SOURCE: "Comic Ballads in the Drawing Room," in The Victorian Popular Ballad, Rowman and Littlefield, 1975, pp. 203-50.

In the following excerpt, Bratton argues that Carroll's work has origins in the Victorian Popular Ballad form.

…. By the middle of the [nineteenth] century the comic ballad world was … established as the domain of the writers who served the middle-class end of the popular audience, and it was adaptable to cater for their tastes and needs in a variety of ways. Two writers then emerged as supreme in whose work, in very different ways, this promise was fulfilled. There was on the one hand Lewis Carroll, who published his first book of comic verse Phantasmagoria in 1869 and The Hunting of the Snark in 1876, whose work took the comic ballad into the realm of fantasy and escapism, developing it into an art as abstract and devoid of direct relevance as it could...