This is a very well presented hardback containing the best of Edward Lear. Perhaps not as complete as Holbrook Jackson's Complete Edward Lear, it nevertheless contains his best work, including A Book Of Nonsense, Limericks, alphabets and his most well-known poems, The Dong With The Luminous Nose, The Quangle Wangle Quee, and The Jumblies. The author's quaint illustrations are well reproduced throughout.

The reason this book is so important to comedy is that the incluence on people like Spike Milligan, Beyond The Fringe, and of course Monty Python's Flying Circus is clear. Lear was obviously the 19th century precursor to those humourists. Lear brings an educated and intelligent angle to his humour just as his successors did, and his talent as a poet and artist make this collection much more than just a collection of 'nonsense'!

I can see why Stacy of California thinks this is a weird "incomprehendable" book. The word is "incomprehensible" Stacy. It takes a person of a proper old-fashioned education to appreciate this fine piece of classic literature. We oldsters don't get weird modern art either, or some of the wacky movies Hollywood gives awards to but no one can imagine why.

Edward Lear's nonsense is of the best. Read it aloud! Your kids will amaze you by how fast they can begin to recite along with you! If you remember "The Owl and the Pussycat" from your childhood, you owe it to yourself and your children to share it and "The Jumblies" with them.

I owned a lovely illustrated Little Golden Book version of The Owl and the Pussycat as a toddler. My mother read it to me countless times. After it had been put away in a safe place for 7 years, it somehow came up in a conversation between my mother and me, and we found we could still recite the whole thing. It's a great, highly rhythmic poem that MUST be read aloud.
Now that I own an anthology of Edward Lear's work, my siblings and I have discovered the joy of Lear. We particularly enjoy the Jumblies ("their heads are green and their hands are blue and they went to see in a sieve"). Lear's work must be read aloud, with an audience, to be fully appreciated.
However, note that, while Lear has some really delightful poems, much of his work for children consists of limericks, many of which are not particularly clever. After pages and pages of "there once was a somebody from somewhere who did something odd, that silly old somebody from somewhere", it gets a little old. However, they are silly, and younger children might enjoy them more than my brothers and sisters and I (age range 12 to 18) did.

Wonderful beginning book for children to spark an interest in poetry. I actually had this poem (the owl and the pussycat) read at my wedding... everyone enjoyed it.

Vivien Noakes Edward Lear is a wonderful, clear, and enjoyable book. Mr lear the twentieth of twenty-one brothers and sisters, starts out interesting and stays that way through out his well traveled life. Prolific as a writer and painter suffering with epilepsy, this biography gives you just enough of the places he traveled, his art, personel life, friends( he semed to have known everyone including Tennyson) to keep it balanced and give a good feel of Mr. Lear.

Victorians are experiencing something of a comeback after decades of censure as the strange, repressed, half-crazy relatives we don't want to tell anyone about. We are discovering that the Victorians were not so different from us.

The Victorians did, however, produce their own brand of eccentricity and none are as delightfully eccentric as the Victorian/Edwardian writers for children discussed in Inventing Wonderland. Jackie Wullschlager starts with that greatest of all Wonderland writers, the master himself Lewis Carroll and ends with Jazz Age Pooh creator A.A. Milne.

The eccentricity of these Victorian writers is their confident, and sometimes troubling, obsession with childhood itself. Wullschlager assures us, correctly, that these writers' obsessions did not cross the line into pedophilic behavior. To 21st century sensibilities this seems scarcely creditable, especially after reading letters by Lewis Carroll to various girl children. Carroll, Lear, Barrie and Grahame's effusions about childhood can only be understood within the context of the Victorian age, the age that produced and adored Wordsworth's overly quoted (then and now) "But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home" (Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood).

Wullschlager is, I think, a bit too dismissive of Milne, who is regarded in the text as a has-been, clinging to the last remnants of the Victorian celebration of childhood. Wullschlager's overall point in this regard, however, is well made. The Victorians invented and took seriously the concept of childhood as a wonderland. Consequently, they produced children's writers of a truly magnificent stature. When the concept of childhood=innocence & pleasure was abandoned, in the early 20th century (thank you, Freud!), the result was an almost tongue-in-cheek parody of the earlier writers. It just wasn't possible to take childhood that seriously anymore.

Writers for children have of course continued to produce masterpieces, largely in the fantasy area, but that particular brand of unself-conscious Victorian nonsense and idyllicism may be lost forever. The Victorians are not as strange to us as we may like to believe, but they are certainly unreproducable.

Recommendation: Interesting, well-written, well-paced. Not the most complete biographical sketches but a complete analysis of biography and art. Give it a try.

I really enjoyed reading these poems. Lear is the master of his domain and his silly poems are always funny.
This is an anthology of poems, of different lengths. Lear's style can make even the most serious adult burst with laughter. I was stifling my laughs in the library. I think you're never too old for funny poems such as these, and reading books like this can be cathartic during stressful times.
Read these poems to everyone you know.

This book was just great. I had to keep putting it down because i was laughing so hard.