It was Carroll who invented the now famous term "child-friend". But with typical elusiveness he chose to use it in a peculiarly personal, almost deliberately misleading way. For Dodgson a "child-friend" was any female of almost any age — at least under forty — with whom he enjoyed a relationship of a special kind of closeness. Some indeed were little girls, some began as such but grew up and were still "child-friends" at twenty or thirty; some were given the name even though their relationship with Dodgson began when they were young women. Far from losing interest in girls when they reached puberty, at any one time a substantial proportion - anything from 30 to 90% — of his "child-friends" were already at or well beyond this watershed.

Carroll did indeed befriend many children, and his relationship woith the female child is a vital part of his biography. But that relationship is far removed from the simplistic absolutes of the myth. It needs to be understood within the wider non-mythic truth of Carroll's emotional life, the paradigm of 19th Century culture, in most particularly within the Victorian Cult of the Child.