The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

The assumption is made that a bachelor’s interest in little girls must be sexual and
that a photographer of little girls must be a voyeur…. But to view him [Dodgson]
so is to judge him by the standards of our time while taking no account of the
culture in which he lived…. The romanticizing of childhood was part of the
Victorian ethos. Dodgson, a devout Christian, saw children… as [being]… freshly
arrived from the presence of God, uncontaminated and asexual…. As for his
photographs the study of the nude body has been the hallmark of serious artists for
centuries and Dodgson truly saw himself as an artist in his medium…. The adult
nude was to him… too sexualized; the female child whose body is not yet sexual
provided a way… to celebrate the human form without obliging him to come to
terms with… sexual beings. 185
As Stoffel points out, to judge Dodgson through modern eyes is to
disregard the environmental framework of his day. Images of juvenile nudes
were part of mainstream society and existed not only in art but in popular
culture, appearing on ephemeral material such as Christmas cards. More
importantly though, to the artist and his contemporaries, the notion of child
pornography was remote and was not considered or even imagined in regard
to this material. Hugues Lebailly argues that those “who still think of him
(Dodgson) as a monomaniac pervert engrossed in a perpetual little girl
hunt” need to recognise this context:
Far from singling him out among the society of his time his very attraction to the
immature female form was shared… by so many [members] of… the literary and
artistic élites… that it should be read as… partaking in one of the most typical
attitudes of his time. 186
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