The Hunting of the Snark Becker Lennon, the poem's "motif of loss of name or identity" is typical of Carroll's work. Richard Kelly writes that the poem contains a "theme of annihilation." Furthermore, Edward Guiliano feels that the "Snark" is within the nonsense tradition of Thomas Hood and, especially, W. S. Gilbert, the librettist of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan team. According to him, a case can be made for a direct influence of Gilbert's Bab Ballads on "The Hunting of the Snark", based on the fact that Carroll was well-acquainted with the comic writing and the theatre of his age. In response to various
Lewis Carroll early version of what today is known as Scrabble. He appears to have invented – or at least certainly popularized – the "doublet" (see word ladder), a form of brain-teaser that is still popular today, changing one word into another by altering one letter at a time, each successive change always resulting in a genuine word. For instance, CAT is transformed into DOG by the following steps: CAT, COT, DOT, DOG. The games and puzzles of Lewis Carroll were the subject of Martin Gardner's March 1960 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Other items include a rule for finding the