174 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF LEWIS CARROLL
a copy of the "Snark," managed to get the whole poem off by heart, and insisted on reciting it from beginning to end during a long carriage- drive. Her friends, who, from the nature of the case, were unable to escape, no doubt wished that she, too, was a Boojum.
During the year, the first public dramatic repre- sentation of "Alice in Wonderland" was given at the Polytechnic, the entertainment taking the form of a series of tableaux, interspersed with appropriate readings and songs. Mr. Dodgson exercised a rigid censorship over all the ex- traneous matter introduced into the perform- ance, and put his veto upon a verse in one of the songs, in which the drowning of kittens was treated from the humorous point of view, lest the children in the audience might learn to think lightly of death in the case of the lower animals.
