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 with a bloody nose, which he recorded in his diary and noted that the episode left him not feeling himself for "quite sometime afterward". This attack was diagnosed as possibly "epileptiform" and Carroll himself later wrote of his "seizures" in the same diary. Most of the standard diagnostic tests of today were not available in the nineteenth century. Yvonne Hart, consultant neurologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, considered Dodgson's symptoms. Her conclusion, quoted in Jenny Woolf's 2010 "The Mystery of Lewis Carroll", is that Dodgson very likely had migraine, and may have had epilepsy, but she emphasises that she