The Hunting of the Snark of prose and its too appealing title. "The Athenaeum" described it as "the most bewildering of modern poetry," wondering "if he has merely been inspired to reduce to idiotcy as many readers and more especially reviewers, as possible." According to "Vanity Fair", Carroll's work had progressively worsened after "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), with "The Hunting of the Snark" being the worst of his works and "not worthy [of] the name of nonsense". While "The Spectator" wrote that the poem's final line had the potential to become a proverb, it criticised the poem as "a failure" that might have succeeded
Lewis Carroll: A Biography intimate woman-friends that Dodgson had through his life, yet still concludes that his existence revolved exclusively around friendships with small girls!" Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone in "The Alice Companion: A Guide to Lewis Carroll's Alice Books" (1998) criticises the book for what they say is a poor treatment of Carroll's involvement in controversies at the University of Oxford. Megan Harlan in "Entertainment Weekly" writes that "This beautifully written bio never shies away from the house-of-mirrors complexity of its subject." An issue of "Victorian Studies" reported that there were issues with inconsistent references. Miles Edward Friend compares Cohen's