Lewis Carroll collection given to his Oxford college in surprise US donation

The Guardian

16-02-2025

Thousands of letters, photographs, illustrations and books from one of the world's largest private Lewis Carroll collections have been donated to the UK out of the blue by an American philanthropist.
The extraordinary gift has been made to Christ Church, University of Oxford, where Carroll lectured and where he met Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which celebrates its 160th anniversary this year.
The collection includes more than 200 autograph letters, some of which are unpublished. There are a number to his 'child-friends' and their parents, often sending riddles and jokes and copies of books. Some shed light on Carroll's interest in the theatre.
There are also significant early editions, including the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark and mathematical works. A copy of Alice's Adventures Under Ground is inscribed to Alice's mother by Carroll: 'To her, whose children's smiles fed the narrator's fancy and were his rich reward: from the author. Xmas 1886.'
Carroll is considered one of the best amateur photographers of his day and the donation includes more than 100 of his photographs. The subjects include his friends and noted figures such as the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Gabriel Sewell, the Christ Church college librarian, was taken aback when she received a brief email out of the blue from the US collector, who wrote: 'I have decided to donate my Lewis Carroll collection. It includes more than 200 letters and 100 photographs plus many obscure printed items. Have you any interest?'
The email was sent by Jon A Lindseth, a retired American businessman and philanthropist, collector and scholar.
Sewell said: 'It was a bit of a surprise. It's an enormous collection. He's incredibly generous. It would be impossible to make a collection like this nowadays without having an enormous amount of money.
'Such material doesn't come on to the market these days, and not all at once. When we've tried to buy Carroll photographs, we've never had enough money. They get snapped up by people with much deeper pockets.'
She did not know Lindseth personally, but was aware that, over decades, he had built up a significant collection of material relating to Carroll, the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose professional life was spent chiefly as an academic, a mathematician and logician at Christ Church.
Having excelled at the college as a student, he received its mathematical lectureship in 1855 and remained there in various capacities until his death in 1898. He even worked as its sub-librarian for a time.
His friendship with Henry Liddell, the college's dean, and his family, inspired him to write his famous children's story, first told to Alice Liddell and her sisters on a boating trip in 1862.
They were captivated by the little girl named Alice who goes looking for an adventure, and Alice asked him to write it down for her.
The unpublished correspondence reflects Carroll's frustration over the misuse of his pen name. In 1890, he fired off a letter to the bookseller Messrs H Sotheran in Manchester, who had listed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking-Glass in their catalogue, attributing them to 'Carroll (Lewis, ie Rev CL Dodgson)'.
Carroll wrote that they had inserted his name 'in connection with books of which he has never claimed or acknowledged the authorship, + which no one has any right to attribute to him: he will be much obliged if they will forbear from doing this for the future'.
There are also unpublished letters from Carroll to Edith Rix, whom he had tutored in logic. He reportedly regarded her as the cleverest woman he ever knew. She went on to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge and to work at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In 1886, he wrote to her: 'I would love to write you a chatty letter, in answer to 2 or 3 of yours: but I've no time for this post, + won't keep you longer waiting for answers to your mathematical questions …'
Sewell said: 'It is [at Christ Church] that [Carroll] produced the hundreds of letters, photographs and sketches that now return home as part of the remarkable collection expertly curated by Jon Lindseth.'
Lindseth is a noted Carroll scholar, whose publications include Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll's Masterpiece. He has also written for the journals of the Lewis Carroll Society and curated two Carroll exhibitions.
Christ Church has long possessed one of the foremost Carroll archives. Sewell said: 'With this unparalleled donation from Lindseth, however, there can be no doubt that the college is now the pre-eminent institutional collection of Carroll material in the UK.'
She added: '[Lindseth] was very firm that he wanted it to come to the UK and he wanted it to be in Christ Church, where Carroll lived and worked … No other institution in the UK has a particularly big Carroll collection. All the big collections are in the States, and he wanted to remedy that.'
Cataloguing and digitisation of the Lindseth Lewis Carroll collection has only just begun, but an exhibition displaying some of the most exceptional items is in Christ Church's historic upper library until 17 April – the first time the collection has been displayed in the UK.