The exhibition, organized by Carolyn Vega of the Morgan’s literary and historical manuscripts department, comes just after the United States publication of a splashily well-received new biography, “The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland,” by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. The Morgan show is kicking off what will become a lively late summer and fall of Aliceiana, from the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia to the Grolier Club in New York. But the Morgan, which is drawing on its own deep holdings of Carroll material, has secured the Hope Diamond of Alice bibliography: the handwritten, hand-illustrated original manuscript, “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” which Carroll gave as an early Christmas present to Alice Liddell in 1864 and which the British Library, its permanent home, is allowing to visit the United States for the first time in more than 30 years.

The 90-page, green-morocco-bound book rarely travels even in Europe. And when it does leave London — being almost as close to an ur-text of the British soul as Magna Carta or Shakespeare’s First Folio — it is accompanied by security measures whose details are cloaked in obfuscation befitting Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Jamie Andrews, the head of cultural engagement for the British Library, said that it was not checked on the flight over (“We don’t freight things like that”), but he would not say exactly where it was on the plane or who exactly was with it.