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.