Talk:Lewis Carroll

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The Walrus & The Carpenter[edit]

Really? That's what you're going with as evidence for pedophelia? Pretty thin soup I'd say, given the reader identification character, Alice, states clearly that the two of them are unpleasant characters for what they did. You could also take it as a critique of powerful men taking advantage of their followers, which the political undertones of Tenniel's illustrations makes more credible. --24.212.154.38 (talk) 18:24, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

The description of the poem under the "influences" section ("that sometimes a story is just a story, and not everything Carroll wrote had a deeper meaning") is contradicted a few sentences later in the "implications of pedophilia" section. Further, the link the footnote in the latter section goes nowhere, though it looks like it was just supposed to be a link to the poem itself. Should the last paragraph of this section just be axed altogether? Obviously not a high-priority article, but I'll be the first to admit that I have no real idea what I'm doing. AcidTrial (talk) 22:32, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Okay, I went ahead and deleted that paragraph, anyway.AcidTrial (talk) 16:35, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Anglo-Saxon verse[edit]

Is there a citation for the 'Anglo-Saxon' verse thing? It was my impression that he never studied or read any Old English, and that those of his poems (eg Jabberwocky) which are supposed to resemble AS verse actually don't. Guyalsfere (talk) 13:55, 19 February 2015 (UTC)

Need judgement calls on images.[edit]

Ok, in Wikimedia Commons has four images in its database in Wikimedia Commons of Lewis Carroll photos of nudes. I was a bit iffy if I should include these images into RationalWiki or not. In Victorian Britain, photos of pre-pubescent children naked or in rags were not considered (by "Polite society") to have any sexual implications, and were a popular genre in early photography. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, active collectors of photographs, had a number of such pictures in their collection, some of them (if I recall correctly) actually taken by "Lewis Carroll" (Charles Dodgson), who was a pioneering and well-known amateur photographer. Do you guys want to include the images in the article or should we practice caution? The images can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll . Epic Games (talk) 05:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't think it's likely to add anything beyond what is already on the page. We are not an encyclopedia, hence not completist. Bongolian (talk) 07:28, 8 February 2022 (UTC) See RationalWiki:What is a RationalWiki article? Bongolian (talk) 07:30, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
I was thinking of adding it to show how we shouldn't place 21st century values into a different era considering that when contemporary artist Polixeni Papapetrou did a photo of her daughter that was mimic of one of those photos Carroll took it created a media storm. Epic Games (talk) 07:36, 8 February 2022 (UTC)
No. Do not add those images. We already have the famous photograph of Alice Liddell as a beggar on the page and that's quite shocking enough. We don't need anything worse than that. Maybe such images were considered perfectly normal 150 years ago. But they are not now. Our enemies have already falsely accused us of being paedophile apologists numerous times. Don't put any more fuel on that fire. You can write more about the photos Carrol; took without showing those photos. Spud (talk) 13:51, 15 February 2022 (UTC)