Hugues Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child-photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", a somewhat bizarre concept to modern eyes, which perceived child-nudity as essentially an expression of innocence. Lebailly has shown that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson's time and that most photographers, including Oscar Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron, made them as a matter of course.

Child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards — implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material. It has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th or 21st century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was in fact a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time.