We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles’s preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended that the preference was entirely aesthetic … but … he probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself … For posterity, however, there were compensations. If Charles Dodgson’s suppressed and diverted sexual energies caused him unspeakable torments, and they did, they were in all probability the source of those exceptional flashes of genius that gave the world his remarkable creative works.
