The Hunting of the Snark

A ship's crew sets out to hunt the Snark, a creature no one has ever described clearly, led by a Bellman whose map of the ocean is perfectly blank. The crew all have names beginning with B: a Baker who has forgotten his own name, a Butcher who can only kill beavers, a Banker, a Barrister and a Beaver who makes lace. The danger, they are warned, is that the Snark might turn out to be a Boojum.

Published in 1876 as 'an agony in eight fits', this is Lewis Carroll's longest nonsense poem, and people have argued about its meaning ever since, which is exactly the joke. It is great fun read aloud. For more of Carroll's nonsense verse, see Through the Looking-Glass.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), a shy mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, who was also a deacon, a pioneering photographer and the author of books on logic. On a boat trip in July 1862 he made up a story for the three daughters of the college dean, and ten-year-old Alice Liddell asked him to write it down.

The result, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, followed by Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark, changed children's books forever with nonsense, wordplay and logic games that delight adults as much as children.