Complete and Utter Nonsense

This two-volume selection gathers Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse and related comic pieces outside the Alice books. One volume draws on the poems of Rhyme? and Reason?, including Phantasmagoria, in which a man receives a lecture on ghostly bureaucracy, and the Longfellow parody Hiawatha's Photographing. The other includes The Hunting of the Snark, a quest poem whose crew hunts a creature that may not exist, together with extracts from Sylvie and Bruno and further light verse. The collection is mock-epic, riddle, and wordplay: a body of nineteenth-century comic poetry rather than a single narrative.

Quarter-bound in green cloth with cream pictorial paper boards. Green two-volume slipcase titled in gold.