Go ask Alice

Viewing Lewis Carroll as a likely pedophile may say more about us than about him

Victorians, Jenny Woolf argues, saw children as innocent, and Lewis Carroll, squeamish about the idea of sin, prized their company as deliverance from the threat of eroticism.

By Christina Thompson

Globe Correspondent / March 7, 2010

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“Nobody can now be blamed,” writes Jenny Woolf, “for failing to understand the ways in which other times were different from our own.” Actually, I think we can and should be blamed for making this quite elementary error, but the fact is we do, quite frequently, confuse others with ourselves. Indeed, perhaps the single biggest obstacle to understanding history is ... (Full article: 887 words)