The "Answer"

I read Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark for the first time recently and came across this curious footnote:

From Fit the Third: The Baker's Tale
"The skipping of 40 years puts the Baker in his early forties. Carroll began writing the Snark in 1874 when he was 42. Could the Baker be Carroll himself? J.A. Lindon suggests that the Baker's 42 boxes (Fit 1: page 48, line 9) are perhaps intended to represent Carroll's 42 years. Each box bore the Baker's name and all were left behind when he joined the Snark-hunting expedition. Note also the mention of Rule 42 in Carroll's preface, and the King's remarks at the trial of the Knave of Hearts (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12), 'Rule Forty-two. All persons more than a mile high to leave the court.' Curiously, Carroll refers to his age as 42 in his poem Phantasmagoria (Canto 1, Stanza 16) though at the time this poem was written he was still in his thirties. The number 42 certainly seems to have had some sort of special significance for Carroll."

Of course, the logical conclusion is that Douglas Adams may have been influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by Carroll's works. However, what if the opposite is true? Is it not possible that a copy of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fell through a wormhole, ending up in Carroll's hands? And disintegrated shortly thereafter, of course, so as not to disrupt the time continuum. Hmmm.



Current mood: Speculative
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