Okay, so this topic is moderately amusing to me. The truth is we still don’t actually know for sure, but it’s WEIRD.

He had a long and apparently well-documented history (letters he wrote) of multiple relationships with adult women. So much so that his family attempted to cover it all up because, by victorian standards, it was absolutely fucking scandalous. Like, wreck the surname for generations scandalous (which admittedly didn’t take much by victorian standards). This makes it look like he had NO relationships with adult women, because being an oddball that way was LESS of a freakshow publicly than sleeping around was.

The victorians also had this weird thing (by today’s standards) about nude children being the very symbol of innocence. Like, so much so that you’d wonder if they thought the mere sight of naked babies restored an adult’s innocence or something.

And these people had WEIRD hangups about sex.

We’re talking they supposedly covered the legs of tables and chairs in cloth so they would less resemble actual people’s legs, lest someone accidentally think of what’s at the TOP of legs on people. (genitalia! scary!)

The schism with Alice’s family may just have been that SOME people were POSSIBLY gossiping behind closed doors about the man and they refused to be associated with even the POSSIBILITY of scandal, especially if that scandal was that he slept with multiple women. There’s also mention that he was interested in Alice’s older sister, and something about a maid.

The whole thing is just straight up odd, but apparently most of the pedo rumors didn’t start until after his death. I’m not sure what, if anything, that means.

So, who knows. an oddball dude in a SUUUPER sexually repressed society, it honestly could go either way on coin flip odds.