Malice in Wonderland?

One

thing we know about the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland — he loved little girls. The uneasy question has always been, How much? Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Arthur Dodgson, was a passionate photographer as well as a writer and mathematician. At his death in 1898, he left behind hundreds of pictures, many of the "little misses" he doted on all his life. There has never been evidence that Carroll took advantage of them sexually. But over time those pictures, along with his rapturous diary entries about his prepubescent "girl-friends," have made Carroll something like the Michael Jackson of Victorian letters. The more he goes on about children, the more he gives you the creeps.

The Alice books are forever — they are the most popular and best-loved works of children's literature. The Lewis Carroll problem is forever too. But it has been dropped back into our laps by a new exhibition and a fascinating new book. "Dreaming in Pictures" is a seductive show of Carroll's camera portraits of adults and children at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that will travel to Houston, New York and Chicago. It appears at the same time as The Lives of the Muses (HarperCollins; 416 pages), a supple work of cultural history by novelist Francine Prose, whose subject is the women who have inspired creative men from Samuel Johnson to John Lennon. She tells us, "The lives of the muses greatly expand our limited notions of Eros," and she includes within those notions Carroll's not quite sexual, not quite chaste infatuations. Prose devotes a chapter to Alice Liddell, the little girl who inspired Alice in Wonderland. Carroll contrived the story to entertain her on a warm afternoon in 1862, then wrote it all down because she asked him to.

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The San Francisco show, organized by Douglas R. Nickel, the museum's photo curator, wants to convince us that Carroll could have had entirely innocent aims in his child photography. Prose takes the wiser course of treating Carroll poignantly and letting the obvious questions go on hanging in the air. Wiser because Carroll's fervent attachment to little girls seems sweaty to us now. He met them on trains, at stores, on beaches. He carried puzzles in his pocket to beguile them and wrote them letters to remind them that "we still remember each other, and feel a sort of shivery affection for each other."

Scholars always warn that we should not look at 19th century images through modern eyes, finding sex where the Victorians saw only creamy innocence. But however you might describe Carroll's famous picture of Alice, 7, costumed as a sultry beggar girl, girlish is not the word. Her liquid posture, that off-the-shoulder dress, the frank suction of her gaze — innocence this luscious could almost have an R rating. From here to the foxy cowgirl outfits of JonBenet Ramsey isn't a stretch. While Prose doubts that Carroll was an active pedophile, she does not deny the erotic longing in his pictures. "Where do we draw the line between the sacred and the carnal?" she asks. The answer is shivery.