Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lewis Carroll wrote the first stanza of Jabberwocky in the year 1855 while living with his parents in Croft-on-Tees. He originally published the lines in a family magazine called Mischmasch under the title Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.
The poem Jabberwocky first appeared in the 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass. It was placed in a scene where Alice encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen and reads the verses in mirror writing.
John Tenniel reluctantly agreed to illustrate the book in 1871 and his illustrations remain the defining images of the poem. His depiction of the Jabberwock reflects Victorian obsessions with natural history and includes features like leathery wings and a long scaly neck.
The word vorpal has appeared in dictionaries as meaning both deadly and extremely sharp. It refers to the magic sword used by the hero to decapitate the Jabberwock in a single blow.
Jabberwocky has been translated into 65 languages. Translators have generally dealt with the invented words by creating equivalent words of their own that respect the morphology of the target language.
The original purpose of Jabberwocky was to satirise both pretentious verse and ignorant literary critics. It was designed as verse showing how not to write verse before eventually becoming the subject of serious classroom learning.