Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

In memory of “The man who loved the girls”

enero 13th, 2014 · No hay Comentarios

Thanks to an article written in the ABC webpage, in which Servando Rocha is interviewed, I came up with something that personally shocked me. As we all know, Lewis Carroll was the author of “Alicia in the wonderland”. What Servando Rocha has done is compile all of the writings and photos done by Carrol, and put all together in a book. There we will find the strange obsession he had with young girls.

P1070929<< The man who loved the girls>> is a Spanish book written as I said before by Servando Rocha. As it is said in the article published in the ABC webpage, the book will include a prologue done by G.K. Chesterton; around 70 writings are translated and 80 portraits done by the famous English writer Lewis Carroll.

When the writer died, he left many writings and pictures. Years later, they (his biographers) found that all those pieces of paper that they did not found useful contain many things that were erased by the inheritors in order to silent things. Though when Carroll was alive people already knew he usually met with girls, he never did something those girls did not want, because he was a religious man, and only with them was able to express freely.

Servando Rocha comments in the article that there is no documentation that could show the couple of year Carroll was fascinated by Alice Liddell, the young girl that inspired him to write his work. It was also said, that at that time Lewis asked Alice for marriage, when she was just thirteen. This can be known because there is a letter in which Alice’s parents tell Carroll to stay away from their daughter.

It is a thrilling mystery to get to know who Lewis Carroll was, and how all his writings help to understand his work” points out the writer of <<The man who loved the girls>>, “I have never seen anything like this in writings.

Carroll wrote the writings as if they were games. He loved the girls of that time, as many photographers did, but the astonishing of all this is that whenever he wrote the writings he felt like as he was also a child, said the editor. Whenever he wanted to portray any of the girls, he asked for permission by sending to the parents of the girls a letter.

The editor of the book admits that he changed his initial idea to the cover; at first it was a picture in which Lewis Carroll appears kissing Alice, but finally he changed because it was kind of perturbing. He added, “The title is already insinuating, so the reader can take his/her own conclusions”.

However, Servando Rocha says that the love Carroll had among the girls was not sexual, because he had never had any problem with any of them. The writer, Lewis Carroll, lost all kind of interest through these girls when they became adults.

As Rocha told ABC, Lewis once was asked why he did not portray boys, and his answer was: “I am quite selective. That race is not of my interest.”

Don’t you think it is kind of frustrating that someone who was able to write a work as marvelous as “Alice in the wonderland” was kind of obsessed with little girls?

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