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On Borrowing

One of the surest tests [of a poet’s superiority or inferiority] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

T. S. Eliot, p. 114 in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 1920

 
Likewise, a good illustrator welds the theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different and sometimes even funnier than that from which it is torn.

And Lewis Carroll may have borrowed from Thomas Gray.

 

All art is infested by other art.

(Leo Steinberg, in Art about Art, 1979)

 

Gustave Doré was an inspired master thief too:Segments from:
※ Plate I (mirror view) of Gustave Doré’s illustrations to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1863),
※ Matthias Grünewald’s Temptation of St Anthony (c. between 1512 and 1516, a panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece, now located at Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France).

 
The borrowing never ends:

 
2018-02-18, update: 2025-12-11

The Lewis Carroll Collection at Christ Church (2018)

The Lewis Carroll Collection

Christ Church holds three distinct collections of material relating to Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Ludwidge Dodgson. These collections include a wide variety of material, from autograph letters and a wealth of manuscripts, original photographic prints, proof sheets and presentation copies, to a large number of editions of the “Alice” books in different languages.

Illustrated editions include 19th century black and white etchings and a huge range of 20th century illustrations. Some illustrators are famous in their own right, like Salvador Dali, Ralph Steadman and Barry Moser. The collections also include an impressive array of secondary material (biographies, books about various aspects of Carroll’s work, etc.) and are available for the use of researchers upon application to the Library.

The whole corpus of the Lewis Carroll collection is currently the object of intense study and scrutiny, being reviewed and catalogued. This is a work in progress. A significant part of the Lewis Carroll collection has now been digitized. More will follow in due course. This project aims to provide an enhanced experience for viewers, allowing them to flip the pages, zoom in, and read very detailed descriptions. In 2018, the digitized part of the Lewis Carroll collection has been organized in the following sections:

The Making of ‘Alice’
Other Works by Lewis Carroll
Miscellaneous Carroll Material
Photography
Carroll Friends and Contemporaries

Access to all fully digitized resources is made available both through the college website, or directly via the Digital Bodleian portal. Crucially for research, our digitized items are integrated with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a set of software standards established and adhered to by an ever expanding community of libraries and cultural heritage institutions, including the British Library, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cambridge University Library, Harvard University Library, MIT, Stanford University, Trinity College Dublin, the Vatican and Yale University. All this gives scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world.

Source (2018): http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/library-and-archives/lewis-carroll-collection-0

Snark related links are offered in “Other Works by Lewis Carroll“. At present the links also lead to scans of Henry Holiday’s illustrations.

 
I like Edward Wakeling’s detailed description of Holiday’s illustrations. The Ocean Chart is not mentioned. That is no mistake: That chart quite probably isn’t an illustration by Henry Holiday. My own collection of scans does contain the Ocean Chart, as it is about all illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark. That includes the illustration not made by Henry Holiday.

 
2018-01-31, updated (direct links replaced by archived links): 2025-12-09

“Snark” is older than Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll did not coin the term snark. The term snark is older than Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).

※ For comments: Bluesky and Reddit.
※ Links: notoneoffbritishisms.com.

This is an update to the post Snarking.

2025-11-03, updated: 2025-12-07

Three 150th Snark anniversaries

There are three important 150th anniversaries of “The Hunting of the Snark”. Pan Macmillan (including Picador), the BBC and The Guardian already missed two of them.

  • 25 October 2025: Naming ☑
    • On 25 October 1875, Carroll decided to use “The Hunting of the Snark” as the title of his Snark tragicomedy (which in Henry Holiday’s view started out as a tragedy).
  • 1 April 2026: Birth ☐
    • On 29 March 1876 at Macmillan, Carroll prepared 80 presentation copies for family and friends. (As far as I understand, these copies contained an additional poem: the Easter Greeting.)
    • On 1 April 1876, Macmillan officially published the poem with Henry Holiday’s illustrations.

There are more Snark related entries in Carroll’s notes.


 
Microblog: Bluesky

 
2024-06-05, update: 2025-12-06

Sir Nicholas Soames’ Speech

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
　And the Bellman​, perplexed and distressed​,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
　That the ship would not travel due West!

※ www.nicholassoames.org.uk (2018-12-06): Full speech
※ Youtube: The Snark reference starts at 00:09:03.
※ e𝕏 twitter: [1] [2]

2018-12-30, update: 2025-11-29

Taking 19840 as the subject to reason about

Taking Three as the subject to reason about —
　​A convenient number to state —
We add Seven, and Ten, and then multiply out
　​By One Thousand diminished by Eight.

The result we proceed to divide, as you see,
　​By Nine Hundred and Ninety Two:
Then subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be
　​Exactly and perfectly true.

Not all of Thomas Cranmer‘s 42 Articles made it into the Elizabethian 39 Articles of the Anglicans.

(3 10+7 10+10 10)×(1000 10-8 10) = 19840 10 = 231504 6 .
231504 10 can be devided by 42 10 as well as by 39 10 without remainder.
But did Lewis Carroll know that? 😉

 


(x+7+10)×(1000-8)/992-17 = x,
for x=3:

3 3
+ 7 10
+ 10 20
× (1000-8) 19840
/ 992 20
– 17 3

 

100110110000000 2 1111100000 2
1000012211 3 1100202 3
10312000 4 33200 4
1113330 5 12432 5
231504 6 4332 6
111562 7 2615 7
46600 8 1740 8
30184 9 1322 9
19840 10 992 10
139A7 11 822 11
B594 12 6A8 12
9052 13 5B4 13
7332 14 50C 14
5D2A 15 462 15
4D80 16 3E0 16
40B1 17 376 17
3744 18 312 18
2GI4 19 2E4 19
29C0 20 29C 20
22KG 21 255 21
1ILI 22 212 22
1EBE 23 1K3 23
1AAG 24 1H8 24
16IF 25 1EH 25
1392 26 1C4 26
105M 27 19K 27
P8G 28 17C 28
NH4 29 156 29
M1A 30 132 30
KK0 31 110 31
JC0 32 V0 32
I77 33 U2 33
H5I 34 T6 34
G6U 35 SC 35
FB4 36 RK 36

 
2024-02-14, update: 2025-11-17

Fact Checks

  • Ambiguous: The “Boots” and “the maker of Bonnets and Hoods” in The Hunting of the Snark might be two different persons, but also could be the same person. Thus, the Snark hunting crew might have only nine members, not ten.
  • Unproven: The assumption that Carroll was on drugs when he wrote the Alice books.
  • Probably wrong: The assumption that the the Snark’s “fondness for bathing-machines” is nonsense. It might be an Oxford Christ Church College insider joke.
  • Too often wrong: Carroll quotes (e.g. in the Internet). Check them before a Carroll misquote sticks as a tattoo on your skin.
  • Wrong: The assumption that C.L. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) invented the word “Snark”.
  • Wrong: The assumption that the “Ocean Chart” (the Bellman’s map) in The Hunting of the Snark was made by Henry Holiday.
  • Wrong: The claim by rare book sellers that only the first issue of The Hunting of the Snark has “Baker” on page 83.
  • Wrong: The assumption that there is photographic evidence that Alice Liddell, as a child, kissed C.L. Dodgson.
  • Wrong: The story that C.L. Dodgson sent an admiring Queen Victoria a copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

 

Not Lewis Carroll

 
2019-07-12, updated: 2025-11-13

The Mathematical World of C.L. Dodgson

The Mathematical World of C.L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) https://t.co/nmGpkaXScD vía @YouTube

— Profesor Raul Alva G (@Prof_Raul_Alva) October 21, 2019

On voting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=2038&v=wYjnUDV3pTM

2019-10-22: Below you find text (2018-05-13) moved from https://snrk.de/page_the-new-belfry#voting to this blog article.

Carroll/Dodgson tried to fight against apodictic assertiveness and oversimplification not only by means of nonsense poetry but also by means of mathematics. He expected decisions to have a solid base – like fair voting:

One small part of Dodgson’s work, though, has impressed social scientists: his analysis of the mathematics of voting. His interest in the topic was sparked by the deliberations of his colleagues at Christ Church over such matters as how to choose a new belfry. Dodgson’s pamphlets on voting were largely ignored until 1958, when a British economist, Duncan Black, noticed that there had been nothing so good on the topic since just after the French Revolution.

https://www.economist.com/node/11662202, 2009
 

Ostensibly, [Dodgson] was pondering the best way for the governing body of Christ Church, Oxford, where he was a tutor in mathematics, to decide on the design for a controversial belfry, and to pick new members of the college. […] For college elections, Dodgson first proposed a version of Borda’s method, and also a version of Condorcet’s (though he appears not to have known about Borda’s and Condorcet’s work). Later, he developed an interest in politics beyond the walls of Christ Church, and, in the eighteen-eighties, he tried to find ways to secure equitable representation in Parliament for minorities.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/26/win-or-lose, 2010

 
Dodgson’s method of taking votes on more than two issues (1876) attempts to find winners in case initially there is no winner. The method was applied at Christ Church college for a small number of candidates. However, for large lists of choices, the rearranging of candidates (until a winner is found) requires a computing power which surely was not available then. And in 2006 it still was a challenge (see McCabe-Dansted below).

2019-10-22, updated: 2025-11-11

Thinking it Through

Among the issues the The Hunting of the Snark is about, one of them perhaps might be reasoning. There are several remedies against bad reasoning. One of them is clear thinking. That is what Kwame Anthony Appiah‘s Thinking It Through – An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy (2003) is about. The book also is available as PDF file (archive).

 
See also: http://appiah.net/ (archive).


Recently my browser gave me a warning when I checked whether the PDF file still is online. But the file the is ok and didn’t change since I downloaded it a few years ago.

 
2017-12-01, update: 2025-10-28

The Jabberwock

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky#Reception:

[…] [Jabberwocky] has also been interpreted as a parody of contemporary Oxford scholarship and specifically the story of how Benjamin Jowett, the notoriously agnostic Professor of Greek at Oxford, and Master of Balliol, came to sign the Thirty-Nine Articles, as an Anglican statement of faith, to save his job. […]

Stephen Prickett (2005): Victorian Fantasy, Baylor University Press, p. 113, ISBN 1-932792-30-9

Unlike Benjamin Jowett, the Rev. Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) didn’t sign, but managed to save his job nevertheless without being ordained as a priest. (I am not so sure about the Jowett link, because «the first stanza of “Jabberwocky” was originally written by Carroll at the age of 13 under the title “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon poetry”.» [Darien Graham-Smith, p. 36])

 

Jabberwocky

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

 
See also:
※ https://poemanalysis.com/lewis-carroll/jabberwocky
※ Vogon poetry
※ Chamutal Noimann, Empowering Nonsense: Reading Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” in a Basic Writing Class (2014)
※ Etching of Saint George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccello (c. 1470). But there also are other inspiring sources:

Christian’s fight with Appollyon in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,
London: Carington Bowles, 1781.
(Source: John Bunyan Society)

 

Games (unfortunately not available anymore from the app shop):
Jabberwocky, Confounded, app for iOS by Christopher Gross

 

Music:
composer: Zoë Tweed, rendition: Sylva Winds
(flute: Yi-Hsuan Chen, bassoon: Guylaine Eckersley, oboe & voice: Drake Gritton,
clarinet: Rowan Jones, french horn: Zoë Tweed)

 
composer: Ben Ponniah, rendition: Peter Noden

 

Muppets

 

2018-04-06, update: 2025-10-27

One Hour of Snark (BBC 1992)

HUNTING OF THE SNARK
Lewis Carroll
Topics BBC Radio, Dramatised reading, Lewis Carroll, The Snark, nonsense verse

Michael Bakewell examines the various interpretations of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verse published in 1876, about “an impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature” and introduces a dramatised reading.

Music: Steven Faux
Narrator: Alan Bennett
Bellman: Paul Daneman
Baker: David Collings
Butcher: David King
Snark: Peter Penry Jones

BBC Radio 3, 20 December 1992

 
2019-01-01, updated: 2025-10-27

The Queen and the Snark

My article “The Queen and the Snark” has been published in the magazine ILLUSTRATION (Volume 21, Issue 80, dated Summer 2024, but published in February 2025). From the editorial of the magazine: “[…] and we
have one essay which finds half-hidden allusions in Henry Holiday’s visual interpretation of Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Is any of this real? It is up to you, the reader, to decide.”

I fully agree with that: Since the end of 2008 I think that Holiday’s illustrations are an important contribution to the interpretation of Carroll’s tragedy. They are as important as the text of the poem.

As of today, the Cellopress page for issue 80 still is empty.

Only after I wrote the article, I found a map in Henry Holiday’s front cover illustration.

For comments: Facebook | Bluesky | ipernity | Substack | reddit

Related links: Letters in the Waves? | When the Queen met the Boojum | Nose is a Nose is a Nose

 
2025-01-01, update: 2025-09-19

Alice on the Train

Bycatch (but not mine):

[left]: John Tenniel: Alice on the Train (1872)
[right]: Augustus Leopold Egg: The Travelling Companions (1862)

I found the comparison in preraphaelitesisterhood.com. If it is a pictorial reference at all, it might be a nice pun by Tenniel, but not as challenging as Henry Holiday’s conundrums.

Playing with the work of other artists could have been fun for John Tenniel too. (Of course another reason for such similarities always could be, that Holiday and Egg both referred an image by a third artist.)

 
2017-09-22, updated: 2025-08-17

I met the Snark in 2005

Before my Snark hunt started in December 2008, I mainly focused on Henry Holiday’s illustration to the 5th fit in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Since 2005 (then as a member of a works council, where I specialized on mental workload issues in OHS), I used that illustration as a depiction of improvable workplace design. I also inserted the illustration into a German Wikipedia article in 2008. Probably from there it was copied into another Wikipedia article in 2012. That one again might have inspired a Forbes article about well-being in the workplace in 2013.

In 2008 I read Carroll and Holiday’s complete tragicomedy. Then I made an incidental discovery.

 
2019-04-13, update: 2025-05-20

Breakfast at five-o’clock tea

There is a time difference between the UK and Tahiti.

Snark mark 2/5:

Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree
　That it carries too far, when I say
That it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea,
　And dines on the following day.

In November 1859, Dodgson gave a lecture at a meeting of the Ashmolean Society on “Where does the Day begin?”. A stopped clock is right 24 times a day, if you start carrying the clock around the globe due West at an angular speed of 15°/h once it has stopped. (It’s almost like the mad tea-party having always six o’clock while moving around the table.) Only the day date suddenly would change somewhere. (That’s where in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare quickly changes the topic.)

There neither were internationally defined time zones yet, nor an internationally agreed date line when Charles Darwin and the HMS Beagle travelled around the world, but when he (and the Snark) breakfasted in Tahiti, it probably already was around tea time back home in Carroll’s Oxford. From England it carries us far away, when we imagine breakfasting in Tahiti.

On 2020-10-22 I found a twitter thread, where John Pretorius showed, that he interpreted (and applied) Lewis Carroll’s “breakfasts at five-o’clock tea” stanza in the same way as I did.

 
2019-08-16, update: 2025-05-13

The Joy of Hiding Things in Art

In a BBC video, video journalist Adam Paylor gives us a good example for why things might be hidden in art: Besides assuming that people who see cryptomorphs in artwork might just be suffering from pareidolia, often one important reason for hiding things in art is neglected by art researchers: Hiding things in images can be fun!

Also from http://severnbeachantiques.com/famous-rare-1980-huntley-and-palmer-rude-garden-party-ginger-nuts-tin you can learn about a good reason for an artist to hide things in art:

I did them out of devilment, purely for a laugh. I’ve always been a bit of a naughty boy but I’ve nothing against Huntley & Palmers. There have been rumours that I got made redundant and did it out of revenge. But that’s not true – I was only ever a freelance. I just felt like adding a bit of smut to the proceedings.

That is what Mick Hill, the creator of the illustration of the Huntley & Palmers garden party ginger nuts tin, said about the hidden surprises in his artwork.

 
2018-07-01, updated: 2025-04-06

Maurice Saylor’s Snark

Naxos: «SAYLOR, M.: Hunting of the Snark (The) / New Music for Vintage Silent Film Comedies (Cantate Chamber Singers, Snark Pit-band, Snark Ensemble, Becker)

Maurice Saylor’s setting of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark is written for a chorus and ‘Snarkestra’, Saylor’s word for his quirky, misfit pit-band. This includes all manner of percussion and woodwinds, as well as such exotica as harmonica, bass accordion and washtub, instruments “reviled by society at large”, in Saylor’s words. To the nonsense text he brings a riot of colour and wit as well as a series of traditional devices such as refrains, sea chanties, and a chorale. The result is music of vibrancy, excitement, and even dangerous volatility. The three silent film scores are pacey, dapper and splendidly jazzy.»

(Thank you, Magnus, for your comment.)

2025-03-13

Face Change

In an early draft to the illustration The Crew on Deck in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, the illustrator Henry Holiday gave the Bellman a different face than the one which the Bellman had in the final illustration. Henry Holiday didn’t discard the original face. He moved that round faced character (an Oxford colleague?) to the illustration to the chapter The Barrister’s Dream and then turned the Bellman in the illustration The Crew on Deck into a Darwin look-alike.

I think that Dodgson addressed conflicts within the Curch of England and the related legal battles (see Essays and Reviews) in The Hunting of the Snark. One of the results of that conflict was the The Public Worship Regulation Act 1874 introduced (in the year when Carroll started to write his Snark tragicomedy) as a Private Member’s Bill by the Archbishop of Canterbury Archibald Campbell Tait. So I dug a bit into the history of this. When I saw the round features of the bishop’s face in the Wikipedia, it reminded me of the face which Holiday gave the Bellman in his first draft. Interestingly, during the young Dodgson was a pupil at Rugby School, the bishop was the headmaster of of that school. Rugby seems to have been a traumatizing experience for Dodgson.

As for the looks, Richard Bethell, 1st Baron Westbury could be another candidate for Holiday’s reference. The Wikipedia says: “Perhaps the best known of his decisions was the judgment delivering the opinion [see excerpt] of the judicial committee of the privy council in 1863 against the heretical character of certain extracts from the well-known publication Essays and Reviews.”

But also Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Wine of St. Martin’s Day (dated to the 1560s) could have provided some inspiration. However, in the 19th century the Italian(?) owner of the painting still might not have known that Bruegel made it. And I am not sure whether Henry Holiday ever saw the painting or an reproduction thereof.

 
2018-03-31, updated: 2025-03-03

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