Born Too Soon : #5 - Lewis Carroll

Today we feature the creepiest uncle of them all - Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known to posterity as Lewis Carroll.

Picture a shy, third rate academic filling the long, lonely hours between lectures sitting in his cramped, windowless office surfing /b/. Occasionally he makes a sparklingly witty post or clever pun which is instantly buried under the deluge of stale copypasta. But the threads that really bring him to life, the ones that keep bringing him back to the site are those that involve "loli" - Japanese "Lolita complex" cartoons of young girls in provocative poses.

Thankfully, the internet wasn't around in the 1850s and Dodgson spent his time far more productively writing Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Not so creditably, he also spent his time experimenting with the new medium of photography; taking photographs of very young girls that make modern viewers cringe.

A photo of Alice Liddell taken by Dodgson in 1858

An older, wiser Alice.

If our more cynical readers would like a good laugh, we recommend that they visit Jimmy Wales' blog and read the section on the 'Carroll Myth' where Dodgson's apologists try to argue that his tastes were "a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time."

...And Bush wasn't really stupid and Obama isn't really incompetent.