The story was told on the water, on the stretch of the Isis between Folly Bridge and Godstow, to Lorina Liddell, thirteen, Alice, ten, and Edith, eight. Robinson Duckworth was in the boat and rowed stroke.

What was said that day was not written down. No version of the telling survives — not a phrase, not the order of it, not what the children asked back. The diary records tea on the bank and the hour of return, and nothing of the tale.

Afterwards Alice asked him to write it out for her. That request is the reason anything at all exists.

The prefatory poem Carroll set at the front of Wonderland calls it a golden afternoon.

“All in the golden afternoon / Full leisurely we glide”

In 1950 the London meteorological office was asked about the weather near Oxford on 4 July 1862. The records indicated that it was cool and rather wet. The enquiry is reported in Helmut Gernsheim’s Lewis Carroll: Photographer and cited by Martin Gardner in The Annotated Alice.

That is a later check against a later poem: a reading of instrument records made eighty-eight years afterwards, set beside a line written for a child three years afterwards. The records indicated cool and rather wet. The poem says golden.

He wrote it out in sepia ink, hand-lettering the whole of it, and he made the lettering deliberately neat so that a child could read it easily. Thirty-seven pen-and-ink illustrations of his own, and a coloured title page.

The text was finished in February 1863 — the first of the four left-hand additions says so. The drawings took much longer. He gave the finished book to Alice Liddell on 26 November 1864, as an early Christmas present.

Her sisters are inside it. In the Dormouse’s tale the three little sisters who live at the bottom of a well are Elsie, Lacie and Tillie: plays on the Liddell sisters’ names — L. C. for Lorina Charlotte, an anagram of Alice, and the family’s shortening of Edith.

On the last page Carroll pasted a photograph of Alice — his own photograph of her — over a drawing of her that he had made himself. The drawing stayed under the print. It was not seen again until it was uncovered in 1977.

A paper flap now holds the photograph in place, so that a reader can lift it and see the drawing beneath.

The record does not name who uncovered the drawing in 1977, and does not name whoever made the flap that allows it to be lifted. That absence is a fact about the record, not about them.

This Station does not show the drawing underneath. We could not obtain an image of it.

Alice Liddell kept the manuscript until 1928, then sold it at Sotheby’s. The sale was made under financial pressure, and the record carries two accounts of what that pressure was, and two figures for what the book fetched.

• Reason — death duties following her husband’s death (British Library)
• Reason — her husband’s debts (other accounts)
• Price — £15,400 (auction record; Lewis Carroll Society)
• Price — £15,000 (British Library)

Both reasons and both figures stand in the record. This Station does not choose between them.

The buyer was the Philadelphia dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach. He afterwards offered the manuscript to the British Museum at cost; the money could not be raised. It went to America, to the collector Eldridge Johnson.

After Johnson’s death it was auctioned again in 1946, and Rosenbach bought it back for $50,000. In 1948 a group of American benefactors raised the sum and presented it to the British Museum, in gratitude for Britain’s part in the war.

In 1948 it was given to the British Museum. The British Library did not exist until 1973, when it was established and the Museum’s library departments passed to it. Widely repeated accounts, including Wikipedia, say the manuscript was presented to the British Library.