Lewis Carroll's diaries lost four volumes and ten pages before reaching the British Library in 1969; his Alice manuscript sold at Sotheby's in 1928

Charles Dodgson, who wrote as Lewis Carroll, died in 1898 and left diaries held by his family. By 1932 four volumes had disappeared. One account blames a move and another blames storage in a cellar. When the surviving journals went to the British Library in 1969, ten pages had been cut out. A summary note in the handwriting of his niece Violet Dodgson lists their contents. Violet and her sister Menella were co-guardians of the diaries from the early 1940s to the late 1960s. Researcher Karoline Leach published a document that links the cuts to the nieces. The pages are connected to Carroll's 1863 break with the Liddell family. Most cut pages were blank when cut, and no evidence shows Carroll cut text himself. Separately, the Alice manuscript was auctioned at Sotheby's on 3 April 1928, and the dealer A. S. W. Rosenbach bought it. The price was reported as 15,400 pounds, and the seller as Alice Liddell Hargreaves^†. American benefactors bought it again in 1946 and gave it to Britain in 1948.