Lewis Carroll's photography and modern childhood

"In 1856, when Charles Lutwidge Dodgson adopted the pen name Lewis Carroll, photography was still a young medium, and presented uncharted possibilities for representation. Carroll soon found his forte in photographing children, and his photograph Alice Liddell as a Beggar Child (1858) is now one of the most famous Victorian depictions of a child. Carroll's engagement with childhood occurred at a critical juncture, when the idea of "childhood" was just beginning to attain status as a life stage with characteristics distinct from adulthood. In this sense, Carroll's photographs are especially rich, incisive, and complex: they embody conflicting definitions of childhood intertwined with constructions of gender, class, bodies, age, sexuality, and whiteness; behavioural norms and propriety; innocence and experience; fantasy, play, and imagination; and aesthetic standards and contexts of viewing. Author Diane Waggoner shows that Carroll's photographs of children were as important to him as his literature in modelling the concept and appeal of Victorian childhood. Based on over twenty years of scholarship and archival research, the manuscript places Carroll's images within broader Victorian visual and social culture. Waggoner shows how these contexts shaped Carroll's pursuit of a distinctive photographic vocabulary for childhood, and explores how Carroll established new aesthetic norms for images of girls; engaged with evolving definitions of masculinity, education, and boyhood; and pushed the definition of childhood to its outer limits with his use of fancy dress and nude images. Meditating upon Carroll's handling of childhood, time, and loss in both word and photograph, she argues that Carroll's photographs should be understood as powerful contributions to the nineteenth century's visual representation of the emergent definition of childhood"-- Provided by publisher.