Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense

by Lewis Carroll

  No mention of the blood that flowed around:

  So when the stick was sawed in eight,

  The sawdust lost diminished from the weight.

  III

  As curly-wigged Jemmy was sleeping in bed,

  His brother John gave him a blow on the head;

  James opened his eyelids, and spying his brother,

  Doubled his fist, and gave him another.

  This kind of box then is not so rare;

  The lids are the eyelids, the locks are the hair,

  And so every schoolboy can tell to his cost,

  The key to the tangles is constantly lost.

  IV

  ’Twixt “Perhaps” and “May be”

  Little difference we see:

  Let the question go round,

  The answer is found.

  V

  That salmon and sole Puss should think very grand

  Is no such remarkable thing.

  For more of these dainties Puss took up her stand;

  But when the third sister stretched out her fair hand

  Pray why should Puss swallow her ring?

  VI

  “In these degenerate days,” we oft hear said,

  “Manners are lost and chivalry is dead!”

  No wonder, since in high exalted spheres

  The same degeneracy, in fact, appears.

  The Moon, in social matters interfering,

  Scolded the Sun, when early in appearing;

  And the rude Sun, her gentle sex ignoring,

  Called her a fool, thus her pretensions flooring.

  VII

  Five seeing, and seven blind

  Give us twelve, in all, we find;

  But all of these, ’tis very plain,

  Come into account again.

  For take notice, it may be true,

  That those blind of one eye are blind for two;

  And consider contrariwise,

  That to see with your eye you may have your eyes;

  So setting one against the other –

  [10] For a mathematician no great bother –

  And working the sum, you will understand

  That sixteen wise men still trouble the land.

  Notes

  Poems from Family Magazines

  Useful and Instructive Poetry (1845)

  This volume is the earliest surviving work by Charles Dodgson, written when he was thirteen. The manuscript has the poems written on 29 right-hand pages – with lively illustrations (some unfinished) on the left-hand pages (Berol).

  My Fairy

  Poems with a moral tag are a constant butt for the young Dodgson.

  Punctuality

  The punctilious instructions are undermined by the flowery moral, a nice double take.

  Charity

  For once, a useful if unsympathetic moral: throughout his life LC mocked the moralism beloved by pedagogic poets writing for children.

  Melodies

  There is only one other recorded limerick by LC, a form made famous by his contemporary Edward Lear. There is no account of the two ever having met or even of their knowing about each other. See “To Miss Véra Beringer”.

  A quotation from Shakespeare with slight improvements

  The scene is from Henry IV, Part 2, iv, 5, in which the young Prince Henry sits beside his sleeping father and is tempted to try on the crown: “biggin” does indeed mean a woollen nightcap while “rigol” (30) means a circle or diadem. The 13-year-old poet perfectly follows the iambic pentameters of the original and achieves a conversational effect, as he does also in the next poem, “Brother and Sister”.

  The Juvenile Jenkins

  The Dodgson family moved from Daresbury to the Rectory at Croft-on-Tees when LC was eleven years old. Young Jenkins has not been identified.

  The Angler’s Adventure

  26–39. Buffon’s history … Plesiosaurus: Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, published Histoire naturelle, 36 vols. (1749–88); Thomas Bewick published History of British Birds, 2 vols. (1797–1804); Izaak Walton published The Compleat Angler in 1653. Fluxions is Isaac Newton’s term for differential calculus; the first Plesiosaur skeleton fossils were found by Mary Anning in the earlier nineteenth century. All these pseudo-learned references are, of course, there to be reversed by the maid who knows a toad when she sees one.

  Rules and Regulations

  LC was a life-long sufferer from stuttering as were several of his siblings; hence, perhaps, the twice-repeated injunction among these absurdist rules of behaviour not to stammer or stutter.

  Clara

  The Gothic deflated, with a glance at Tennyson.

  The Rectory Magazine (c. 1848)

  The second of the family magazines, with contributions from several of the Dodgson children. Lewis Carroll (C.L.D.) wrote under a range of pseudonymous initials (see Introduction), listed in his key to “Names of Authors with their assumed initials”. Only his poems are included here.

  Terrors

  The railway continued to be a source of fascination and comedy (see, e.g., “Prologue to ‘La Guida di Bragia’ ”). The mingling of astronomical, Gothic, medieval and contemporary terrors give this poem a mysterious quality despite its prosaic ending.

  The Rectory Umbrella (c. 1850–53)

  The seventh of the Dodgson family domestic magazines. Between it and The Rectory Magazine were four of which no copies appear to have survived (see Introduction). As he describes in “The Poet’s Farewell”, LC wrote the whole of this particular magazine himself, including the footnotes. Some of the poems were later collected in the next magazine, Mischmasch.

  Ye Fatalle Cheyse

  title: Cheyse: Chase not cheese: the pseudo-medieval spelling throughout is for the fun of obscurity, added to by the footnotes.

  The Storm

  note 9. murderous: Reads “murdurous” in Rectory Umbrella.

  Lays of Sorrow – Number 1

  Lays of Sorrow – Number 2

  The verses about the cannibal hen and the obstinate donkey in the “Lays of Sorrow”, are clearly drawn direct from family experiences re-cast in mock-heroic style.

  Number 2, note 3 “Moans from the Miserable”: In this little prose piece the domestic rabbits complain of being affectionately carried about by their ears, and it includes a ditty:

  “Oh ye whose hearts have nerves,

  Oh ye whose ears have tears,

  It is not your love you are wearing out,

  But living victim’s ears!”

  The Poet’s Farewell

  LC’s complaint about writing the whole volume himself (38–40) seems to indicate that the missing earlier volumes included some contributions from his siblings.

  6. shone: Reads “shon” in Rectory Umbrella.

  Mischmasch (c. 1855–62)

  The last of the domestic magazines and rather different in nature from the earlier volumes. In Mischmasch are gathered a considerable number of LC’s early poems that had already been published and that he thought worth preserving when in his twenties, from Whitby Gazette, Comic Times, The Train, Temple Bar, All the Year Round and College Rhymes. Some of them are cut out from these magazines and pasted in. Also included are a poem each by Louisa and Wilfred (see Introduction).

  Many of the poems were later collected in Phantasmagoria (1869) and so appear there in this edition, often in revised form. Notable is the “Stanza of [pseudo-]Anglo-Saxon Poetry”.

  The poems first collected in Mischmasch were “The Two Brothers”, “The Dear Gazelle”, “She’s All My Fancy Painted Him”, “The Lady of the Ladle”, “The Palace of Humbug”, “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry”, “The Three Voices”, “Tommy’s Dead”, “Ode to Damon”, “A Monument – all men agree”, “Melancholetta”, “The Willow Tree” (later titled “Stanzas for Music”), “Lines” (revised as “A Valentine”), “Blogg’s Woe” (later titled “Size and Tears”), “Faces in the Fire”. The prose pieces “Photography Extraordinary” and “Wilhelm Von Schmidt” al
so contain poems, which are printed here.

  The Two Brothers

  Another take-off of the idiom of Border Ballads: here their deadpan violence and ear for dialogue and for mismatched question-and-answer is transferred into fantasy sibling quarrels among the Dodgsons.

  98. Than: Reads “Then” in Mischmasch.

  The Dear Gazelle

  This poem is introduced by a page headed “Poetry for the Million”. The joke is set out in the first two paragraphs:

  The nineteenth century has produced a new school of music, bearing about as much relation to the genuine article, which the hash or stew of Monday does to the joint of Sunday.

  We allude of course to the prevalent practice of diluting the works of earlier composers with washy modern variations, so as to suit the weakened and depraved taste of this generation.

  The third paragraph suggests that the other arts will copy this musical trend and ends: “Poetry must follow.” The poem is treated as a musical lyric, with expression, tempo and expansion signs, such as D.C.: da capo – again from the start. The first line of each stanza plays on Thomas Moore’s poem “Lalla Rookh”:

  I never nurs’d a dear gazelle,

  To glad me with its soft black eye,

  But when it came to know me well,

  And love me, it was sure to die!

  First published Comic Times, 18 August 1855.

  She’s All My Fancy Painted Him

  A shorter and considerably revised version of this poem is offered as evidence in the courtroom scene in Alice in Wonderland: “[The White Rabbit’s Evidence]”. William Mee’s popular ballad “She’s all my fancy painted her” (music by Mrs Philip Millard) turns up a number of times, revised and parodied, in LC’s poetry.

  First published Comic Times, 8 September 1855.

  From “Photography Extraordinary”

  The essay plays with the idea that just as photographs are “developed”, so “the ideas of the feeblest intellect, when once received on properly prepared paper, could be ‘developed’ up to any required degree of intensity”. The different styles achieved are demonstrated in prose passages and in the three poems.

  First published Comic Times, 3 November 1855.

  From “Wilhelm Von Schmitz”, chapters 3 and 4

  All four chapters were first published in the Whitby Gazette (7 September 1854), hence the various allusions to Whitby in the “novel”. This was Carroll’s second published piece. In the Mischmasch version this absurd tale lacks chapters one and two; it is written in a spirited Gothic style. Its main characters are the Poet, the Waiter, Muggle and Sukie, and it has a happy ending. The three poems are all supposedly the production of the “Poet”, Wilhelm Von Schmitz.

  [“My Sukie! he hath bought, yea, Muggle’s self”]

  4. its: Reads “it’s” in Wilhelm Von Schmitz.

  The Lady of the Ladle

  LC’s first published poem; the opening parodies Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake”:

  The stag at eve had drunk his fill,

  Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,

  And deep his midnight lair had made

  In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade.

  20. pomatum: A perfumed hair-oil originally made from apples.

  30. Coronach: This is a lament with bagpipes and parodies Scott’s “Coronach” in Canto iii of his “Lady of the Lake”, beginning: “He is gone on the mountain”.

  First published Whitby Gazette, 31 August 1854.

  Lays of Mystery, Imagination, and Humour

  Number 1

  The Palace of Humbug

  The first line recalls the song “The Gypsy Girl’s Dream” from The Bohemian Girl (1843), the opera by Michael William Balfe, with libretto by Alfred Bunn. Richard Roe and John Doe (34, 36) are the substitute names used to protect the identities of witnesses in a lawsuit. All the legal terms in the poem, such as “suit”, “plea” and “law”, are punned against common speech, and “Sue” is a suitably legal name, though pronounced differently.

  First published Oxford Critic and University Magazine, no. 1, June 1857, having been rejected by other comic journals.

  Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

  Readers will recognise this as the opening verse of “Jabberwocky”, eventually published in Through the Looking-Glass (1872). These 1855 notes by LC do not entirely square with Humpty Dumpty’s explanations there to Alice! (“Ed.” in text is LC himself.)

  Tommy’s Dead

  Sydney Dobell’s tragic poem (1856) of age and bereavement here turns jaunty, by the device of making the speaker a particularly cantankerous old father and by pretending that Tommy was a cat. Dobell’s “Tommy’s Dead” probably alludes to the Crimean war and opens:

  You may give over the plough, boys,

  You may take the gear to the stead,

  All the sweat o’ your brow, boys,

  Will never get beer and bread.

  The seed’s waste, I know, boys,

  There’s not a blade will grow, boys,

  ’Tis cropped out, I trow, boys,

  And Tommy’s dead.

  Ode to Damon

  Damon and Chloe, typical pastoral names, are here transposed to London everyday life. The Lowther Arcade opposite Charing Cross was a market for bric-a-brac while the 1851 Great Exhibition (18) took place in Hyde Park, a good step away, which gives point to Damon’s mistaken “short cut”.

  First published College Rhymes, iii, October 1862.

  [Riddle]

  The solution offered in Handbook, p. 9, is ‘tablet’.

  Other Early Verse

  Prologue to “La Guida di Bragia”

  For an operetta written for LC’s own Marionette Theatre, perhaps around 1855 when he was much occupied with performances and was also planning a book with “practical hints for constructing Marionettes and a theatre” (see Diaries, i, 81–2). No other marionette plays by LC are extant. Bradshaw’s railway timetable guide (“La Guida di Bragia”) is mentioned quite frequently in the diaries, and of course the railway figures in Through the Looking-Glass. LC was very interested by the new train network and, being a sociable man, used it frequently to visit friends all over the country. Indeed, a number of his friendships began in railway carriages, as with the Drury family (see note to “[To the three Misses Drury 1]”). In the little play manuscript, he imagines the mayhem that would ensue if the timetable decided to play tricks on its passengers by altering the times in secret (Berol).

  First published Queen, clxx, 18 November 1931, pp. 37–40, 66.

  The Ligniad, in two Books

  This mock-epic was written while LC was an undergraduate at Christ Church, addressed to his earliest friend at the college, George Girdlestone Woodhouse, the first person to speak to him in the dining-hall. The title suggests a “wooden” quality, drawing on “Woodhouse”: “lignum” means wood; the wooden hero cannot rise to poetry, though he is here celebrated in mock-heroic form. The “wood” also alludes to his bat, since Woodhouse was distinguished not only for his devotion to Greek and Latin but for his powers as a cricketer. LC is following in the mock-heroic tradition of Pope’s Dunciad without his acrimony.

  9. Doric reeds: Pastoral shepherds’ pipes.

  10. Scapula: A printer’s term; here, the page printed from a plate.

  12. Attic salt: Athenian wit.

  17. Greek Iambics: A popular exercise for public schoolboys and undergraduates was the translation of English poetry into Greek verse. The Gaisford Prize at Oxford, from 1857, was awarded for this.

  20. “Ah me, I am smitten” (Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1343).

  40. Plays Euripides: He is believed to have written over ninety plays of which eighteen survive.

  48. A fragment from our Poet Laureate: From Tennyson’s “Edward Gray” (1842):

  Love may come and love may go,

  And fly like bird from tree to tree;

  But I will love no more, no more,

  Till Ellen Adair come back to me.


  101. “short slip”: Fielder positioned behind the batsman. Perhaps the poem celebrated a recent cricket-match in which Woodhouse excelled as batsman, bowler AND fielder.

  See Roger Lancelyn Green, “Carroll’s ‘The Ligniad’: an early mock-epic in facsimile”, in Guiliano, pp. 81–91.

  [From a letter to his younger sister and brother Henrietta and Edwin, 31 January 1855]

  These exuberant Chinese whispers were written when LC had just begun teaching at Christ Church in 1855 at the age of 23 (Letters, i, 31). He jokes about dignity and distance between teacher and pupil and about the other hierarchies of college life. A “Scout” was a college servant.

  Upon the Lonely Moor

  This is the early version of what would sixteen years later become the White Knight’s song in Through the Looking-Glass (1872).

  First published (unsigned) Train, ii, 1856, pp. 255–6.

  From “Novelty and Romancement: A broken spell”

  [“ ‘When Desolation snatched her tearful prey”]

  The rodomontade of this poem is part of a burlesque prose invention in which the glamorous “Romancement” turns out to be “Roman Cement”. First published Train, ii, 1856, pp. 249–54.

  Alice, daughter of C. Murdoch, Esq

  Addressed to the four-year-old daughter of William Clinton Murdoch and his wife Isabella, probably during a visit to London in June 1856 when LC invented a “story-charade” with some of the younger family members (see Letters, i, 33 note 1).

  From “The Legend of Scotland”

  This short story with verses was finished on 16 January 1858, having been promised for several months to the children of Charles Longley, Bishop of Durham. The ghostly tale was based on Auckland castle where they lived (Diaries, iii, 151–2). It’s not clear why the victim changes from a medieval Scot into an Irishman in the final two lines.

  [“Into the wood – the dark, dark wood”]

  This poem was written to go with LC’s photograph of Agnes Grace Weld as Little Red Riding-Hood in his photograph album, 6 January 1858 (Diaries, iii, 148).

  In the early 1860s LC published fourteen poems in College Rhymes, an Oxford and Cambridge magazine with many contributions from Christ Church. He was the Editor from July 1862 until March 1863. He later collected six of his poems with some changes in Phantasmagoria and this section has only those poems that he did not include there.