About the book:
Martin Gardner's scholarly edition of Carroll's long comic poem "The Hunting of the Snark," with extensive annotations unpacking the wordplay, the logical puzzles, and the biographical context.
Carroll's most mysterious work a poem about an impossible quest that has been read as allegory, satire, and pure nonsense depending on the reader.
Gardner's notes are essential and often as enjoyable as the poem itself.
Condtion:
Good secondhand condition.
Annotation on first page.
Page 49 picture partially coloured in.
Page 73 pen marking favourite passage.
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About the author:
Lewis Carroll (1832 to 1898)
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson the pen name is a Latinised and Germanised reversal of his given names spent almost his entire adult life at Christ Church, Oxford, as a lecturer in mathematics, an Anglican deacon, and a logician of genuine accomplishment. He had a pronounced stammer that made adult society uncomfortable and children's company easier, and he was by most accounts most fully himself in the company of the Liddell children, daughters of Christ Church's dean, for whom he improvised the story that became Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on a boat trip up the Thames on July 4, 1862.
His relationship with Alice Liddell and his extensive photographic work with children he was a serious and technically skilled photographer have been the subject of sustained scholarly and ethical debate, and the question of how to hold that alongside the work remains unresolved and should not be tidied away.
What he produced is something else entirely from the man who produced it: the most anarchic, logically rigorous, and genuinely strange children's books in the English language. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) are not illogical they are hyper-logical, applying formal rules with merciless consistency and inverting Victorian convention at every turn. The Alice books are anti-didactic in a genre built on didacticism: every moral is absurd, every authority figure ridiculous, every adult certainty dissolved by a child's reasonable questions. That the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, and Humpty Dumpty read as portraits of Victorian social ritual is not accidental. John Tenniel's illustrations, produced for the first editions, are so definitively right that the books and images have become inseparable.
Jabberwocky the poem embedded in Through the Looking-Glass is one of the great poems in English, built almost entirely from invented words that somehow work. Carroll coined the term "portmanteau word" to describe them: slithy is lithe and slimy, mimsy is flimsy and miserable. He also invented chortle, which has passed entirely into the language.
His influences are Swift in the satirical tradition, Edward Lear in the nonsense verse, and his own mathematical training in the logical architecture beneath the absurdity. His influence forward is so vast as to be almost atmospheric: Kafka's bureaucratic dreamlogic, Joyce's portmanteau language, Nabokov's wordplay Nabokov translated Alice into Russian the Surrealists who claimed the books as proto-Surrealist, Borges, Beckett, Douglas Adams, and the entire psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, which found in Wonderland a map it recognised. The question of what is real, what authority is legitimate, and what a child sees that adults have agreed not to see runs from Carroll through most of the literature that matters.
