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Lewis Carroll was perhaps the strangest of all the sexuaUy troubled Victorian writers. In The Image of Childhood Peter Coveney observed that "everything for Carroll pointed to disaster in his personal life. He was almost the case-book maladjusted neurotic. The stammering, awkward, spinsterish don was imprisoned within Christ Church, Oxford," first as a student, then as a mathematics tutor, from 1851 when he was nineteen, until his death in 1898. Carroll liked to befriend and photograph naked préadolescent girls, and confessed "one hardly sees why the lovely forms of girls should ever be covered up!" He admired them as long as they remained children, who seemed to have no sexual feelings , but lost interest in them as soon as they reached puberty. His own sexual desires, though precariously under control , were powerfully expressed in his photography, and his obsession with little girls, as Coveney adds, "was both sexual and sexually morbid." He possessed some of them by removing all their clothes and capturing their image with his camera. He was particularly fond of Alice Liddell and her sisters, the daughters of the dean of his college, and took more discreet though still suggestive photographs of them. In 1863, after an obscure argument with the family, Carroll was banished from the Liddell household. But his famous books, written for and about Alice, expressed his adoration of this lovely child.
Charles Dodgson was a mathematician, Vladimir Nabokov a lepidopterist, and both used pseudonyms: Dodgson called himself Lewis Carroll for his children's books, Nabokov used the name V Sirin for his Russian novels published in Europe. The Atice books formed part of Nabokov's literary culture. Educated in English by an English governess, and by teachers at Cambridge, Nabokov knew Carroll's work from an early age, and discovered a kindred spirit in his witty wordplay. Like CarroU, Nabokov enlivened his books with puns and portmanteau words, puzzles and chess games, parody and humorous verse. Nabokov's first book, published in Berlin in 1923, was a translation ?? Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). A critic wrote that Nabokov "adapted characters and narrative into Russian forms and moved the setting to Russia. The result was a brilliant rendition which is reputed to be the finest translation of Alice into any...