In recent times we witnessed a debate over the depiction of nude children by artists, in particular the creative photography of Australia's Bill Henson.

Twenty years ago I wrote and published the following dissertation on the topic . . .

Children, taken as a whole, are attractive creatures. Some stunningly so. They usually possess an unspoiled simplicity of beauty, largely lost in the adult human.  Even a gruff tousle-haired schoolboy can exude a certain charm. Freckles? No matter; they are cute too! And the all-singing-all-dancing ballet girl with her piping voice and frozen smile. She also is a thing of wonder.
 
But let us not try to hide from the fact that the sensual nature of that beauty and charm is closely related to the emerging sexuality of the child. The child is a sexual creature, and that from a very early age, too. Sexuality is present in the child's makeup from the start. It is biological, in the genes.

We should, however, clearly distinguish between sensuality and sexuality. The two are related, yes, but one can surely enjoy the sensual nature of something or someone without engaging in sex with that same subject, that person - or that child!   Or even desiring to do so, for that matter!
 
And not even the Christian, with his somewhat constricted view of the body, can escape delight in the sensual. Naked angelic figures gambol through the art adorning cathedral walls but the artist merely hides the reality beneath the symbolic heavenly beings. The figures, clad with wings, are those of real human children; indeed, boys and girls served the artists of old as models.
 
And this is but one of innumerable manifestations of sensuality in religion. Is there not a strange and subtle sensuality in the figure of the Christ, stripped, standing before his accusers, being whipped, or hung near-naked upon a cross? The women who fell at his feet surely felt so, at least. 

The Church may condemn sensuality so defined and especially the wanton display of nakedness, whether that of children or adults, in the flesh, so to speak, while uttering merely an occasional grumble at the sight of this self-same nakedness in the great art adorning its walls. And forgetting, too, the sensuality of its ceremonies (sometimes graced with altar-boys!). 


PHOTOGRAPHIC ART 

The arrant hypocrisy of such dual standards reached its height with the advent of the great art of photography. The painter could paint his nudes, male and female, young  or old, and had done so for centuries, give or take a few brief moments of persecution, but no photographer dared do likewise. Poor Lewis Carroll, labouring under an overweight of Victorian hypocrisy-prudery, struggled within himself endlessly over his photographs of small children, photographs often taken with little or no clothing. It was with a guilty sense of concern that he hesitatingly wrote of photographing one young girl in bare feet!  

Carroll, this curious bachelor-cleric, this inventor of great tales for little girls (and, for that matter, boys, but mostly for girls), was also a great child photographer at the very dawn of the photographic era. What wonders might he not have produced for us had he not been so hemmed about with the moral strictures of his religious-social milieu?
 
As it was he managed to convey in many of his child portraits a definite element of sensuality. It is certainly there in some of his portraits of the original Alice - Alice Liddell.  One can hardly find more sensuality anywhere! What an attractive and winsome subject she was (and is). 

A further interesting insight comes from a letter Carroll wrote to one of his illustrators, Harry Furniss, on the subject of drawings for another book he had written: 'I wish I dared dispense with all costume; naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely, but Mrs Grundy [the prudish character in a well-known novel of the day] would be furious - it would never do. Then the question is, how little dress will content her? Bare legs and feet we must have at any rate.' (And, incidentally, the great Ruskin once criticized his protégé Kate Greenaway for not having more of the children in some pictures she'd done in bare feet.)


ALICE LIDDELL

Alice Liddell came from a large family in a home with an academic background, being the daughter of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. The family had come to Oxford in 1856 when Alice was only four. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, to give him his birth name, was a young clergyman who had an intense interest in photography and he soon became friends with the large Liddell family, taking two of the children, Harry and Ina, on boating trips and picnics. When Harry went off to school, the little party was joined by Alice and her sister Edith. On their journeys Carroll regaled them with stories, the chief of which centred on a girl called Alice.

Alice Liddell asked Carroll to write the story down, which he eventually did, and after one or two rewrites, it was published in 1865 as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - illustrated by John Tenniel. A sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, followed in 1871.

There has been speculation from time to time about the relationship between Dodgson and the children, especially Alice, but no impropriety has ever been demonstrated. Doubtless the very fact of a friendship between an unmarried clergyman and an 11-year-old girl is enough to spark dark thoughts in some people's warped heads.  Alice eventually married and was known from then on as Alice Hargreaves. Alice, then aged 80, was present at Columbia University in the USA when the centennial of Carroll's birth was being celebrated. She died in 1934.  Carroll died in 1898.