Well I've looked at some of the collections of his pics that are easy enough to find on the web, and I've read his potted biography on wiki. Hardly scholarly, but a starting point.

There is a context here. There was a fad for photographing small children in Victorian times that didn't have attached to it the sensibilities we've developed today. The children were frequently photographed naked. It's way too simplistic to say that he was simply "of his time" because we have to accept that, just like today, his exploitation of children had the potential to be damaging to those children.

Incidentally, in those days children often died young, as we know. There was a fashion, if your child died, to prop up the dead body, made up and dressed up, eyes jammed open, and have a family group photo taken with the dead child there as part of the family.

Yer man certainly had relationships with adult women, some a fair bit younger than him. but still grown-ups. Information about these was suppressed because it was held to be scandalous that a man of the cloth should have indulged himself in that way. The unfortunate upshot of that suppression was that only his relationships with girl-children were left for us to contemplate.

At least half of his photographs were destroyed. It would be easy to conclude that he might have been ashamed of them, but it's just as likely, as I see it, that he just ditched his second-rate efforts, just as we delete our blurry pics today.

The vast majority of the photos I've seen today were of fully-clothed girls with no particular hint of salacious intent in the "arty" poses. A few show a pre-pubescent girl in what we might describe today as a provocative pose. I do find that disturbing personally. I have my doubts as to whether the little girl had much of a clue as to what the photographer was up to, but it still looks exploitative.

One or two photos and a couple of drawings are of naked children. The photos, though not the drawings I've seen, reveal breasts and genitals uncovered. They are incredibly unsexy, as the girl looks utterly uncomfortable, and I find that kind of imagery to be completely unpalatable. I wondered when I saw them why he didn't delete them as well.

I don't think it matters, in terms of the exploitation of the girls that was going on, whether their parents were complicit or even present. The naked photos overstep the mark by any measure. He may have had " permission". But the girls themselves were not of an age to give their informed consent. By saying that I don't think I'm seeing things merely from a 21st century viewpoint.

I don't know for sure, obviously, but I doubt that he actually laid hands on the girls. He was living a fantasy and it probably wouldn't be unkind to suggest that he was providing himself with masturbatory material. Who knows. He wouldn't have felt the need to destroy it had he thought that the parental connivance had accorded his photos some legitimacy.

I don't think we should ditch Alice In Wonderland. I wouldn't want to watch repeats of Jim'll Fix It though. That's the difference!