Lewis Carroll’s Illustrations for “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” (1864) | Hacker News Reader

Lewis Carroll’s Illustrations for “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground” (1864)

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128 pointsprismatic12 comments

These are absolutely wonderful! Simple, but with an excellent 'pen feel', great movement and demonstrate a really keen eye for detail & composition. With training, Carroll could have easily been a professional illustrator, not that he would have wanted that, I assume, but the fundamentals are all there.

For me, drawing is truly the 'handwriting' of an artist. So individual, so quirky. The pen doesn't lie.

It is amazing that this work has been preserved!

absolutely incredible how well they hold up in the context of their age

The deadpan expressions on the ink drawings of the fantastical juxtaposed with the mundane invoke an Edward Gorey feel to me.

Even without Carroll's history they look sort of creepy. Kind of a prison art feel.

I vote for a John Neil/Aubrey Beardsley sort of look.

Risky click, from what I've heard about Carroll.

I mean those some of those "risky" pictures are on even on Wikipedia. Also from my understanding he followed a common Victorian era belief that was prevalent at the time and wasn't necessarily a pedophile.

Quoting wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll):

> Several other writers and scholars have challenged the evidential basis for Cohen's and others' views about Dodgson's sexual interests. Hugues Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child nudity as essentially an expression of innocence.[88] Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson's time and that most photographers made them as a matter of course, including Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron. Lebailly continues that child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards, implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material. Lebailly concludes that it has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th- or 21st-century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time.

And the following paragraph is also interesting.

Risky click, from what I've heard about 'Victorian Era'

I've spent the morning digging into this, and find it frustratingly controversial (in the proper sense, of being murky and divisive). I admit I like the story of the defense you've sheared, that it was an aspect of the times, but can't deny the concerns raised by his relationship with Alice in particular (see their kisses, letters). My SO says there was a documentary which featured condemning letters from one of his yiuge girlfriend's nannies, but I haven't seen these, except perhaps in a passing mention of contemperary gossip. I do find it interesting to read mid-tentieth century psychoanalysis of his work, because it kind-of reads like the sensational speculatuon in online forum comments :p

Have you found any authoritative or reliable sources that you might share?

Do we know when and why the perception of child nudity has shifted ?

The following paragraph:

> Karoline Leach's reappraisal of Dodgson focused in particular on his controversial sexuality. She argues that the allegations of paedophilia rose initially from a misunderstanding of Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea – fostered by Dodgson's various biographers – that he had no interest in adult women. She termed the traditional image of Dodgson "the Carroll Myth". She drew attention to the large amounts of evidence in his diaries and letters that he was also keenly interested in adult women, married and single, and enjoyed several relationships with them that would have been considered scandalous by the social standards of his time. She also pointed to the fact that many of those whom he described as "child-friends" were girls in their late teens and even twenties.[89] She argues that suggestions of paedophilia emerged only many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his relationships with women in an effort to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man interested only in little girls.

The story of Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carrol is ... complicated. On the one hand there is a lot of fishy stuff going on with young girls. On the other hand, he deliberately cultivated the image of himself as a friend of children because it was, at the time, believed to be a mark of innocence and absence of worldly desires. And on the other other hand, he had many relationships with adult women, flouting convention and going on unescorted excursions with them, well into his old age.

A good treatment of this complexity is found in the biography of him, "In the Shadow of the Dreamchild" by Karoline Leach. The book posits the theory that Dodgson may have been pursuing an affair with Alice Liddel's older sister, or even her mother, which may not be convincing. But the book is well researched and has a lot to say about Charles' love life, or apparent lack of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Shadow_of_the_Dreamchil...

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