Who was of course better known as Lewis Carroll. Many years ago I remember being particularly struck by his words in a new (at the time) edition of Alice. Timeless at heart:
Sadly, he’d probably be derided as a pedophile and not worth listening to these days…
What is the straight dope on his “paedophilia”? I’ve always dismissed it for lack of evidence and the tendency to import our prepackaged and often superficial modern judgements and “values” into our times and places without attempting to understand them.
…‘other times’…
I think that your intuition is correct. Cecil is noncommital but a little suspicious.
I’ve seen that piccy of Ms. Hatch. I don’t think it’s meant to be erotic.
Yes. Especially in the past, where you were supposed to be reticent where it comes to sex. A person of Dodgson’s era would not automatically think about sexual consummation if he saw something he thought was erotic. So even if he was turned on by young girls, there’s a good chance he never acted on the urges.
A similar case was Benjamin Britten, who was gay and very attracted to boys in his early teens. There are many attested cases of him being especially friendly to boys that age (IIRC, some included sharing beds), but none of the boys has ever suggested he ever touched them sexually, and most – even those who knew about homosexuality at the time they knew him – specificially denied he did anything to them.
Larry and RC, thanks for that. Sexuality is such a deep and largely hidden thing that the tendency is to assume it’s dark as well.
Being a little unsure about the intent of the photos myself, I’m not going to post a link here, but I did a Google image search for Evelyn Hatch and found the photo. It doesn’t look particularly erotic to me, but it doesn’t look particularly innocent, either. Hard to say, I guess.