No blind eye

In 1832, eight years before Francis Kilvert's birth, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in Daresbury. His rather forbidding and Germanic middle name was inherited from his mother, whose maiden name it was. Charles was rather awkward socially, and had a pronounced stammer, but was a precociously talented child, and showed real potential in mathematics.

As an adult his stammer was noticeable and it bothered him. Interestingly, it was not at all evident in conversation with children.

Charles went to Oxford and graduated ahead of all his contemporaries in mathematics. He stayed on at Christ Church to undertake further studies and to teach. He took holy orders and became Rev Charles Dodgson. He seems to have found social relationships more complex and challenging that maths, and felt more comfortable in the company of children. He never married.

One of Charles' Oxford colleagues was Henry Liddell, Dean of Chirst Church, who complied the Greek-English dictionary which carries his name and is still in use today: Liddell and Scott. Charles became enamoured of one of Henry Liddell's children, Alice, to whom he told the stories which became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Charles Dodgson published his stories under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll which served to protect his professional work as a logician.

The much-loved stories, so brilliantly told, disguise what appears to be an unhealthy obsession with Alice, who was twenty years younger. Had they met as adults, marriage would have been a possibility. But Dodgson's obsession came when Alice was still very much a child.

Dodgson was an early and accomplished photographer, and some of his images of children now produce profound unease, however unremarkable they were at the time.

Kilvert, who was also educated at Oxford (Wadham) shared with Charles Dodgson an interest in children - particularly in girls - which we find uncomfortable today. There is no getting around this problem. Kilvert's interest in girls would not now be viewed as at all healthy. He was, of course, kind and avuncular: a man who genuinely cared. But there can be no doubt that part of his interest was sexual. His descriptions of young girls, and of his thoughts about them, are indisputable. (Check out, as an example, his description of Carrie Britton, aged 7, on 23 August 1871.) He was interested in spanking, and, indeed, offered to spank the daughter of a parishioner, or to watch her spanked naked, with the specious intention of adding to the girl's punishment of humiliation.

Kilvert had a sincere love of children, and huge sadness at the suffering he saw them undergo. His description of visiting Little Davie after his death is amongst the most humane and touching passages in the diaries. 

But his descriptions of 'Gypsy Lizzie' and his confession that he had walked ten miles for a kiss of a girl in school are unmistakably unhealthy.

Infantilised adult views of sexuality seem to have been common in the Victorian era. The previous century had enjoyed a far more earthy approach to sex, but the Victorian period had an up-tight ignorance of sexuality which it was simply too outre to discuss. Dodgson, Kilvert, Ruskin all shared unrealistic and slightly ill-educated views of women. Ruskin's six-year marriage was famously - perhaps notoriously - finally annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. Effie herself noted that her husband:

had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was, and that the reason he did not make me his Wife was because he was disgusted with my person the first evening

That is, adult sexuality had been blocked by maladaptive ignorance. (And perhaps also by too profound a veneration of Greek sculpture which lacked pubic hair.)

Kilvert described a rural world which had survived in Wales long after industrialisation and the flight to the cities had destroyed it in England. It is a world which now feels light years away, even though it is a mere 150 years distant. Today it is hard to imagine daily life in Kilvert's world, hard to imagine the soft footfall of a non-mechanised society. Impossible to imagine the deference which was given unquestioningly to authority.

Similarly, it is difficult to feel confident that one has understood the then accepted propriety of adult views of children, especially when such views would be the focus of immediate, if not hostile, suspicion today.

Today, we do not know what the standards of fifty years in the future will be. We can be sure that they will be different, but we cannot begin to guess what they will be. And our lives now can be lived only by the standards of the past or present, not by those of the future.

It is a temptation to judge Kilvert's interest in children harshly, to apply to him accusations of paedophilia. The word itself was unknown in his era. Perhaps we should at least slow the pace of our rush to judgement. Like all of us, Kilvert was trying his best by the standards and expectations of the period in which he lived.

We should perhaps, acknowledge the uncomfortable truth of some of his more febrile and even over-heated passages: we should even have some sympathy with the sexual frustrations he clearly felt throughout most of his adult life. But we should not let the dark complexity overcome the light. We all live in subtle chiaroscuro, and too monochrome a judgement would deny us the pleasure and enrichment offered by the whole of the Kilvert picture.