But was Carroll a pedophile? As you walk through ''Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Lewis Carroll Centenary Exhibition,'' organized by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin to mark his death in 1898 and now at the Equitable Gallery in Manhattan, the question seems oddly irrelevant. What is most startling, and attractive, in his portraits of girls is not what he saw in them but what they saw in him.

''Lewis Carroll . . . came to our country home to photograph the children,'' wrote Dymphna Ellis, one of the children Carroll photographed. She added: ''I feel sure I was a 'favorite.' He made every child that. He developed the photographs in our cellar . . . I remember the mess and the mystery . . . We cried when he went away . . . We were absolutely fearless with him. We felt he was one of us, and on our side against all the grown-ups.''

These don't sound like the words of a victim of childhood seduction. But something in them is still alarming: cellar, mess, mystery, fearless. The words make you think that whatever Carroll and his little subjects were up to, it was exciting and seductive for all concerned. They were co-conspirators.

The photographs are the evidence. From the looks of them, these little girls weren't worried about the Big Bad Wolf. Even Carroll's photograph of Agnes Grace Weld posing as Little Red Riding Hood doesn't suggest that. She is intense, penetrating and focused as she emerges from the woods with a basket of goodies.

The exhibition vigorously inoculates the viewer against the idea that Carroll was a pedophile. It devotes more space to Carroll's pictures of family, friends and colleagues than to those he called his child friends. It shows none of his nude pictures of girls and only one photograph of Alice Liddell, Carroll's favorite girl and the saucy inspiration for ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.'' It includes testimonials from the women Carroll photographed as children: they adored him.

What emerges instead is something even more unsettling. The children in the photographs, in striking contrast to the grown-ups, are bold, sultry, mischievous and seductive. They seem as eager to please him as he was to please them. They appealed to him, in both senses of the word.

What electrified them so? There is a hint in Carroll's letters to them. The exhibition includes a letter he wrote to Rosamond Langbridge upbraiding Rosamond's big sister Gladys for being ''wanting in businesslike habits.'' (He had asked Gladys if the three sisters would like to divide a gift of six different books among themselves, and she had neglected to specify a desired distribution.) Carroll's letter, playfully alluding to a certain grasping disposition in Gladys and referring Rosamond to ''Blackstone's Treatise on the Just Claims of Younger Sisters,'' gently teases Rosamond into his world with a brew of logic, scolding, meddling and silliness.