Through reading Mavor’s piece on Carroll what I found interesting was Carroll’s friendship with young middle class girls. Additionally, the photographof Alice Liddell is interesting as it is a glamorous depiction of her as a child beggar. I feel this contrasts starkingly to Carroll’s image of a real working class girl in which their is no sense of fun or embellishment. Despite the questions that his photographs arouse you could argue that Carroll’s work is quite modern in that he’s constructing this fantasy world via photography. Moreover, its almost as though he trying to reconstruct this idealization of childhood which is why he limited his contact with middle class children as he was all too aware that their childhood was limited.
Posted by: ellis22s | November 15, 2010
Lewis Carroll and markings of womanhood
Posted in Uncategorized
Victorian Visual Culture 
Reading this post concerning “limited” childhood got me thinking about the “Lilliputian stationary” that Carroll made, as well as his pasting of a tiny photograph of Alice into his telescope. This chapter in its entirety was strange, but I wondered especially why he would even bother doing some of the things he did. The word “limited” in reference to the childhood of middle class children really got me considering Carroll’s scope. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could have been limited, too. Perhaps, even being as creative as he was, it was hard for him to see beyond a childlike world or beyond a world in miniature. Perhaps he liked the idea of stationary that was too small to ever be sent—too small to be practical. As far as his photographs are concerned, he may have felt more comfortable living within moments where the subject would never change.
By: laurel2250 on November 17, 2010
at 2:02 am