This collection brings together Edward Lear's Victorian nonsense: the limericks of old men and young ladies from invented or real places, longer narrative poems such as The Owl and the Pussycat, The Jumblies, and The Dong with a Luminous Nose, and sequences of nonsense songs, alphabets, cookery, and botany. Lear's line drawings are part of the text, giving faces to the creatures and travellers. The poems invent geography, marriage, and disaster without moral lesson. There is no continuous story. The book is a gathered body of comic verse and picture in which language and drawing make a self-contained absurd world.
Title Metadata
Subject/Genre
5 SubjectsIllustrations, hand-coloured, taken from Lear's five nonsense books (1846-1895). Full yellow cloth with a design in red, orange, green and blue by Richard Beards, red endleaves. Yellow slipcase with a continuation of the cover design.
| Printing | Print Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1st Printing | 1996 | — |
| 2nd Printing | 1997 | — |
| 3rd Printing | 1998 | — |
| 4th Printing | 1999 | — |
| 5th Printing | 2002 | — |
| 6th Printing | 2004 | — |
| 7th Printing | 2012 | — |
| 8th Printing | 2013 | — |