Defending Lewis Carroll

IN RECENT YEARS Lewis Carroll has become as famous for taking cheesecake photos of young girls as for penning "Alice in Wonderland." But according to Will Brooker, an associate professor of communications at the American International University in London and author of the new book "Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture" (Continuum), this image of the real-life Charles Dodgson as a proto-pedophile derives largely from an academic joke gone awry.

For years after his death Dodgson was regarded as an eccentric but kindly genius, says Brooker, who was reached by cell phone shortly after lecturing in Boston at the annual meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. "As adults, many of the young girls he befriended later claimed he'd been a wonderful man who liked children because they appreciated his sense of humor and games. And images of naked children were everywhere in Victorian culture -- they represented innocence."

But then a 1933 essay by one A.M.E. Goldschmidt titled "`Alice in Wonderland' Psycho-Analysed," and first delivered as a speech at Oxford, claimed to have found all sorts of sexual symbolism in the book, from the fall down the rabbit hole to the door with the missing key. Though widely considered to have been "a parody of Freudian literary analysis," Brooker said, Goldschmidt's reading stuck.

"Today we rightly celebrate Lewis Carroll's books as children's classics, but at the same time titillate ourselves by saying that we wouldn't let Dodgson babysit our own kids," said Brooker, who has also written books on the popular reception of "Batman" comics and "Star Wars." He continued: "We often think of the Victorian era as a time of moral hypocrisy, but aren't we the real hypocrites?"