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.
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.
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.
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.
Lindseth is a noted Carroll scholar, whose publications include Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Masterpiece.
