Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

Brigid Daull Brockway is technically a writer

A blog about words, wordplay, and etymology, with slightly more than occasional political rants.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Will you, won't you?

One of my biggest literary pet peeves are people who insist that all the great writers were clearly on drugs and that is why their work is so good. Lewis Carroll, I am often told definitively, was an opium addict. Well, no, Lewis Carroll was a genius with a very creative mind. There's no evidence at all that he was a poppy fiend. And people who assume that one must be high to create great fanciful works of art must be dreadfully un-creative.
Another of my biggest pet peeves are people who insist that people famous for their work with children, like Mister Rogers, must be pedophiles.
Naked chairs on a public blog!
What filth will the Internet spew forth next?
This charge has been leveled against Lewis Carroll by many as well and it's simply absurd... okay, well, maybe not so absurd. He was exceedingly and a little morbidly fascinated with little girls, spending a whole lot of time in their company. Yes, well, lots of people prefer the company of children to the company of adults, because grown-ups are boring. 
But then there are the pictures. Seems Carroll was a rather avid photographer, and that the thing he liked to photograph most was naked pre-pubescent girls. Looks bad. I mean, the man took a lot of pictures of little naked girls. However, the experts assure us, this was not abnormal during Victorian times, and these little photo shoots always took place with the mothers' blessing. It seems the Victorians, while feeling the need to cover up chair legs for their prurience, thought that taking naked pictures of other people's children was perfectly normal, and for that matter, these photos captured childish innocence.


The Victorians even liked to include pictures of naked children on their Christmas cards.


Oh, now that's just gratuitous filth.
To which I say, WTF Victorians? Victorian women sometimes drowned because of the lead weights that they put in their skirts when they swam to keep them from floating up and showing off a bit of ankle. Yet they sent kiddie porn to their grandmas to mark the birth of Christ?




So there. All of Victorian England was apparently a giant pedophile collection. Lewis Carroll totally probably not a child molester. Maybe.

I'm no perv. My pornographic Christmas
cards never use models under the age of 18

3 comments:

Mike said...

I guess you also have to take into account that way back then women were sometimes wives at a very young age. Either way it's still a bit creepy.

Bersercules said...

I agree it sucks when people assume creative people are on drugs--WOW!!! Naked children on christmas cards! Shame on you Victorian England!

Great post! This will have me rethinking Victorian England for weeks!

Amalia Dillin said...

My pet peeve is the "All heroic pairs in Classical Mythology were lovers." Achilles and Patroclus, Theseus and Pirithous -- the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, too, for that matter. But people fail to consider the cultural context of what little evidence there is for those assumptions, and why is it that every time men form strong relationships with one another it MUST MEAN they are getting it on? I'm not saying that Achilles didn't happily swing both ways, because what was and was not acceptable in the pre-christian world, and especially THAT far back, is a totally different animal -- I'm just saying, according to the later times wherein those assumptions were read back in (Homer does not include any reference), it would mean that Brave and Honorable Patroclus (who, for the record, I had always understood was some kind of uncle or mentor to Achilles) had emasculated himself completely in the eyes of the rest of the warriors. And when it comes to the Son of Zeus and the Son of Poseidon, I'm not sure either one of them had a small enough ego to be the subservient partner. I can absolutely see them engaging in relationships with OTHER men, and why not? But if they had that much respect for each other, that they considered themselves brothers, it kind of seems odd that their relationship would end up being sexual in nature, since those kinds of sexual relationships in Classical Greece (where we get the evidence, such as it is) were NOT relationships between equals.

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