15 October 2008
Carroll and his Cash
I'm working on the chapter on Carroll's bank account at present. As we were sitting in that windowless room in Barclay's Bank archives and transcribing the account from the ledgers, I became more and more astonished.
Carroll was well known to be (to put it rudely) a nitpicking fusspot, and yet the account showed him positively throwing his money around at times and running into the red as a result. It looks as if, when his bank statements arrived, he just binned them without bothering to read them.
The account is the only totally uncensored major document about him, and I hadn't realised before how important it was to find something which hadn't gone through the filter of his loving family. He comes over as a man who could be very careless and headstrong. It also shows that the controlled, fussy image he presented to the world, although partly true, was also a self-caricature.
Wonder what sort of child he was. A pest, I suspect, though probably a lovable and interesting one. He said almost nothing about his childhood, except to mention once that he had been a "detestable" little boy.
Carroll was well known to be (to put it rudely) a nitpicking fusspot, and yet the account showed him positively throwing his money around at times and running into the red as a result. It looks as if, when his bank statements arrived, he just binned them without bothering to read them.
The account is the only totally uncensored major document about him, and I hadn't realised before how important it was to find something which hadn't gone through the filter of his loving family. He comes over as a man who could be very careless and headstrong. It also shows that the controlled, fussy image he presented to the world, although partly true, was also a self-caricature.
Wonder what sort of child he was. A pest, I suspect, though probably a lovable and interesting one. He said almost nothing about his childhood, except to mention once that he had been a "detestable" little boy.