Book description
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the
wabe...' wrote Lewis Carroll, author of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking Glass
, in his wonderfully playful poem of nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky'. This
new edition collects together the marvellous range of Carroll's poetry,
including nonsense verse, parodies, burlesques, and more. Alongside the
title piece are such enduringly wonderful pieces as 'The Walrus and the
Carpenter', 'The Mock Turtle's Song', 'Father William' and many more.
Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ
Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in
1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took
deacon's orders, but shyness and a stammer prevented him from seeking
the priesthood. His most famous works, Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872),
were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of
his college. Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis in 1898.
Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus of English at the
University of Cambridge and past President of Clare Hall College. She
is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of
Literature. Among her works are Darwin's Plots (1983; third
edition, 2009), George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past:
Essays in Narrative
from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Open Fields: Science in
Cultural
Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996).
