A PARODY : The arrest and trial of Lewis Carroll

The arrest and trial of Lewis Carroll

By Quentin Letts

DAILY TELEGRAPH 26/01/2003

By our Courts Correspondent

Children's writer Lewis Carroll was a "seriously unmarried bachelor" who befriended pre-pubescent girls and told them ambiguous tales while taking their photographs, the Old Bailey heard.

In the latest showbusiness paedophile scandal his behaviour was described as "curiouser and curiouser".

Carroll, 31, who is being tried under his real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is a mathematics lecturer at Oxford University who writes unusual books for children. "He'd never get away with it today," said Robert Prude, QC, prosecuting. The court was told of Carroll's love for Alice Liddell, whom he first met when she was four. "We became excellent friends," he wrote in a diary seized by detectives.

Carroll enjoyed picnics with little girls, took them on boat trips to a shaded park, and even allegedly proposed to 11-year-old Alice when he himself was 31. He is a quiet man, prone to bouts of melancholy.

He was arrested last month in an all-units police raid, part of "Operation Wonderland". The middle-aged logician and maths don, who has never married, was charged under the Retrospective PaedophileHysteria Act, in connection with a stash of suspicious photographs. They were removed from his Oxfordshire house.

He has been suspended from his teaching duties at Christ Church. Bookshops are removing his work from their shelves."The poor fellow is ruined," said his solicitor. Outside the Central Criminal Court, protesters screamed insults. Mr Justice Mobb broke his gavel trying to bring the court to order after hissing and shouts of "Perv!" from the public gallery.

Mr Prude said that Carroll wrote stories about a girl called Alice who meets various animals including a snake and oysters. One involved Alice in "the Queen's garden".

Judge Mobb, sharply: "Queen? What sort of queen?"
Mr Prude: "Well might you ask, m'lud."

Evidence was heard from a psychoanalyst who remarked that Carroll's stories were fraught with sexual imagery. "That business with the rabbit hole, I mean, it's obvious," said an expert psychiatric witness. "And the Cheshire pussy-cat? Please."

Carroll was an early buyer of "photographic apparatus" and at the heart of this case is the fact he had shot hundreds of portraits of children - scores of pretty young things who were commonly asked to pose with naked feet or in short boots with white socks.

Young Alice Jane Donkin was shown climbing out of a window for an 1862 photograph called "The Elopement". Irene MacDonald, aged four, was snapped in her nightie, brushing her hair. "Grooming," noted Mr Prude, a word now shorn of its innocence.

Many of the photo sessions were conducted in the garden of another celebrity, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Mr Rossetti has been questioned by police and released without charge - but not before police had tipped off the media.

Mrs Liddell, Alice's mother, said she found Carroll's photography tiresome. She recalled that one winter she and her husband left for Madeira. The first day after their departure Carroll presented himself at the door of the Liddells' house and stayed to "nursery" dinner. Alice was not always accompanied by her governess, Miss Prickett.

Carroll, who is close to his aunt, is a complex man who has difficulty making adult friendships. He stammers, is a fastidious opponent of smoking and prone to melancholy.

"To some he sounds like an obvious child molester," Carroll's defence counsel said. "Is it just possible that he is simply a lonely, creative oddball who knows his genius can only be ignited by the company of what in one elegy he has called 'a childish sprite' "?

The trial continues.