Lewis Carroll, Henry Holiday and Joseph Swain's Tragicomedy
※ La Chasse Au Snark (studio version, 1968, 15:53)
※ Sa Triste Histoire Il S’Offrit à Dire (live version, 1969, 15:49)
※ Car Le Jubjub Etait Un Boojum, Voyez-Vous (Happening At La Vieille Grille 1967-8/Biennale de Paris 1971, 16:54)
※ Survint Un Silence Suprême (live version, 1968, 20:12)
Cover illustration: Tove Jansson
Links: jazzmusicarchives | YouTube
Sadly, it’s not online anymore.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06sbrxh/clips (2020-01-02):
Tony Robinson narrates this fresh adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic masterpiece following a strange assortment of characters on their quest for an elusive beast.
Led by a bell-ringing Captain, this motley crew must brave terrifying danger in their chaotic pursuit of a creature known as Snark. Accompanied by specially composed music and songs, this surreal tale questions whether anything is really what it seems. …
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2015.
Streaming: 2020-01-02 – 2020-01-31
Credits:
– Narrator: Tony Robinson
– Bellman: Eric Potts
– Baker: Paul Barnhill
– Butcher: Everal A Walsh
– Barrister: Jonathan Keeble
– Snark (in the Barrister’s dream): Jonathan Keeble
– Beaver: Stephen Hoyle
– Music and songs (composer): Katie Chatburn
– Music (performers):
– Katie Chatburn
– Dorry Macaulay
– Kathryn Williams
– Stephen Cordiner
– Jasper Wilkinson
– Director: Charlotte Riches
– Author: Lewis Carroll
2020-01-02, update: 2020-05-15
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.
2018-06-13, update: 2020-03-20
This is the first page published in snrk.de, a blog which was set up in 2017. It’s mostly about Lewis Carroll‘s, Henry Holiday‘s and Joseph Swain‘s illustrations to The Hunting of the Snark.
In his Illuminated Snark, John Tufail assumed that the night sky in the front cover of The Hunting of the Snark could be a map. Together with my assumption that Henry Holiday drew inspiration from several paintings by Marcus Gheeraerts (I+II), John’s paper helped me to find the Ditchley Portrait. That again helped me to find the painting by an unknown artist depicting Elizabeth I at old age.
2017-08-28, update: 2020-02-27
https://bookbarnbbi.wordpress.com/2017/12/01/pick-of-the-darwin-room/:
[…] When [The Hunting of the Snark] was published in 1876 it was illustrated by Henry Holiday who, though a very talented artist, failed to capture the surreal nature of Carroll’s poem. The illustrations for this edition however, provided by Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake, are the perfect accompaniment. Peake’s drawings have an uneasy bubbling quality, blending with the silly and macabre feel of the words […]
Nothing against Mervyn Peake’s illustrations, but already this illustration (even without the yellow lines and dots which I added) might contain more elements of “surreal nature” than what you find in Mervyn Peake’s illustrations. I like those playful weeds (or animals?) in the lower left corner of Holiday’s illustration.
That’s not the only thing which that corner has to offer.
Another popular path (not) to understand The Hunting of the Snark has been stated more than three times: Some call Carroll’s poem “nonsense”. It isn’t.
Anyway, I don’t think that Holiday failed to convey to us graphically what Carroll meant. The price for his achievement perhaps was that Holiday’s illustrations are less eye pleasing than illustrations like Peake’s.
Holiday’s illustrations are as grotesque as Carroll’s poem.
2018-02-16, updated: 2020-02-01
There is one giant fact we continue to to to chase down, there is one illus like the the Hunting of the the Snark or or or or or the quest the answer to Fermat’s last theorem or the riddle of the Sphinx or the Bermuda Triangle er er er er the one the feel we feel the er the er the one fact that we wish to discover the one hard crouton fact that we search for in the minestrone of the Labour Party.
A Billiard-marker, whose skill was immense,
Might perhaps have won more than his share—
But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,
Had the whole of their cash in his care.
The Times announces that Liddell of Westminster is to be the new Dean: the selection does not seem to have given much satisfaction in the college.
Quote: C.L. Dodgson, 1855-06-07, @DodgsonDiaries on Twitter
2017-08-28, updated: 2019-06-08
In this image one of the elements has been marked (orange frame) which Henry Holiday borrowed from a 17th century painting (by an anonymous artist). This might be a bit different from the borrowing described by T. S. Eliot in 1920. In the example shown here, the borrowing of the pictorial allusion is inconspicuous. It doesn’t enrich Holiday’s illustration. It’s only purpose might be that of a signpost pointing to another work of art.
more.
2017-09-27, update: 2019-02-25
2017-11-25, update: 2019-02-06
A Snark article in the Knight Letter
(with lots of help from the editors Chris Morgan and Mark Burstein)
Source: Knight Letter (ISSN 0193-886X), Fall 2017, Number 99
When I wrote this article, I failed to mention that already in 1973 Elizabeth Sewell pointed out in The Field of Nonsense that a line in Carroll’s poem has a similarity to a line in a limerick by Edward Lear (MG058). I am sorry for not having mentioned that.
I posted my article online with permission of the Knight Letter editors. In the online copy, I fixed the wrong URL kl.snr.de. It’s kl.snrk.de. Furthermore, four additional images have been attached to my online version.
2018-02-09, update: 2018-12-30: Reference to Elizabeth Sewell
2018-12-30, updated: 2022-08-01
See also: http://www.chinchin-records.com/bajka—in-wonderland
If you get the complete album, then you also have the original poem being sung to you.
Even while the blinding bandage lies,
Daughter of a Judge, upon thine eyes,
If the scales thou wield with care
Truth and Justice will declare
Hunting Snarks is innocent and wise!
Inscribed (1876-09-02) with an allusion to Justicia by Lewis Carroll into an edition (now owned by NYU) of The Hunting of the Snark owned by Charlotte Edith Denman, daughter of George Denman.
Source of the acrostic poem:
Rare, Uncollected, Unpublished & Nonexistent Verse of Lewis Carroll, Collected and Annoted by August A. Imholz, Jr. & Edward Wakeling, p. 30, LCSNA 2018, ISBN 978-0-930326-11-1.
The book is available to LCSNA members only.
by Mary Hammond, published on Nov 7, 2017. There also is an essay: Mary Hammond, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark Explained.
Mary Hammond’s interpretation of course is not the first Snark interpretation. First hints on what the Snark could be about had been given to us by Henry Holiday and Philo M. Buck. And there is an excellent chapter on Carroll’s tragicomedy in Louise Schweitzer’s One Wild Flower. Oliver Sturm’s Die Jagd nach dem Schnatz is a German translation, which also contains an attempt to explain the Snark. And there is a Snark chapter in Klaus Reichert’s Lewis Carroll: Studien zum literarischen Unsinn. Reichert is another German Snark translator.
Among the interpretations known to me, Mary Hammond’s interpretation is the first one where Eternal Damnation is seen as one of the more important issues to which Lewis Carroll might have taken reference in The Hunting of the Snark. In Carroll’s poem, the Baker‘s Forty-Two Boxes led me to the same conclusion earlier.
In my correspondence with Mary Hammond (a pen ame of Mary Hibbs) she also told me about what in her view “…jum” in Boojum could stand for: Search for jumble in the chapter Of Reason in John Locke‘s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).
I too associate Boojum with the vanishing of reason – which too often is the beginning of violence. Yet, I’ll probably never know, whether my association is similar to what the Boojum meant to Carroll.
549 “It’s a Snark!” was the sound that first came to their ears,
550 And seemed almost too good to be true.
551 Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
552 Then the ominous words “It’s a Boo-”553 Then, silence. Some fancied they heard in the air
554 A weary and wandering sigh
555 That sounded like “-jum!” but the others declare
556 It was only a breeze that went by.
My publications:
※ Knight Letter № 99: Nose is a Nose is a Nose
※ Knight Letter № 100: Burning the Baker
There now is a new paperback edition of Untangling the Knot: An Analysis of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, 2019-10-06, by Sandra Mann (besides Mary Hammond another pen name of Mary Hibbs). She also sent me an additional article about a possible reference to Bishop Reginal Heber (1783-1826). See also: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lewiscarrollresources/permalink/2241199999492366/
2020-02-12: Untangling the Knot in PDF, 2018
2017-11-17, updated: 2018-12-02.
Interview posted by David Baker 66 on 2018-08-31
Dr. Amy Green – “The Hunting Of The Snark” – ROI Show 279
The “ROI” team welcomes Dr. Amy Green to discuss “The Hunting Of The Snark.”
“It is in some way serious.” (07:17)
Yes, it is: snrk.de/knight-letter-100.
See also:
MusicWeb international, by Gary Higginson:
Douglas YOUNG (b.1947)
The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits)
Narrator – Peter Easton
Douglas Young – Piano and Percussion
The Leicestershire Chorale and Members of the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra/Peter Fletcher
rec. Bosworth College, Desford, 14 March 1982
CAMEO CLASSICS CC9106 [53.21]What is so marvellous is how well the young instrumental musicians at the time, played and clearly reacted to the music (their names are listed in the booklet) and my colleague at the time on MusicWeb, John Whitmore, is quoted as saying “the playing is good absolute rather than good considering”, I can’t improve on those words.
The booklet contains the original, Monty Python type, illustrations you find in any good copy of the poem, by Henry Holiday (d.1927) as well as the complete Carroll text and biographies of the performers but no composer’s note on the work.
Mounty Python type! I like that.
Besides Lewis Carroll’s textual allusions and Henry Holiday’s pictorial allusions, I now also found a piece with musical allusions. Accompanying the Bellman’s “That English is what you speak” with Greensleeves is clear, whereas I don’t know whether Young meant to allude to Schnittke when I heared Schnittke. Then again, to choose Silent Night to accompany the Baker’s gruesome end is wonderfully naughty.
As far as I know, this recording is in the market since 2014. From MusicWeb it received three reviews, with Paul Corfield Godfrey‘s review inbetween Whitmore‘s and Higginson‘s reviews. As a layman I would like to add to these that if I ever would dare to try to learn The Hunting of the Snark by heart, I would use this recording to help me memorizing the text.
Remark: The links in the quoted text from MusicWeb had been added in snrk.de and were not part of the original text.
Media data: Libraries Australia
