Published: 25 March 2010

THE tomes were half the size of a door, thick, dusty – and were so heavy that journalist Jenny Woolf couldn’t lift them. But inside were long-forgotten secrets to the life of one of Britain’s major literary figures, the Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll.

Jenny, who lives in West Hampstead, has written a new biography of the author – and one of the sources that she used to cast fresh light on her subject was a set of long-forgotten bank records not seen since the account was closed a couple of years after his death.

Her work, one of  many on the writer, was prompted by her own love of his books – and an odd sense that no biographer had yet to really cast a proper light on a man who has been dead for more than 100 years but whose key writings are still being sold today.

“I was a big fan when I was young,” she recalls. “I first read Alice when I was under seven and I remember thinking that Alice was seven and a half – and that she was quite a big girl, bigger than me. I loved them – when I had finished reading the stories, I wanted more. I decided to write to Lewis Carroll and ask him to write more Alice books, and I wanted to meet him.” 

Of course, he had been dead for the best part of 50 years. 

Jenny’s childhood passion for the author returned while she was writing travel features. She was invited to stay at a hotel in Oxford which once was home to Parsons Thompson, a popular Victorian bank. The PR mentioned the vaults once held the records for famous Oxford dons – and it occurred to her that very probably Lewis Carroll banked there.

“I contacted the archive department of Barclays [who had taken over the business] and asked if they had the records for Carroll,” she said.

To her surprise and delight, they said yes: and furthermore, no one had ever asked to look at them. “They covered 44 years and held extraordinary information,” she says.

It showed Carroll in a new light, outlining daily purchases and his rising and falling fortunes. But it also showed a man who liked to spend money – and give it away as quickly as he earned it.

“He donated money to 25 to 30 different charities regularly each year,” she says.

“Yet his accounts would often go into the red. He was not careful when it came to spending cash.” 

She had read biographies of her literary hero, but found them far from revealing – as if his character had been airbrushed by supporters, or sullied by those who did not like him. This feeling was partly prompted by her background as a journalist, she explained. Jenny had compiled interviews of well-known people called Things I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18 for the Sunday Express, and she was struck by how “you got a sense of personality” from such interviews. 

“I found this was missing from the biographies I read of Lewis,” she admits.

“Some were very wooden – I just did not get a feeling of Lewis being a real person.”

Carroll’s reputation had been dragged through the mud as well as lifted skywards. In some accounts, he was a strange recluse who could not form relationships with adults, an opium addict who was accused of having an unhealthy attraction to girls. He was even once accused of being Jack the Ripper – finger-pointing towards quiet literary figures was a regular occurrence in the immediate post-Ripper period.

Other biographies played on his large family (he was one of 11 children) and his genius for mathematics – he spent his entire career teaching at Oxford University. None satisfied Jenny.

“He left a lot of letters and diaries, and essays,” she says. “I decided I would read them, and get a more rounded picture of him. Other biographers seemed to be pushing you to think what they want you to think.”

But it was the bank records that gave her a fresh way of considering Carroll’s works.

And she believes that regardless of what biographers find through their studies, one fact can never change – that he wrote two children’s books that are timeless. 

“Most of the characters are caricatures,” says Jenny. “They are very briefly sketched, and not well described. It means you have to make up a lot of it yourself – you have to use your imagination. Basically people can put themselves very easily in the story.”

• The Mystery of Lewis Carroll. By Jenny Woolf. Haus Publishing £18.99