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The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

 

            The poem I chose for this assignment is "The Jabberwocky," by Lewis Carroll. According to The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, whose pen-name was Lewis Carroll was a very well-known author during the Victorian Era. He was born in 1832 and was the third of eleven children. He and his siblings were mostly home schooled so Dodgson helped keep himself and his siblings entertained with stories and drawings he contributed to a family magazine. Dodgson enjoyed making up stories for children, three such children being Alice Liddell and her sisters, which is whom "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" were created for. After a very brief life spent enchanting children and their parents with fantastical tales about scary Jabberwocky's and disappearing cats, Carroll succumbed to bronchitis in 1898 (858-859). .
             "The Jabberwocky," which was written in 1872, and is one of Carroll's most well-known works, is about a boy whose father warns him about the horrible beasts that live in the forest. The boys decides to go into the forest and confront the worst beast within, which is the Jabberwocky. He fights the beast and cuts off its head, then takes it home to his father. His father is overjoyed that the boy killed the beast and celebrates his kill. This poem appeared within a book Carroll wrote, "Through the Looking Glass." In this story, Alice looks down on a table and sees a book with this poem, but all the writing is backwards. This is actually a good way to look at Wonderland, as a backwards place, where the abnormal is the norm. Where else would you have a smoking caterpillar and a cat who can fly and disappear? This gives the reader an idea of Carroll having a very vivid imagination, which you need when writing children's stories. After the class discussion on this poem, it was noticeable that there may be a different meaning to each reader.


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