Lewis Carroll: A Rare and Wondrous Rabbit Hole
One of the most significant private collections on Lewis Carroll arrives at Christ Church, Oxford
In an act of remarkable generosity, the bibliophile and Lewis Carroll scholar Jon A. Lindseth has donated his magnificent Carroll collection to Christ Church Oxford, where the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—better known as Lewis Carroll—taught mathematics from 1855 to 1881 before devoting himself primarily to his writing. In 1856, Dodgson became friends with Henry Liddell, the new Dean of the college, and his family. His friendship with the Liddell children led him to create one of the most famous and enduring children’s stories, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
This exceptional donation is of huge significance to Christ Church, to Oxford, and to the United Kingdom. It is the largest donation of materials to Christ Church Library since the eighteenth century and the second-largest donation to the Library in the history of the college, which was founded as Cardinal College by Thomas Wolsey in 1525 and refounded in 1546 by King Henry VIII.
Jon contacted Christ Church in July 2024 to offer us his collection, and we were thrilled at the prospect of adding such a stellar collection to the holdings already at Christ Church. Jon had developed this collection over several decades, and it had long been recognized as one of the best in private hands. Jon is well-known as a supporter of Carroll research as the co-editor (with Alan Tannenbaum) of Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece (2015) and its companion, Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The English-Language Editions of the Four Alice Books Published Worldwide (2023), which Jon co-edited with Arnold Hirshon.
Insights into the Alice Author
The collection is outstanding in quality and breadth, and it goes far beyond Alice. Dodgson’s whole output is represented: manuscripts; photographs; special editions of Dodgson’s many works; more than 300 parodies; a large amount of material relating to Alice on stage; and a very significant collection of translations of the Alice books, from the very first German translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1869 through to much more recent publications.
Cataloguing and digitization of the collection are underway to make the collection as discoverable as possible. Our Dodgson Collection Project Archivist Tom Duckham joined Christ Church in January and is focusing on this cataloguing. Many of the letters in the Lindseth Collection show Dodgson as a photographer and part of a social world centered on Oxford, but spanning literary, academic, artistic, and theatrical circles. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the ten letters to Alice Kitchin, the mother of Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin, one of Dodgson’s favorite photographic subjects.
The letters reveal their friendship across more than a decade, spanning from 1873 to 1891. Some of the letters from Dodgson to Alice give an insight into Dodgson’s photographic processes and arrangements. In July 1873, he raises the possibility of taking a photograph based on the painting Waking by John Everett Millais and discusses arrangements for having prints hand-colored, suggesting that Alice send Miss Bond, an artist, several versions of a print as well as a lock of hair and samples of clothing for color reference.
In addition to the autograph letters and other manuscript items, the Lindseth Collection contains a vast number of significant early editions of Dodgson’s works, including the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark, as well as mathematical works such as The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic. There are presentation copies and a number of books owned by Alice Liddell Hargreaves (the real Alice) herself. Of note is a first edition of the 1886 facsimile copy of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground inscribed to Alice’s mother, Lorina Liddell, by Dodgson in purple ink: “To Her, whose children’s smiles fed the narrator’s fancy and were his rich reward: from the Author. Xmas 1886.”
New Discoveries for Scholars
Our Senior Rare Books Librarian William Hale has been cataloguing the early and special editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The collection is unsurprisingly strong in early American editions, including all four variants of the 1866 Appleton edition (reissued from the withdrawn 1865 English first edition), only two of which were previously represented in British collections.
Similarly rare are the six early Boston, Massachusetts, printings from 1869 to 1875, which are represented by no less than fourteen copies exemplifying the wide variety of publishers’ bindings in which Victorian books were commonly issued. Examination of four copies of the 1872 Boston edition has shown that they, in fact, represent two editions issued by two different local printers, a detail that has apparently escaped Dodgson bibliographers until now.
Dodgson is considered one of the best amateur photographers of his time, particularly in his images of children. The Lindseth Collection contains around 100 of his photographs, including the iconic image of Alice Liddell as “The Beggar Maid,” photographs of Xie Kitchin, and photographs of Dodgson’s friends and noted figures of his day.
Christ Church is very fortunate to have its own on-site digitization studio and staff so material can be digitized once it has been catalogued and then made freely available via Christ Church’s website and Digital Bodleian, which has digital items from Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries. We are enjoying developing deeper links with Dodgson scholars and collectors who are generously helping answer queries from us about specific items in the collection as we become familiar with them. Christ Church also mounted a spring exhibition, Pictures and Conversations, which attracted a large number of visitors and special interest groups, and descendants of Alice Liddell Hargreaves, Dodgson, and some of his correspondents and photographic subjects.
The Jon A. Lindseth Lewis Carroll Collection is of enormous scholarly value, and the Library looks forward to making it further accessible to current and future generations. Receiving such a large and important donation has inevitably meant that staff have been diverted from other tasks to manage the acquisition, and we are all more expert on Dodgson and his works than we were this time last year. We are committed to developing Christ Church’s Dodgson holdings and have been lucky enough to make a few careful acquisitions since the Lindseth Collection arrived. The Library welcomes inquiries about the collection at any time at library@chch.ox.ac.uk.
