This was very peculiar book :P

My boys, 7 and 4, love this book. They think the alphabets and botany pictures are hilarious. I love to hear them chortle as we read.

My friend Jonathan gave me this book, and it was a god-send for several reasons: A welcome distraction from obsessing about the election, and a bit of cheer in the dreary days of COVID. Of course, I like good nonsense at any time, and was surprised to realize that the only Lear I knew before was the Owl and Pussycat, when there is so much more to enjoy! And of course, the great thing about this kind of nonsense is that I can read it over and over, and enjoy it every time. Special bonus, the author's illustrations! Sadly, they were colored in for this edition, but that's a small quibble.

A childhood is not really complete without some degree of nonsense poetry, for that matter adulthood would probably be quite void without also same said nonsense poetry.

Edward Lear, one of the more well known masters of nonsense, does not disappoint with his quaint collection of poems and stories with an equally bizarre collection of lovable drawings and doodles.

Sometimes it's relaxing to read something into which absolutely nothing can be read - (How's that for a strange sentence?) - and Edward Lear certainly delivers on that front. You could try looking for an allegory or a moral lesson or just some symbolism in his nonsense, just like you could try looking for meaning in fractals or winning lotto numbers - it's beside the point, or even absolutely pointless. And that means that its awesome comes purely from the way it plays with language and images, which is always fun.

That said, apart from the big classics, the ones you probably know already - the Owl and the Pussy Cat, the Pobble Who Has No Toes, and the Quangle-Wangle - there isn't really too much here that you need to know about. They're pleasant, occasionally pretty funny, but that's about all. But they are still definitely good for a laugh or two.

I suggest reading this in two installments. I read about 40% of it, including the very good Holbrook Jackson introduction, back in late Feb 2020, immediately following the birth of my daughter. Then I read the remaining 60% nearly a year to the day, on 2/16/2021, a day that saw me grappling with all the anxieties attendant to fatherhood, early middle age, and so on.

Suffice it to say, Lear is no Lewis Carroll or George MacDonald. But he wouldn't claim to be. What he was was your typical English eccentric "bachelor," in his case a working artist born of a fallen Highgate family, who churned out sketches and paintings and wrote nonsense verse on the side.

What's interesting here is the fusion of art and text, something few Victorian wordsmiths (Gilbert and Sullivan aside; Gilbert's illustrations enhance the libretti considerably - https://gsarchive.net/gilbert/artist/...) brought to the table. Many a sentence or verse that seems like low-level gibberish is turned into "nonsense, the divinest sense" because of a well-placed illustration infra or supra.

Additionally, there are genuinely arresting passages, both in the limericks and longer works, that linger in the mind for a far more extensive period than Lear likely imagined they would (he seems to be quite certain he's producing throwaway doggerel, even if he bothers to cleverly re-use characters like "Xerxes" and the "Quangle-Wangle" in multiple pieces throughout the Lear-verse). But I insist: "Great bards besides / In sage and solemn times have sung / Of tourneys and of trophies hung; / Of forests and enchantments drear / *Where more is meant than meets the ear.*"

To give a few examples: "Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos" is the story of a wife who can't stand a simple yet prosperous life atop a wall without whining about her fate, so her husband blows up the wall and kills her, himself, and their kids; "The New Vestments" is about a trend-setting hermit who outfits himself in meat and sweets and instead of being fawned over upon his return to "haute society" is nearly eaten alive by children and wild beasts; and "The History of the Seven Families of Lake Pipple-Popple" is a ghastly fairy story about 49 offspring of seven animal families who are all killed because they failed to heed their parents' advice about various trivial matters, leading to the grief-stricken parents deciding to embalm themselves so they can be placed in an obscure back room of a local museum.

Highly recommended.

Excellent book.

The Owl and the Pussycat is great. Someof the rest may be as well, but reading the whole book got to be pretty tedious. So repetitive...

Absolutely brilliant!

'There was an Old Man of the Hague
Whose ideas were excessively vague;
He built a balloon
To examine the moon
That deluded Old Man of the Hague.'


' There was a Young Lady of Tyre
Who swept the loud chords of a lyre;
At the sound of each sweep
She enraptured the deep,
And enchanted the city of Tyre.'

The most wonderful nonsense book of all time

How can I give less than five stars to a book that contains not only the Owl and the Pussycat but the Jumblies and the Pobble with no toes. Read and enjoy.

Nonsense comes in many varieties. Some would argue that nonsense needs to, by definition, not make sense. That’s a pretty restrictive definition that would exclude most of the work of Lear and Carroll. A broader definition encompasses any verse or writing that is absurdly humorous or perversely illogical (or perversely logical, for that matter). From Hey Diddle Diddle to Monty Python’s fish slapping skit, nonsense has a long history.

Nonsense, though, is wasted on children. They live their lives in one continuous blur of sights and colors and sounds that make little sense to them. They live in the freedom of nonsense. Adults, however, need nonsense. Confronted by the daily dissonance between idea and reality, logic and illogic, reason and craziness, intent and result, adults become contorted into knots of rationalization and submerged anger/fear as they try to force sense upon everything (when, in fact, most things are nonsensical).

Nonsense unties these knot and lets us see the worst of the world – and helps us understand it – by putting it in terms of its own (il)logic. We can let go of the pretense and the self-inflicted fiction. Some things are too awful to be put into a tragedy. For these, comedy is the only available form, for if we didn’t laugh at them, logic and reason dictate a stark response.

Thus the works of Edward Lear: Unhinged, absurd, eclectic, bizarre, violent and humorous. Individually, they are oddities, but on the whole, Lear provides a fantastically entertaining read that is hard to put down. If you find a moral, so be it. But don’t go looking for one.

Lear's first book, A Book of Nonsense (1846), is particularly violent and unsuited for children. A man is smashed with a gong, a man is smashed with a hammer, one cuts off his thumbs, one is drowned, another is knocked down with a poker, or jumps off a cliff (after reading Homer), a wife is kept in a coffin-like box her entire life, and so on. Peter Cottontail this is not. Lear’s world is weird and dangerous and full of strange characters. “They” are a menacing presence always threatening to destroy non-conforming behavior.

Lear’s later books are much lighter and more children-oriented, but they still contain the humor and pathos of his earlier work, even if they lose a bit of the dark edge. The Jumblies, The Owl and the Pussycat, and The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo are sensuous pleasures to the ears and the mind.

Give up the need to make sense of everything and enjoy Lear...

Who has written such volumes of stuff!

Some think him ill-tempered and queer,

But a few think him pleasant enough.