. Illustration by
John Tenniel, 1871 A decade before the publication of ''
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the sequel Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll wrote the first stanza to what would become "Jabberwocky" while in Croft-on-Tees, where his parents resided. It was printed in 1855 in Mischmasch'', a periodical he wrote and illustrated for the amusement of his family. The piece, titled "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry", reads: The stanza is printed first in faux-mediaeval lettering as a "relic of ancient Poetry" (in which
þe is
a form of the word the) and printed again "in modern characters". The rest of the poem was written during Carroll's stay with relatives at
Whitburn, near
Sunderland. The story may have been partly inspired by the local Sunderland area legend of the
Lambton Worm and the tale of the
Sockburn Worm. The concept of nonsense verse was not original to Carroll, who would have known of
chapbooks such as
The World Turned Upside Down and stories such as "
The Grand Panjandrum". Nonsense existed in
Shakespeare's work and was well-known in the
Brothers Grimm's fairytales, some of which are called lying tales or
lügenmärchen. Biographer
Roger Lancelyn Green suggested that "Jabberwocky" was a parody of the German ballad "
The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains", which had been translated into English by Carroll's cousin
Menella Bute Smedley in 1846. Historian Sean B. Palmer suggests that Carroll was inspired by a section from Shakespeare's
Hamlet, citing the lines: "The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets" from Act I, Scene i.