Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky

Zalben, Jane Breskin

4.13

2,299 ratings by Goodreads

9781563970801: Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky

ISBN 10: 1563970805 ISBN 13: 9781563970801

Publisher: Boyds Mills Press, 1992

Full-color paintings recreate the motley Jabberwock and his array of bizarre acquaintances, and are accompanied by an unusual commentary on the poem by the literary critic Humpty Dumpty

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About the Author:

Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), who taught mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. He is the author of two classic stories of children’s literature: ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND and THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE. These books contain many of his most popular poems, including "Jabber-wocky," "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and "You are old, father William."
Joel Stewart studied at Falmouth College of Art, graduating with a degree in illustration. He is also the illustrator of THE ADVENTURES OF A NOSE by Viviane Schwarz. He says, "Carroll’s language is so rich that it’s a joy to depict just a few of the curious ideas it conjures up. As Alice herself says after reading it, ‘Somehow it fills my head with ideas - only I don’t know exactly what they are.’ "

From School Library Journal:

PreSchool-Grade 4-Carroll's classic nonsense poem gets a fresh visual interpretation here. In a series of spreads, a child mounts his quest for the fearsome Jabberwock in an "other" world in keeping with the delicious unknown conjured up on first hearing, "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves-." After a glimpse of the hero, the real world shows up in the form of facing oval frames-one containing the poem, the other a Victorian father-and-son read-aloud scene. But from then on, with a few lines of the poem per page, children enter a spare landscape of rattan-printed trees, postage-stamp-sized art, and full-color ink-and-watercolor creatures whose simple, almost cartoonish look echoes Edward Lear's comic sketches. The uncluttered composition of these pages leaves plenty of room for Carroll's words to do their work. Printed in uppercase, in a faintly rune-ish serif typeface, they gyre and gimble, whiffle and burble cleanly across the page. Stewart has not paid precise attention to Humpty Dumpty's explication of the poem as it originally appears in Through the Looking-Glass, but he has captured that wordmeister's affinity for conglomeration and arbitrary meaning, creating his own odd creatures to inhabit Carroll's perfect peculiarities. The slightly removed tone is maintained by a climactic twist: when the vorpal blade snicker-snacks "through and through," the beast's innards are revealed to be mechanical-clockwork springs and gears. Other illustrated editions worth considering-Graeme Base's (Abrams, 1989) signature packed pages or Jane Breskin Zalben's (Warne, 1977; o.p.) delicately detailed watercolors-hew more closely to Humpty Dumpty's definitions, but this new version is a good choice for a younger audience, nicely conveying the lighthearted mysteriousness of the poem.
Nancy Palmer, The Little School, Bellevue, WA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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