To the nineteenth century public mind, even the idea of child pornography was officially remote. Although children enjoyed no legal status or protection from physical abuse or exploitation, child pornography was nevertheless unthinkable as a reality. Victorian images of children were often contradictory, children either being extolled as virtuous or else portrayed as victims of poverty. In child portraiture art or photograph, there was the child nude, but represented not as the longings of pedophiles, or child pornographers, but metaphorised purity, innocence and grace, an ephemeral state before original sin. Nude and semi-nude children in Julia margaret Cameron’s photographs are allegorical (and thus innocent?) and represent the projection of truth and beauty. [Judith. Rowbotham, Kim. Stevenson. 2003, p. 178]

In her own words…
My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and the secure it for the character and uses of High Art by combining the real and the Ideal and sacrificing nothing of the Truth by all possible devotion to Poetry and beauty.
[Julia Margaret Cameron, editor Western Naef, 1996 p. 6]