The Hunting of the Snark

• Title: The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, in Eight Fits
• Author: Lewis Carroll
• Illustrator: Henry Holiday
• Translator: None
• Publisher (and Location): London: Macmillan & Co.
• Date of Publication: 1876
• Edition: 1st 
• Physical Description

1. – Bound by two green calf boards with a brown calf spine
2. -“Calf” refers to leather made from the hide of a calf (the most common leather used in bookbinding)
3. -Calf is smooth with no perceptible grain, and while naturally a pale biscuit color, this particular calf has been dyed green for the boards and brown for the spine, or band.
4. -The upper (front) and lower (back) boards have a smooth, slightly beveled surface
5. -While originally a polished green calf, over time has turned into a dull green color, with a scratched, indented, rough texture and a warped brown color starting to consume the original green from the corners inward.
6. -A simple gilted double-line borders and frames the two boards.
7. -The interior of the two boards is made up of a hand-marbled endpaper with gilt tooling as a border
8. -Endpaper refers to the double leaves added at the front or back of the book by the binder, commonly attached to the upper and lower boards (front and back hard-cover) by a paste or glue
9. – Marbling is the most common material for covering the sides of half-books and quarter-bound books,
10. -The wear and age of the book have led the two boards to be detached from the rest of the book, as the sewing has come undone.
11. –Additionally, the spine of the book (the strip of calf placed between the two boards and sewn together to create the foundation of the book) consists of a raised band with English grooves (raised, and not flush with the rest of the spine) dyed brown, with gilt tooling in the form of elegant designs, decorations on the raised bands, and the text, “HUNTING OF THE SNARK” and “LEWIS CARROLL”
12. -The spine is worn at the hinges with cracked joints and a frayed, worn, and warped structure.
13. –The pages of the book themselves have gilt edges (where the outermost edges of the paper have been cut smooth and gilted).
14. -The actual text of the book consists of 44 conjugate leaves for 108 total pages (although the actual text of the novel is only featured on 83 of those pages) with two silk cover sheets placed at the beginning
15. -Aside from the text of the novel there is…
    1. – a half-title (the page before the actual title page consisting of a simplified version of the title page, in this case consisting of information on the publisher)
    2. –a title page (featuring the title, subtitle, author, other known works, illustrator, publication information, and “The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved” inscription)
    3. – an inscription (dedication) to “a dear Child…”
    4. – a table of contents
    5. – a preface
    6. – an advertising page consisting of the other works by Carroll (including a description of the illustrations, cost, and quotations)
    7. –The text itself consists of 83 pages of large print, double-spaced text with Gothic type used on the divisional title pages (the book is broken into 8 “Fits” or sections, each containing a separate title page, or divisional title) followed by a blank printer’s leaf
       1. -Printer’s leaves are essential and intended to be included in the final version – usually used as a divider or blank space – and can be differentiated by the texture of the paper and chain lines, whereas binder’s leaves are irrelevant and therefore usually not included or removed afterwards
16. -The pages are 19 centimeters high
17. -There are nine wood-engraved illustrations throughout the novel (one for each “Fit” as well as one acting as an introduction) done by Henry Holiday.

• Biographies of the Makers

Lewis Carroll, pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was born on January 27, 1832, in Daresbury, Cheshire, England, and died on January 14, 1898. While best known for his playful poetry (The Hunting of the Snark, 1876) and novels (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865; Through the Looking-Glass, 1871) which have been described by both critics and himself as “nonsense literature,” he was also a logician, mathematician, photographer, and serious novelist. Growing up in an isolated country village, Charles had to find ways to entertain himself and his ten siblings, and he did so by inventing new games to play and “publishing” a pamphlet titled “Rectory Magazines” which consisted of contributions collected from himself and his other family members. Charles shyness and weak immune system led to bullying and a rash of illnesses, one of which caused deafness in one ear. Despite his social and physical issues, Charles excelled in school, coming out as head of his class in mathematics and earning himself a “Master of the House” fellows, a significant scholarship, a job as mathematics lecturer, and a scholarship to become an ordained deacon in the Church of England.

Dodgson naturally had a strong affinity for children, as he was the eldest son in a family of eleven and also had a strong stammer that was only assuaged by natural conversation with children. Dodgson bonded with one girl in particular, Alice Liddell, daughter of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, for whom Dodgson wrote and crudely illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a gift to her. What Dodgson had imagined as a throwaway gift to a young girl ended up becoming the most popular children’s book in England by his death (and arguably one of the most popular books in the world less than 100 years later) after a friend of the Liddells’ stumbled upon the crude manuscript and pressured Dodgson to publish it professionally with John Tenniel, a famed cartoonist for Punch. After this success, Dodgson began to expand into other genres, publishing the nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark in 1871, illustrated by none other than Henry Holiday.

Holiday was born on June 17, 1834, at Hampstead Street, Fitzroy Square, London, and died April 15, 1927 just a few miles away. After attending the Royal Academy Schools in 1855, Holiday became associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (an artistic movement founded on the principles of testing and defying all modern conventions of art, as well as promoting cross pollination between artists and writers to promote the unity of the two) and later became a renowned designer of stained glass windows. In his autobiography, Reminiscences of My Life (1914), Holiday write that “It was an agreeable surprise when one morning Lewis Carroll [Dodgson] came to see me and my work… We became friends on the spot and continued so till his death.” Carroll, a noted photographer, spent many days at Holiday’s private residence taking photographs and making a collection of his photography for Holiday as a gift. Carroll also commissioned Holiday to create 9 wood-cut illustrations (one front-piece and a single illustration for each individual “Fit”) for The Hunting of the Snark, as well as the cover. Famously, his drawing of the Snark itself was rejected by Carroll, as it was intended to be an unimaginable creature.

• History of the Book:

Lewis Carroll was a voracious reader of poetry, and while he published many serious poems he achieved his highest level of success and recognition with his nonsense poetry, specifically The Hunting of the Snark. Carroll was famous for coining new words in his poems that subsequently made it into the cultural lexicon—words ranging from “chortle” to “galumph” to “snark.” The Hunting of the Snark also spawned countless parodies, musical adaptations, and further interpretations, and yet for its playful subject matter its back-story may come as a surprise.

Carroll wrote The Hunting of the Snark following the darkest period in his life when he began questioning the same religion that had been so central to his existence after the serious illness of his cousin and godson. While the poem does touch on death and other more serious topics, it is rooted in humor, whimsy, and playful nonsense. The bizarre poem consists of 141 stanzas in 8 sections (called “Fits”), and fittingly was written backwards as the poem’s last line (“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see!”) was the first line written. While many people have tried to derive some meaning from the poem, Carroll always denied any possible conclusions.

The story itself was originally intended to be included in another work of children’s stories, but grew too large and became a story of its own. The story was published on April 1, 1876, in a standard issue (pictorial buff-colored cloth) as well as a presentation copy for friends and family bound in red, blue, green, and white cloth and gold decoration.

The poem saw a steady increase in popularity from the time it was released until his death (and even more so after), and was reprinted many different times in many different versions. In his lifetime, over 20,000 copies were sold and since has been reprinted, retranslated, reillustrated, and reissued by a variety of artists and writers in a number of languages. The poem is still popular today, with some people even forming “Snark Clubs” in homage to the titular character of poem.

• Critical Response

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be it would. You see?” When Charles Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, wrote this passage through the eyes of Alice in his 1871 novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I believe he was speaking just as much to his own world view as that of the fictional Alice. Carroll himself was a very complicated individual who split his early years between the pursuits of his left and right brain, studying mathematics, logic, serious literature, photography, and nonsense poetry. Although he was a renowned mathematician and logician before becoming an ordained deacon in the Church of England, he found his true passion in concocting fanciful stories with preposterous logic and harebrained creations. In Carroll’s world, anything was possible, and impossibility was the norm. Nonsense reigned supreme, and any attempt at logic was an empty pursuit. Carroll used these fantastical worlds to escape from his own reality, which at times appeared bleak and hopeless, full of death, illness, child molestation accusations, and pain, and while he occasionally touched on these topics in his stories, he always rooted them in imagination and whimsy, as if to remove the pain from them.

Carroll’s stories were at once the perfect and the worst pieces of literature to be illustrated—and therefore I would argue that illustrators were simultaneously his perfect complement and his crux. On the one hand, his vivid, fanciful language, colorful, disproportionate characters, and eccentric, illogical imagery perfectly lent itself to the wild illustrations of Henry Holiday. They brilliantly captured the beauty, chaos, and madness of Carroll’s world, depicting intricate while playful illustrations of bizarrely disproportionate yet hauntingly lifelike creatures. The illustrations brimmed with depth and life, as the crowded heaps of creatures appeared to spill off the page and into the physical presence of the reader as if they could not possibly be contained within the frame of the page. However, at the same time, the very fact that they were attempts at concrete depictions of Carroll’s characters rendered them useless, for to reiterate Carrol himself once more, “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrariwise, what it is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be it would. You see?”

The beauty of Carroll’s stories were the mindscapes he was able to implant into the minds of the readers: pliable, unstable kingdoms that changed shape and form every time we as readers opened the book. Carroll provided the words, but we were to provide the imagery that surrounded them. Personally, I believe that the illustrations in The Hunting of the Snark—while remaining true to the story and beautifully made—were unnecessary and almost unwarranted additions to the text. Carroll promoted imagination, all the while problematically anchoring these supposedly mercurial mental images in concrete, woodcut visuals. Carroll himself (upon receiving an illustration of the Snark from his illustrator Holiday) once was quoted as saying that it was “a beautiful beast” Holiday had created, but that he had intentionally made the Snark to be purely unimaginable and desired that he remain so. Yet, this alone is a paradox, for we as readers must imagine something when presented with a description. Therefore, I believe Carroll didn’t want the Snark to be strictly “unimaginable” in the literal sense, but “unimaginable” in the sense that it cannot be traced back to or tied down by a concrete depiction, leaving the readers’ minds racing with attempts at imagining the impossible. Carroll wanted his work to be everything and nothing at the same time, and what it wouldn’t be it would. He wished to galvanize our creativity and let our consciousness roam free in a universe of the nonsensical, for he understood the power of imagination and actively promoted it through his works. For that very reason, I believe the illustrations—while extremely well crafted and true to the textual descriptions—defied the very foundation of Carroll’s work and actively opposed his desire to force the readers into imagining the unimaginable.

• Work Cited

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan & Co., 1865. Print.

Carroll, Lewis. The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, in Eight Fits. 1st ed. London: Macmillan & Co., 1876. Print.

Landow, George P. “Pre-Raphaelites: An Introduction.” The Victorian Web: Literature, History, & Culture in the Age of Victoria. Brown University, 5 Sept. 2015. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. <http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/painting/prb/1.html>.

Popova, Maria. “How to Learn: Lewis Carroll’s Four Rules for Digesting Information and Mastering the Art of Reading.” Brain Pickings. Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, 13 June 2014. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. <https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/13/how-to-learn-lewis-carroll/>.

Popova, Maria. “The Origin of Snark: Original Illustrations from Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” 1876.” Brain Pickings. Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, 16 Jan. 2012. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. <https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/16/lewis-carroll-the-hunting-of-the-snark/>.

“The Works of Charles Dodgson: Illustrators.” The Lewis Carroll Society Website – The Works of Charles Dodgson. The Lewis Carroll Society, 17 Mar. 2010. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. <http://lewiscarrollsociety.org.uk/pages/aboutcharlesdodgson/works/illustrators.html>.

Wakeling, Edward. “Lewis Carroll and The Hunting of the Snark.” The Public Domain Review: A Project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Open Knowledge Foundation, 4 May 2011. Web. 08 Feb. 2016. <http://publicdomainreview.org/2011/02/22/lewis-carroll-and-the-hunting-of-the-snark/>.