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- Utter Nonsense
- Edward Lear by Jackie Wullschlager
The height of nonsense
The height of nonsense
In 1886, the redoubtable Victorian critic John Ruskin was invited by the Pall Mall Gazette of London to draw up a “List of the Best Hundred Authors.” His top choice wasn’t quite what the Gazette’s high-minded editors had in mind: “I really don’t know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self,” Ruskin wrote, “as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.” With a hint of impishness, Ruskin declared Lear’s 1846 “Book of Nonsense” — a children’s book published under a pseudonym that eventually reached a whopping 19 printings during the author’s lifetime — to be “surely the most beneficent … of all books yet produced.” He went on to proclaim its unusual contents — a curious verse form we now call the limerick, accompanied by Lear’s equally curious pen-and-ink drawings — as “inimitable and refreshing.”
Lear’s vast outpouring of nonsense — from those early limericks, which established tomfoolery as a bona fide literary genre, to his beloved masterpiece, “The Owl and the Pussycat” (about the duo that famously went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat) — remains as Ruskin described it: instantly appealing, stunningly original, fiercely opposed to pretense and brimming with humor, melancholy and mystery.
Los Angeles Times | 5 January 2003
