The Hunting of The Snark - The Illustrations

The Illustrations

A related debate is to what extent Holiday's illustrations should be considered when analyzing the poem. Oliver Sturm, who translated Carroll's ballad into German, assumes: "Carroll's productivity seems to have been strongly determined by the rhythm of the illustrations delivered ." Opponents claim that they deviate from the text in a number of places (for example, the Baker is supposed to have whiskers and hair, Fit the Fourth, but in the illustrations he is bald) and hence should be discounted. Others claim they were prepared with great cooperation from Carroll, and that the correspondence of letters can tell his opinion of each. Thus it would seem that Lewis Carroll did not intend care and hope from the repeating stanza to stand for two women, but was quite pleased with the interpretation after the fact. Contrariwise, Carroll suppressed an illustration of the Boojum itself, since he wanted the monster to remain undescribed (none of its features described in Fit the Third are physical).

As a Pre-Raphaelite illustrator, Holiday took reference to earlier artists and earlier styles, where allegorical figures (often women) depicted abstract concepts like care, hope, religion, liberty etc.

It has been suggested that the character identified as "Care" below is really the ship's figurehead (as shown in the first illustration), and that "Hope" is actually the Boots. Andrew Lang, who reviewed the book in 1876, suggested that "Hope" might be the Bonnet-maker. However, a shadowy figure making bonnets can be seen on the ship in the second illustration.

Other hands have been responsible for providing illustrations for Carroll's text, among them Mervyn Peake (1941), Tove Jansson (1959) and Ralph Steadman (1975).