1876 Rare First Edition - The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll, Illustrated
An attractive first edition of Lewis Carroll’s great nonsense poem, retaining Henry Holiday’s remarkable pictorial cloth binding and complete with all nine of his celebrated illustrations.
Author: Lewis Carroll. Illustrated by Henry Holiday.
Title: The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony, in Eight Fits.
Publisher: London: Macmillan and Co., 1876.
Edition: First Edition.
Language: Text in English.
Pages: xi, 83 pages, followed by publisher’s advertisements.
Size: 7.5 x 5 inches.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s pictorial cream cloth binding, elaborately decorated in black after designs by Henry Holiday, with the dramatic shipboard scene to the front cover and the “Wasty Waste” buoy design to the rear. Black-coated endpapers and all edges gilt. The cloth has mellowed to an attractive warm cream and shows expected age toning, light soiling and rubbing, with some wear and fraying at the head of the spine and extremities, as shown. The pictorial decoration remains remarkably strong and distinctive, and the binding is firm. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good. Complete, firmly bound and generally clean, with scattered foxing and age toning, principally to the preliminary leaves and title page, as shown. Several contemporary or early ownership inscriptions appear on the preliminary leaves. The illustrated leaves and text remain well preserved.
Illustrations: Complete with nine illustrations by Henry Holiday, including the frontispiece and the celebrated completely blank “Ocean-Chart,” one of the most famous visual jokes in Victorian literature.
Estimate: USD $500–600.
The book: First published in 1876, The Hunting of the Snark is one of Lewis Carroll’s most inventive works outside the Alice books. Subtitled An Agony, in Eight Fits, the poem follows an eccentric expedition consisting of such figures as the Bellman, the Baker, the Barrister, the Beaver and the Butcher as they voyage into strange territory in pursuit of the elusive Snark. Carroll’s intricate wordplay, mock logic and deliberate absurdities conceal a work that has invited generations of interpretations, from pure nonsense to philosophical allegory.
The book is also one of the most visually memorable collaborations in Victorian literature. Henry Holiday’s illustrations and elaborate pictorial binding perfectly complement Carroll’s strange imaginary world, while the famously blank map provided by the Bellman remains perhaps the ultimate expression of Carrollian logic. First editions retaining the original decorated cloth and all nine illustrations are particularly desirable.
The author: Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was an English mathematician, logician, photographer and writer whose extraordinary imagination transformed Victorian children’s literature. His Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass combined fantasy, parody, mathematics and linguistic play in ways that continue to fascinate both children and scholars.
With The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll pushed nonsense literature into still stranger territory, constructing an elaborate mock heroic quest around an essentially unknowable creature. The poem’s language, characters and enigmatic ending have helped make it one of the enduring classics of nineteenth-century imaginative literature.
The illustrator: Henry Holiday (1839–1927) was an English painter, stained-glass designer, sculptor and illustrator closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite artistic world. Carroll personally selected Holiday to illustrate The Hunting of the Snark, and the two corresponded extensively over the imagery.
Holiday produced nine illustrations for the book as well as the designs used for its celebrated pictorial cloth binding. His blend of meticulous Victorian draftsmanship, theatrical expression and surreal humour became inseparable from Carroll’s poem and helped make the first edition one of the most recognizable illustrated books of the period.