religious tract to his young readers, An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves "Alice". Largely written on 5 February 1876, An Easter Greeting explores the concept of innocence and eternal life through biblical allusions and literary allusions to Romantic writers William Blake and William Wordsworth. Gardner suggests that Carroll included the tract as a way of balancing the dark tone of the poem. Scholar Selwyn Goodacre speculates that, as many copies of first-edition of the poem contain the tract, there is a possibility that all first editions originally had a copy of An Easter Greeting. Reception and legacy The first printing of The Hunting of the Snark consisted of 10,000 copies. By the conclusion of 1876, it had seen two reprints, with a total of 18,000 or 19,000 copies circulating. In total, the poem was reprinted seventeen times between 1876 and 1908. The Hunting of the Snark received largely mixed reviews from Carroll's contemporary reviewers. The Academys Andrew Lang criticised Carroll's decision to use poetry instead of prose and its too appealing title. The Athenaeum described it as "the most bewildering of modern poetry", wondering "if he has merely been inspired to reduce to idiotcy as many readers and more especially reviewers, as possible". According to Vanity Fair, Carroll's work had progressively worsened after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), with The Hunting of the Snark being the worst of his works and "not worthy [of] the name of nonsense". While The Spectator wrote that the poem's final line had the potential to become a proverb, it criticised the poem as "a failure" that might have succeeded with more work from the author. The Saturday Review wrote that the poem offered "endless speculation" as to the true identity of the Snark, although the unnamed reviewer felt that the familiar nature of Carroll's nonsense weakened its effect for the reader. Conversely, The Graphic praised the poem as a welcome departure from the Alice books, and called it "a glorious piece of nonsense", that could appeal to all Alice fans. "The Hunting of the Snark" has in common some elements with Carroll's other works. It shares its author's love of puns on the word "fit" with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and mentions of "candle-ends" and "toasted cheese" with his supernatural poem Phantasmagoria. Additionally all three works include the number "42". Another of Carroll's children's novels, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) makes a