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The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear

edward lear

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The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, Calico Pie and The Pobble Who Has No Toes, together with Edward Lear's crazy limericks, have entertained adults and children alike for over 100 years.

This edition, illustrated by the author, contains all the verse and stories of the Book of Nonsense, More Nonsense, Nonsense Songs, Nonsense Stories, Nonsense Alphabets and Nonsense Cookery. It has a biographical Preface by Lear himself, and concludes with some delightful 'heraldic' sketches of his cat, Foss.

287 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,1895

This edition

Format
287 pages, Hardcover
Published
June 1, 1940 by Amereon Ltd
ISBN
9780891900900
ASIN
089190090X
Language
English

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About the author

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edward lear

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Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.
His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems.
As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.

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Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
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SDShamshel
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13650...

"By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.
And when the sun sinks slowly down,
And the great rock-walls grow dark and brown,
When the purple river rolls fast and dim,
And the ivory Ibis starlike skim,
Wing to wing we dance around
- from The Pelican Chorus
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TheHiidenPowa
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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I love the poem where he introduces himself! From memory:
How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
Who has written such masses of stuff
Some think him ill-tempered and queer
But a few find him pleasant enough.

He sits in a beautiful parlour
With hundreds of books on the wall
He drinks quite a lot of Marsala
But never gets tipsy at all.

He has many friends, laymen and clerical
Old Foss is the name of his cat
His body is perfectly spherical
He weareth a runcible hat.

He reads, but he cannot speak, Spanish
He cannot abide ginger beer
Ere the years of his pilgrimage vanish
How pleasant to know Mr Lear!
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BEEKAT
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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This book aint joking when it said complete nonsense, cause it is
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Santoryu_XBurner
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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It's hard to imagine that there is another reputable author who consistently held himself or herself to as limited an artistic standard as Edward Lear. This volume contains over 100 pages of what we can only call limericks, not one of which is as good as the first poem I found by typing "random limerick" into Google.

But hey -- judge for yourself. Here's a sample from Lear:
"There was an Old Person of Bangor,
Whose face was distorted with anger!
He tore off his boots,
And subsisted on roots,
That irascible Person of Bangor."

Compare this to poem #21 under the heading "Death" in the Wordsworth Book of Limericks:
"A daring young fellow in Bangor
Sneaked a super-swift jet from its hangar.
When he crashed in the bay,
Neighbors laid him away
In rather more sorrow than anger."

If, after carefully considering these poems, you still want to read the present collection, more power to you.
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Miseingno
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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Tô fazendo um dos cursos de inverno na USP cujo tema é o nonsense nas artes, cinema e literatura. Não dá pra falar sobre nada disso sem citar o pai de todos: Edward Lear. Já o tinha o lido, mas não especificamente essa edição que é a mais completa de todas, aqui fica mais do que claro o quanto ele influenciou o século XX.
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Veryoldracoon
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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I cannot stress enough how horrible the limericks are. They often have extra syllables that mess up the rhythm, and often rhyme only because they repeat words. However, they, like all the other poems and stories, are accompanied by the authors own entertaining sketches, so I can almost forgive them.

The other songs and stories are wonderful enough that I'll just ignore the limericks.

Content warnings:
* Inter-species marriage.
* A husband refers to his wife as "Oh lovely Pussy, oh Pussy my love, what a wonderful Pussy you are..."
* A very nice rhinoceros is killed and stuffed just so he can be used as a "diaphanous door-scraper".

Many different collections are currently lumped together by the goodreads librarians. They'll probably never be fully straitened out. Here is the contents of the version I read:

The Book of Nonsense - Horrible limericks.
Nonsense Songs and Stories - Wonderful poems and one story (The four little children who went around the world).
100 Nonsense Pictures and Rhymes - More horrible limericks.
An Alphabet - An OK way to teach kids the alphabet, and words like Dolomphious and Runcible.
"How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear" - An OK poem.
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tdangie
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
March 26,2025
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4/5 stars. The limericks are a touch disappointing, but I think this is more to do with the format of the times, where the final line is more or less a repetition of the first line, rather than the punchline that we have today. But there is a lot of innocent humor in all of these pages, including the illustrations. I wish there were more “true poems” like ‘The Jumblies’ and ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’.
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