He wrote and received almost 100,000 letters.

Lewis Carroll began keeping a meticulous record of letters sent and received a few weeks before his 29th birthday and continued to do so for the next 37 years of his life. He wrote and received almost 100,000 letters. 98,721 was the last numbered letter. He also kept a letter register as curator of the senior common room at Christ Church, Oxford, but neither of these letter registers has survived. We don't know how many letters he wrote, and there was no known register for the first 29 years of his life.

But one thing is certain: Dodgson was a prolific letter writer as well as an author, and his letters provide fascinating insight into his mind. "Life seems to go in letter-writing, and I'm beginning to think that the proper definition of "Man" is "an animal that writes letters," he once wrote to a friend.

Morton N. Cohen, with assistance from Roger Lancelyn Green, spent 20 years researching The Letters of Lewis Carroll. During that time, Cohen collected over 4000 copies of letters and chose 1305 for publication. Carroll's "public" letters - to the press, his publishers, his illustrators, and Henry Savile Clarke, who adapted Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for the stage - are divided into four sections for future publication, hopefully under the same editorship.

Unfortunately, only four letters from Carroll's first 19 years of life have survived. Several exist from 1851 onwards, but the number only increases from the mid-1860s, when he became famous as an author.