Charles Darwin

The Bellman and Charles Darwin.

As for Darwin’s beard see also: Charles Darwin’s wild whiskers in From Charles Darwin’s beard to George Eliot’s right hand: 4 famous Victorian bodily quirks

In an early preparatory draft, the Bellman had a quite different face. Henry Holiday later used that face (an Oxford colleague?) in another illustration.
 

2017-08-27, updated: 2022-10-31

Waistcoat Poetry

 

There was an old man of Port Grigor,
Whose actions were noted for vigour;
He stood on his head
till his waistcoat turned red,
That eclectic old man of Port Grigor.

Edward Lear, 1872

 

He was black in the face,
and they scarcely could trace
The least likeness to what he had been:
While so great was his fright
that his waistcoat turned white –
A wonderful thing to be seen!

Lewis Carroll, from “The Hunting of the Snark”, 1876

 
 

Martin Gardner annotated (MG058) to The Hunting of the Snark that Elizabeth Sewell pointed out in The Field of Nonsense (1952) that a line in Carroll’s poem has a similarity to a line in a limerick by Edward Lear.

See also:



In The Field of Nonsense (I use a 2015 reprint), Elizabeth Sewell compared Carroll’s waistcoat stanza and Lears’s waistcoat limerick while taking a safe distance to considering “mutual plagiarism” by stating that “there is no evidence that either man was familiar with the other’s work”, adding that “the likeness do not in any case suggest borrowings…” (p. 9). However, Carroll/Dodgson knew Lear’s work (Marco Graziosi), and borrowing isn’t necessarily evil.

 
2017-09-11, update: 2022-10-24

Benjamin Jowett


Image sources: (1, 4) Henry Holiday, (2) probably by The Autotype Company, after Désiré François Laugée, (3) from cover of Benjamin Jowett and the Christian Religion by Peter Hinchliff.

[…]
Need I rehearse the history of Jowett?
I need not, Senior Censor, for you know it.
That was the Board Hebdomadal, and oh!
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow!
[…]

C.L. Dodgson, from Notes by an Oxford chiel (1874)

 
For comparison (inspired by Dodgson?):

First come I. My name is J-W-TT.
There’s no knowledge but I know it.
I am Master of this College,
What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

Source: The Balliol Rhymes (written in the 1880s), ed. W. G. Hiscock, 2nd edn. (1939; Oxford: printed for the editor, 1955): 1-25. PN 6110 C7H5 Robarts Library (Wikipedia: In 1880, seven undergraduates of Balliol published 40 quatrains of doggerel lampooning various members of the college under the title The Masque of B–ll––l, now better known as The Balliol Masque, in a format that came to be called the “Balliol rhyme“.The college authorities suppressed the publication fiercely.)

I suggest that The Barrister’s Dream in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark is about E.B. Pusey’s attempt to trial Jowett for heresy at the Vice-Chancellor’s Court for unpaid bills for heresy. According to Karen Gardiner (see p. 55 below), the trial began on 1863-03-20. The judge was an academic common lawyer. Jowett’s lawyer objected to the formally civilian court being turned into something like a court of common law, which had no jurisdiction in spiritual matters. The Punch (the anonymous author Dodgson?) called it the “small debts and heresies court“. The judge disagreed, provided it could be shown that Jowett had been guilty of breaking any of the university statues. As this could not be shown, the case was dismissed. Thus, the trial was a mess like the trial in the Barrister’s dream.

“In the matter of Treason the pig would appear
      To have aided, but scarcely abetted:
While the charge of Insolvency fails, it is clear,
      If you grant the plea ‘never indebted.’

 
See also:
※ Lewis Carroll, «Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.» in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
※ Lewis Carroll, «The New Method of Evaluation as applied to π», 1865
※ John Tufail, The Jowett Controversy, 2010 (document creation date)
※ Karen Gardiner, Escaping Justice in Wonderland (An adaption of a paper given at the Glasgow International Fantasy Conference 2018), published in The Carrollian No. 33 p. 47 ~ 60, March 2020 (abstract, 2018).
Essays and Reviews

 
Instagram | Reddit

2018-05-03, update: 2022-10-17

The Beaver’s Lesson

The Butcher reasoning with the Beaver.

This is the illustration (partially inspired by various works of other artists) to the chapter The Beaver’s Lesson.

 


Images:

 
2017-09-26, updated: 2022-09-04

A Double Rule of Three

He thought he saw a Garden-Door
 That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
 A Double Rule of Three:
‘And all its mystery,’ he said,
 ‘Is clear as day to me!’

Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

 
After going in the wrong direction for a while, I understood that this is not about applying the Bellman’s Rule twice. I think that Lewis Carroll (like Charles T. Brooks) quite probably referred to cross multiplication.Rule of Three

Then again, I am not shure whether the direction which I took was that wrong. Carroll could have used Double Rule of Three with a double meaning:
※ the extension to the rule of three for cross-multiplication and
※ the double application of the Bellman’s rule.

More on the Rule of Three: Alfred Crowquill (pen name of Alfred Henry Forrester), Comic Arithmetic, London 1843, p. 96

 
2022-05-31, updated: 2022-06-12   (MG007)

Thing-um-a-jig!

He would answer to “Hi!” or to any loud cry,
  Such as “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!”
To “What-you-may-call-um!” or “What-was-his-name!”
  But especially “Thing-um-a-jig!”

Always assumed that thingamajig derived from Lewis Carroll’s thing-um-a-jig (1876).

I’d seen an oft cited but unsourced reference to 1824 in dictionaries but now found it: June 1824 issue of The Casket a literary monthly “all the cute and curious thingumajigs of the Old Colony.”

— Sandy Slynn (@Sandy_Slynn) February 17, 2020

See also: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thingamajig and www.etymonline.com/search?q=thingamajig.

2020-02-25, update: 2022-04-19

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.”

 
2018-03-31, updated: 2022-01-22

Snark Assemblage


Here I inserted (2012-08-18) details from Henry Holiday’s Snark illustrations to the 1st Snark fit into Thomas Landseer’s illustration.

You can use the assemblage in compliance with license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Main artists: Conrad Martens & Thomas Landseer, Henry Holiday & Joseph Swain.

more | search “SnarkAssemblage”

 
2017-09-23, update: 2021-12-29

What – me worry?


Source for “Alfred E. Neuman”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mad30.jpg

After a Butcher/Jowett comparison I run into a page published by a certain “Arthur Neuendorffer“. (Art perhaps is in Oxford what “Alois Kabelschacht” is in room 354 of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.) Art discovered a resemblance between Henry Holiday’s depiction of The Butcher in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Alfred E. Neuman. He wrote: “When Mad Magazine was sued for copyright infringement, one defense it used was that it had copied the picture from materials dating back to 1911.” Incidentially, my first copy of the The Hunting of the Snark was an American edition published in 1911.

 
It seems, though, that Alfred E. Neuman and the Butcher are quite distant relatives:

2020-02-19, update: 2021-11-17

The Bard

 

Bycatch (found in 2013) from my Snark hunt:

more | John Tufail

2017-09-26, update: 2021-08-26

Holiday’s Butcher and Millais’ Raleigh

But perhaps Holiday’s ruff – and the pose of the Fit Five drawing – was inspired by the Elizabethan drama inherent in Millais’ Boyhood of Raleigh, (1869).

Louise Schweitzer, One Wild Flower (2012)

If you want to be on the safe side, just claim that the meaning of the Snark is elusive. But to the more courageous readers I recommend Louise Schweitzer’s doctoral thesis One Wild Flower.

 
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2017-09-04, update: 2021-03-05

“Thought to be based on Gheeraert’s iconoclasm image”

Message to the Public Domain Review (2019-10-10): You are using my comparison (from December 2008) without proper referencing. This was my first discovery of one of Henry Holiday’s allusions. This finding started my Snark hunt. I think that Public Domain Review should specify the source (my proposal).

(February 2021: Now there is a link “thought by some” in publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-art-of-hidden-faces-anthropomorphic-landscapes)

Image (2019-10-10) from https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-art-of-hidden-faces-anthropomorphic-landscapes#17-0:

Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder’s allegory of iconoclasm, ca.1566 — Source.

The next picture is an illustration by Henry Holiday for Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. The face hidden in the darkness of the trees is thought to be based on Geheert’s iconoclasm image above.

The tenth of Henry Holiday’s original illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, 1876 — Source.


By the way, it’s not “the 10th” of Henry Holiday’s original illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. Holiday contributed only nine (not ten) illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark and two illustrations for the book cover. The Ocean Chart probably had been made by a typesetter, not by Henry Holiday.

And there are various way’s to write Gheeraert’s name. 😉

For discussion: Twitter | Flickr 2009

 
2019-10-10, updated: 2021-02-18

Seven Coats

021     There was one who was famed for the number of things
022         He forgot when he entered the ship:
023     His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,
024         And the clothes he had bought for the trip.

025     He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,
026         With his name painted clearly on each:
027     But, since he omitted to mention the fact,
028         They were all left behind on the beach.

029     The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
030         He had seven coats on when he came,
031     With three pairs of boots–but the worst of it was,
032         He had wholly forgotten his name.

 
more

 
2018-06-13, update: 2020-03-20

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