Taboos vary from culture to culture and from time period to time period. For a hundred years, scholars believed that Charles Dodgson, or Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), had a romantic and probably a sexual...

Taboos vary from culture to culture and from time period to time period. For a hundred years, scholars believed that Charles Dodgson, or Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), had a romantic and probably a sexual interest in 7-year-old Alice Liddell, and that he wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass as a means of courting her. But in her 1999 book, Karoline Leach examines all of the old documents and concludes that Dodgson was really having an affair with Alice’s mother. After his death, his sister was so worried about a scandal that she manipulated his papers to make it appear that he was interested in Alice instead. In 1898, pedophilia was much less taboo than an extramarital fling!