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Phantasmagoria is a poem written by Lewis Carroll and first published in 1869 as the opening poem of a collection of verse by Carroll entitled Phantasmagoria and Other Poems. The collection was also published under the name Rhyme? And Reason? It is Lewis Carroll's longest poem. Both the poem and the collection were illustrated by A.B. Frost. "Phantasmagoria" is a narrative discussion written in seven cantos between a ghost (a Phantom) and a man named Tibbets. Carroll portrays the ghost as not so different from human beings: although ghosts may jibber and jangle their chains, they, like us, simply have a job to do and that job is to haunt. Just as in our society, in ghost society there is a hierarchy, and ghosts are answerable to the King (who must be addressed as “Your Royal Whiteness”) if they disregard the "Maxims of Behaviour”. Ghosts, our Phantom tells the narrator, fear the same things that we often fear, only sometimes in the reverse: “Allow me to remark - That ghosts has just as good a right, - In every way to fear the light, - As men to fear the dark.” 1869 collection of 26 poems, unillustrated. Phantasmagoria by Lewis Carroll was first published by Macmillan and Co., London, in 1869. Macmillan was also the publisher of the Alice in Wonderland books by Carroll. The first edition, had a blue cardboard cover with gold embossed cover illustration and edges and spine, bound by Burn & Co., Kirby Street, E.C. Cover illustrations on the original book (Morgan Library copy) represent the Crab Nebula in Taurus and Donati's Comet, "Two distinguished members of the Celestial Phantasmagoria". 1883 collection of 17 poems (also New York: Macmillan and Co., 1884), illustrated by Arthur B. Frost (new) and Henry Holiday ("The Hunting of the Snark"). One of the front pages states (quote): Of the following poems, "Echoes", "A Game of Fives", the last three of the "Four Riddles", and "Fame's Penny-Trumpet", are here published for the first time. Author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, which includes the poem "Jabberwocky", and the poem The Hunting of the Snark – all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic and fantasy. There are societies in many parts of the world dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life. Within the academic discipline of mathematics, Dodgson worked primarily in the fields of geometry, linear and matrix algebra, mathematical logic, and recreational mathematics, producing nearly a dozen books under his real name. Dodgson also developed new ideas in linear algebra (e.g., the first printed proof of the Kronecker-Capelli theorem), probability, and the study of elections (e.g., Dodgson's method) and committees; some of this work was not published until well after his death. His occupation as Mathematical Lecturer at Christ Church gave him some financial security. His mathematical work attracted renewed interest in the late 20th century. Martin Gardner's book on logic machines and diagrams and William Warren Bartley's posthumous publication of the second part of Carroll's symbolic logic book have sparked a reevaluation of Carroll's contributions to symbolic logic. Robbins' and Rumsey's investigation of Dodgson condensation, a method of evaluating determinants, led them to the Alternating Sign Matrix conjecture, now a theorem. The algorithm known as Dodgson condensation is closely related to the Schur complement and the Desnanot-Jacobi identity. The discovery in the 1990s of additional ciphers that Carroll had constructed, in addition to his "Memoria Technica", showed that he had employed sophisticated mathematical ideas in their creation.

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