From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.
This he perched upon a tripod –
Crouched beneath its dusky cover –
Stretched his hand, enforcing silence –
Said "Be motionless, I beg you!"
Mystic, awful was the process.

I FEAR one of our local heroes is going to be traduced on Saturday. A BBC2 programme entitled The Secret World of Lewis Carroll, which was partly filmed at Carroll's boyhood home of Croft-on-Tees near Darlington, sets out to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – an enduring childhood classic which becomes more relevant in adulthood.

But it has unearthed a photograph, possibly taken by Carroll, in a French museum, which shows Alice's naked pre-pubescent sister. Carroll is known to have taken other images of young children which modern eyes regard as unsettling, and this leads the programme to ask if Carroll was "a Victorian Jimmy Savile". Author Will Self labels him a "heavily repressed paedophile".

Carroll arrived in North Yorkshire as an 11-year-old boy in 1843 when his father became rector at Croft, and he found the Tees Valley to be a real life wonderland of strange stories: our fire-breathing dragons, smoke-snorting engines, life-giving waters, over-sized oxen, back-to-front writing and time-telling sundials were woven into his fictional Wonderland.

While here, he was inspired to take up photography when he lived here by his Uncle Skeffington. Skeffy was the sort of uncle who always turned up with a weird gadget (as well as his fantastic name, Skeffy, a lunatic asylum inspector had a fantastical demise as he died of injuries inflicted by an inmate when he was inspecting an asylum) and in September 1855, he arrived at Croft Rectory with his new-fangled photographic paraphernalia.

In our point-and-press digital age, it is difficult to conceive how complex photography was in the beginnings. Carroll called it a "mystic, awful" process in his 1857 parody of a popular epic poem about native Americans (see above). So he and Skeffy sallied forth with chemicals, plates and tripod in a wheelbarrow and tried to take photos of the church and bridge.

None of them came out, but Carroll – real name Charles Dodgson – was hooked, particularly after his second photographic expedition to picturesque Richmond resulted in some pictures.

Carroll was perhaps the first photographer to raise the new fad to the level of an artform due to his skilful composition. He described himself, though, as "an amateur photographer whose special line is children", and therein lies the problem.

And it is a huge problem.

Nearly all of our slave-owning, racist, sexist, bigoted forefathers not only harboured thoughts of which we thoroughly disapprove but also did deeds which we today find appalling. When judging them, we must be careful not to impose today's standards upon their times - in Carroll's day, for example, the age of consent was 12 which we today would think was barbarically young.

When writing about Carroll, who after Shakespeare is the most quoted writer in the English language, I console myself that although his photography allows us to guess at his thoughts – his camera was indeed a looking glass – there is no evidence that he carried out any inexcusable deeds.

After Saturday's showing, his words will still be wonderfully curious. I hope his reputation remains harmlessly strange and not indelibly stained.