Jabberwocky: Literary Context

Light Verse

The Victorian period in nineteenth-century England is most often remembered as a time of great stateliness and solemnity. However, the Victorian age also witnessed an outpouring of humorous writing. Prose works like The Pickwick Papers (1837) by Charles Dickens proved hugely popular, as did the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. But the most influential strand of Victorian humor appeared in verse. Writers like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll stand out for their mastery of verse forms that amused with light-hearted themes and clever wordplay. Lear, for instance, published several volumes in his Books of Nonsense series, which featured limericks and other types of poems. For his part, Carroll penned many satirical poems and nonsense verses. Among these, the best known remains “Jabberwocky,” which some scholars believe to be a nonsensical parody of an old German ballad about a shepherd who slays a mythical griffin. It’s worth noting that light verse didn’t originate in the Victorian age. For instance, Shakespeare’s plays frequently incorporate nonsense verse, often to humorous effect. Lear and Carroll also would have been familiar with various comic ballads from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite these precursors, however, light verse flourished most fully among the Victorians.

Heroic Narrative

In its account of a boy’s successful quest to slay a monster, “Jabberwocky” draws on a long and diverse lineage of heroic narrative. Broadly speaking, heroic narratives follow specially gifted protagonists as they journey forth into the unknown world, then return home upon the heroic completion of their quest. This circular narrative structure, which is commonly known as “the hero’s journey,” represents an archetype found in stories from all around the world. However, “Jabberwocky” is best understood in more specific literary contexts, such as medieval European romance. Although medieval romances did frequently feature love stories, they differed markedly from what we today call “romance.” Medieval romances tended to focus on the trials and tribulations facing knights and other noble heroes as they sought to complete quests of various kinds. The tales of King Arthur, as recounted in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), provide a good example of this genre. “Jabberwocky” must also be situated in relation to texts like the thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. That poem tells of a great hero, Beowulf, who slays a series of three monstrous foes. Although “Jabberwocky” relates to these strands of heroic narrative, it also diverges from them by adopting a mock-heroic tone.