Career
lieutenant was Gertrude who inspired his great nonsense mock-epic The Hunting of the Snark (1876), and the book is dedicated to her, and opens with a poem that uses her name as a double acrostic. Carroll first became friends with Gertrude in 1875, when she was aged nine and he was forty-three, while on holiday at the English seaside resort of Sandown. He made a number of pen and ink sketches of Gertrude as a young girl.
He continued to correspond with her, and to spend numerous seaside holidays with her, including several when she was in her late twenties.
