Lewis Carroll was a man of many talents; a man who loved challenges.

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That is why it is said that he left photography when the dry developing process was invented, because the thrill of photography for him was in the much more difficult wet collodion process used before that.  

Born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, this multi talented personality was famous under his pseudonym, Lewis Carroll. He was, besides being a well loved author, an Anglican clergyman, a mathematician, a logician and a photographer. Almost everyone has read “Alice in Wonderland” and its sequel “Through the Looking Glass”. His work in the genre of literary nonsense has been so well recognised that Lewis Carroll the photographer is not always given the prominence he deserves.

Influenced by his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later on by his Oxford friend Reginald Southey, Carroll took up photography and even thought about making it a career in his early years. His proficiency with the art of photography soon led to him being well known as a gentleman-photographer.

He first started taking pictures in 1856. Photography was useful to him in paving the way for him to meet many socially important people and taking their pictures. Some of these people include Lord Tennyson, Michael Faraday, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, etc. He suddenly and inexplicably stopped taking photos in the year 1880. In his 24 year photographic career, he produced work that is now considered among the best in Victorian photography. Lewis Carroll has inspired and influenced modern photography the way few photographers have.

Of the over three thousand photos that he took, hardly a thousand have survived the test of time. A little over half of his work that has survived to this day portrays young girls. Other subjects include young boys, women and men and also old men, dogs, skeletons, dolls, little girls, scientists, trees, scholars and so on.

His favourite subject was a girl called Alexandra Kitchin, known as Xie (pronounced “Ecksy”) and he is believed to have taken fifty pictures of her at the very least, the last dating to when Xie was about sixteen years old.

A lot of speculation about Carroll being a pedophile has surfaced over the years because of his artwork and photography with nude young girls as subjects. Indeed, people who support this claim even allege that Carroll wanted to marry the eleven year old Alice Liddell and this caused him and the Liddell family to stop speaking abruptly in 1863, but there is not enough evidence to support this claim. A lot of biographers such as Michael Bakewell and Morton N. Cohen and the writer Dennis Potter all assume that he was, in fact, a repressed and celibate pedophile. Cohen says that although he had convinced his peers that his studies in nude young girls were free from any sexual undertones or intent, later generations had their doubts about that.

Of course, there are people who say that he was not a pedophile, and that he had several affairs with adult women which were hidden as best as possible by his family in order to preserve his reputation. This is why his friendships with young girls come to the fore and creates the myth that he was a pedophile. The main champions of this viewpoint are Karoline Leach and Hugues Lebailly who talk about the “Victorian Child Cult” which represented nude children in artworks as symbols of innocence, a far cry from the sleaze implied in the allegations against Carroll. They argue that many notable artists of the time used nude studies of children and that the traditional viewpoint of Carroll is the “Carroll Myth”.

Both sides have passionately argued their case and as always history is open to interpretation but one thing that is unquestioned is Carroll’s contribution to modern photography.

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