Lewis Carroll, mediocre writer, notorious pedophile

I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass several years ago. Alice has been embedded in our culture through multitudinous repetitions and homages. What I realized reading the books, was that Lewis Carroll was a flagrant pedophile, and he wasn't that great of a writer.

I'll start with the bad writing first. You see, I've read references about the "deep" meanings of Alice's Adventures, and I've read about the complex math problems and philosophical dilemmas in the story.

Reading the books, I quickly realized they were very much "children's" stories. They were not deep. There was almost no character development. The story just shuffled from one scene to the next with no coherent progression and then it was over. I was very much let down. I realized a lot of the 'depth' and intrigue of Alice has actually been added on through the years. It isn't in the books.

Now, as for the seemingly serious accusation. Certainly pedophillia is serious, but it isn't much for an accusation, as I was to find out.

I first got suspicious while reading the book. It just seemed to focus on Alice the wrong way. But that wouldn't have raised any flags, had I not read the introduction. I don't ever read intros before I read books, because I've found intros try to lead a reader in a certain direction, and it's always written by someone who's already read the book (or wrote it) and assume you have too. So I read the intro after the 10 minutes it took me to read the book and I'll be damned if it didn't reveal his true nature. Alice was a real girl. Carroll actually wrote the books based on stories he would tell Alice. Although he was a priest, and a "family" friend, eventually he just started taking Alice out alone on trips. The intro mentions some unknown event caused the Liddell family (Alice Liddell's family) to forbid Carroll from ever seeing Alice again.

Now why does a parent need to ban a priest from taking their preteen daughter on trips? I don't know, can't think of any reason... except that he was molesting her.

Just reading his own books, and the intros to his books I was certain Carroll was a pedo. But then a couple years later I looked further into the matter. And this is some fucked up shit.

Carroll was a photographer. And he took lots of photos of naked preteen girls. Don't believe me? Google search it. They're online. Don't worry, if society decides child porn is "art" it's perfectly legal. Or don't search it and believe the hell out of me.

What's interesting is that I'm not the first person to realize this about Carrol. In fact books have been written about this issue. Even Wikipedia mentions the controversy, but somehow manages to dismiss it with "NPOV" (their magic word that allow Wikipedia articles to be completely biased as long as they do it in a certain way).

Anyway enjoy the latest movie version of a story created to woo a little girl into sex.