Further Nonsense Verse and Prose

(From “The Whitby Gazette” of August 31, 1854)

[2] It has given the editor much pleasure to “discover” this poem and the story “Wilhelm von Schmitz” on p. 57, for since their original appearance in print seventy-two years ago neither has been published, or even quoted, and it is extremely doubtful whether more than two or three people know of their existence. So that if not “new and unpublished matter by Lewis Carroll” in fact, they are certainly so in effect—so far as every one younger than eighty is concerned! Mr. Dodgson composed them during the Oxford Long Vacation of 1854, which he spent at Whitby reading for Mathematics. He stayed at 5, East Terrace, from July 20th to September 21st. He was twenty-two at the time, and this early work from his pen, although somewhat periphrastic, gives promise, in its appreciation of the preposterous and the calculated precision of its phraseology, of the genius which was destined to make the name of Lewis Carroll immortal. The “Hilda” and the “Goliath” were local pleasure craft of the period, and the “wondrous stair” refers presumably to that steep and picturesque ascent known as “Jacob’s Ladder,” which is still a Whitby wonder.