Beware the Jabberwock my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!…

…One! Two! One! Two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snick!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

He chortled in his joy…

I can distinctly remember (and it might have been my first literary memory) that, apart from the backwards poem above, I thought Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-glass rather silly. It was about a not very pleasant girl (possibly an inspiration to Rosely) who went to a ridiculous place and babbled nonsense with some rather dumb strange critters. Little did I know that about four decades later, it would become one of the twelve most influential books I ever read. Oddly, I did remember every part of it—Eat Me and Drink Me proportions, Mad Hatter tea parties, the works, but that was probably the result of radio serialisations, pantomimes—real ones and on television later—and several movies, all of which were pretty bad except for Disney's animation. Great actors trying to be those weird creatures was usually just plain ghastly.
    Yet, when I came to read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as an adult, there was not a single surprise left in there for me. I could even imitate Carroll’s style before I read him. It was the best and most influential book I never read.

   But there were very few nights indeed that, in my dreams, I did not go out and slay the Jabberwocky.