George Edward Farrow born in Ipswich

Ipswich

Ipswich is a large town and a non-metropolitan district. It is the county town of Suffolk, England. Ipswich is located on the estuary of the River Orwell...

 in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, was a noted British

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 children's book author and man of mystery.

Educated in London and America, during his career Farrow wrote more than thirty books for children. He encouraged his young readers to write to him, answered their letters, and let their tastes and opinions guide his future works (rather like his American contemporary L. Frank Baum

L. Frank Baum

Lyman Frank Baum was an American author of children's books, best known for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...

). Though he wrote adventure tales and poetry, Farrow was best known for his nonsense books written in the tradition of Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...

's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures...

, especially his Wallypug series, including:

• The Wallypug of Why
  The Wallypug of Why
  The Wallypug of Why is an 1895 children's novel by G. E. Farrow. The book is an exercise in humorous nonsense, rich in wordplay and absurd situations, in the tradition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...
  
  (1895)
• Adventures in Wallypugland (1898)
• The Wallypug in London (1898)
• In Search of the Wallypug (1903)
• The Wallypug in Fogland (1904)
• The Wallypug in the Moon (1905)

— and others; thirty-four volumes in all.

Surprisingly for a popular and prolific author, little is known of Farrow's life. Until recently, even the year of his birth was not known with certainty, it having been estimated at 1866, partly based on a reference in the Preface to an 1898 book:

One of my correspondents, aged eight, has embarrassed me very much indeed by suggesting that I should "wait for her till she grows up," as she should "so like to marry a gentleman who told stories." I hope she didn't mean that I did anything so disgraceful; and besides, as it would take nearly twenty-five years for her to catch up to me, she might change her mind in that time, and then what would become of me.

What did become of Farrow is also obscure. Author Noel Streatfeild

Noel Streatfeild

Mary Noel Streatfeild OBE , known as Noel Streatfeild, was an author, most famous for her children's books including Ballet Shoes . Several of her novels have been adapted for film or television.-Biography:...

 has speculated,

I think he must have met a Snark

Snark (Lewis Carroll)

The Snark is a fictional animal species created by Lewis Carroll in his nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark. His descriptions of the creature were, in his own words, unimaginable, and he wanted that to remain so.-The origin of the poem:...

who turned out to be a Boojum, for he certainly has "softly and suddenly vanished away."

Farrow's other books include The Missing Prince (1896) and The Little Panjandrum's Dodo (1899).