The very care that Lewis Carroll took in the writing of this book deprived it of a certain charm of originality which always clings to the pages of “Wonderland.” Each chapter is so methodically planned and so well carried out that, while we never lose sight of the author and his cleverness, fairyland does not seem quite so real as in the book which was written with no plan at all, but the earnest desire to please three children. Then again there was a certain staidness in the prim little girl who pushed her way through the Looking-Glass. And there were no wonderful cakes marked “eat me,” and bottles marked “drink me,” which kept the Wonderland Alice in a perpetual state of growing or shrinking; so the fact that nothing happened to Alice at all during this second journey lessened its interest somewhat for the young ones to whom constant change is the spice of life. A very little girl, while she might enjoy the flower chapter, and might be tempted to build her own fanciful tales about the rest of the garden, would not be so attracted toward the insect chapter, which may possibly have been written with the praiseworthy idea of teaching children not to be afraid of these harmless buzzing things that are too busy with their own concerns to bother them.
There are, in truth, little “cut and dried” speeches in the Looking-Glass “Alice,” which we do not find in “Wonderland.” A real hand is moving the Chessman over the giant board, and the Red and the White Queen often speak like automatic toys. We miss the savage “off with his head” of the Queen of Hearts, who, for all her cardboard stiffness, seemed a thing of flesh and blood. But the poetry in the two “Alices” is of very much the same quality.
In his prose “nonsense” anyone might notice the difference of years between the two books, but Lewis Carroll’s poetry never loses its youthful tone. It was as easy for him to write verses as to teach mathematics, and that was saying a good deal. It was as easy for him to write verses at sixty as at thirty, and that is saying even more. From the time he could hold a pencil he could make a rhyme, and his earlier editorial ventures, as we know, were full of his own work which in after years made its way to the public, either through the magazines or in collection of poems, such as “Rhyme and Reason,” “Phantasmagoria,” and “The Three Sunsets.”
In The Train, that early English magazine before mentioned, are several poems written by him and signed by his newly borrowed name of Lewis Carroll, but they are very sentimental and high-flown, utterly unlike anything he wrote either before or after.
Between the publication of “Through the Looking-Glass” and “The Hunting of the Snark” was a period of five years, during which, according to his usual custom, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in the seclusion of Christ Church, calmly pursued his scholarly way, smiling sedately over the literary antics of Lewis Carroll, for the Rev. Charles was a sober, over-serious bachelor, whose one aim and object at that time was the proper treatment of Euclid, for during those five years he wrote the following pamphlets: “Symbols, etc., to be used in Euclid—Books I and II,” “Number of Propositions in Euclid,” “Enunciations—Euclid I-VI,” “Euclid—Book V. Proved Algebraically,” “Preliminary Algebra and Euclid—Book V,” “Examples in Arithmetic,” “Euclid—Books I and II.”
He also wrote many other valuable pamphlets concerning the government of Oxford and of Christ Church in particular, for the retiring “don” took a keen interest in the University life, and his influence was felt in many spicy articles and apt rhymes, usually brought forth as timely skits. Notes by an Oxford Chiel, published at Oxford in 1874, included much of this material, where his clever verses, mostly satirical, generally hit the mark.
And all this while, Lewis Carroll was gathering in the harvest yielded by the two “Alices,” and planning more books for his child-friends, who, we may be sure, were growing in numbers.
We find him at the Christmas celebration of 1874, at Hatfield, the home of Lord Salisbury, as usual, the central figure of a crowd of happy children. On this occasion he told them the story of Prince Uggug, which was afterwards a part of “Sylvie and Bruno.” Many of the chapters of this book had been published as separate stories in Aunt Judy’s Magazine and other periodicals, and, as such, they were very sweet and dainty as well as amusing. It was Lewis Carroll’s own special charm in telling these stories which really lent them color and drew the children; they lost much in print, for they lacked the sturdy foundations of nonsense on which the “Alices” were built.
On March 29, 1876, “The Hunting of the Snark” was published, a new effort in “nonsense” verse-making, which stands side by side with “Jabberwocky” in point of cleverness and interest.
The beauty of Lewis Carroll’s “nonsense” was that he never tried to be funny or “smart.” The queer words and the still queerer ideas popped into his head in the simplest way. His command of language, including that important knowledge of how to make “portmanteau” words, was his greatest aid, and the poem which he called “An Agony in Eight Fits” depends entirely upon the person who reads it for the cleverness of its meaning. To children it is one big fairy tale where the more ridiculous the situations, the more true to the rules of fairyland. The Snark, being a “portmanteau” word, is a cross between a snake and a shark, hence Snark, and the fact that he dedicated this wonderful bit of word-making to a little girl, goes far to prove that the poem was intended as much for children as for “grown-ups.”