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"Jabberwocky" is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named "the Jabberwock". It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The book tells of Alice's adventures within the back-to-front world of Looking-glass world. In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, Alice finds a book written in a seemingly unintelligible language. Realising that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems and reads the reflected verse of "Jabberwocky". She finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape. "Jabberwocky" is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English. Its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neologisms such as "galumphing" and "chortle". A decade before the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll wrote the first stanza to what would become "Jabberwocky" while in Croft-on-Tees, where his parents resided. It was printed in 1855 in Mischmasch, a periodical he wrote and illustrated for the amusement of his family. The piece, titled "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry", reads: Twas bryllyg, and þe slythy toves Did gyre and gymble in þe wabe: All mimsy were þe borogoves; And þe mome raths outgrabe. The stanza is printed first in faux-mediaeval lettering as a "relic of ancient Poetry" (in which þe is a form of the word the) and printed again "in modern characters". The rest of the poem was written during Carroll's stay with relatives at Whitburn, near Sunderland. The story may have been partly inspired by the local Sunderland area legend of the Lambton Worm and the tale of the Sockburn Worm. The concept of nonsense verse was not original to Carroll, who would have known of chapbooks such as The World Turned Upside Down and stories such as "The Grand Panjandrum".

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Related concepts (11)

Neologism

In linguistics, a neologism (niːˈɒlədʒɪzəm; also known as a coinage) is any relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that nevertheless has achieved popular or institutional recognition, and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered a neologism once it is published in a dictionary. Neologisms are one facet of lexical innovation, i.e. linguistic phenomena that introduce new terms and meanings into a language's lexicon.

Jabberwocky

Literary nonsense

Literary nonsense (or nonsense literature) is a broad categorization of literature that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning. Even though the most well-known form of literary nonsense is nonsense verse, the genre is present in many forms of literature. The effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it. Its humor is derived from its nonsensical nature, rather than wit or the "joke" of a punch line.