The idea that Lewis Carroll was pedophilic, in desire if not in action, developed from both a lack of awareness of what has been called the Victorian Child Cult and the belief that he had no interest in adult relationships and focused all his energies on what he called his 'child friends'. This belief - which was totally untrue - arose principally from the fact that his first biographer, his nephew Stuart Collingwood deliberately suppressed the evidence for his uncle's relationships with women. In the late 19th C, there was little conception of pedophilia, and a man associating with children was considered to be 'innocent' and saintly. To promote this image, his nephew manipulated the evidence and even implied that many of the women Carroll associated with were actually 'child-friends'. This was accepted unquestioningly by subsequent biographers, and even developed further, with almost no regard for the actual evidence.

The situation was further complicated by the growing mythology surrounding Carroll's relationship with 'the real Alice', Alice Liddell.