A Blog of Bosh

You can now read Ian Malcolm’s 1908 overview of Lear’s career (mostly from the point of view of the Baring family) in the Nonsense section of the site bookshelf:
Ian Malcolm, “Edward Lear.” The Cornhill Magazine, vol. 24, January 1908, pp. 25-36, as reprinted in The Living Age, vol. 256, no. 3319, 15 February [...]

Hunt Emerson, whose comic book adaptation of Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-cat” was mentioned in a previous post, has also posted a version of “The Jumblies,” executed as a private commission. Click on the images below to get larger ones.

My translation of the early episodes of Peter Newell’s Naps of Polly Sleepyhead will be in Italian libraries next week, and the publisher, orecchio acerbo, has a book trailer on YouTube:

This is going to be in the Little Big Books format, which I found suits Polly’s adventures very well.

The tragic consequences of being a missionary in Timbuctoo were the subject of one of the infrequent comic strips in Punch (22 February 1868, vol. 54, pp. 80-1).
The little poem around which the story turns is known in several different versions and has been variously attributed, but, as far as I know, no final agreement [...]

Why Bobby didn’t get his rocking-horse.
(Click on image for full story.)
Peter Newell from Harper’s Round Table, vol. XVI, no. 789, 11 December 1894, 112.

In a previous post I noted a rare instance of contemporary reference in Gustave Verbeek’s Terrors of the Tiny Tads. Here is another from the strip for 19 May 1907, a few weeks after the appearance of the “Cowboisterous Kangaroosevelt Bear:”
Here comes the Rockefellerphant, so wealthy and so bold,
His stomach like a money bag, all [...]

“Wicked Willie’s Dream” by Walter M. Dunk appeared in Harper’s Round Table, vol. XVI, no. 821, 23 July 1895, 760 (click for full story):

It clearly anticipates Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, in particular for Willie’s position after his fall, but the idea of explaining an uncanny series of events as a dream at the [...]

The blog has been quiet for a long time, as I have been very busy and had to keep up with the daily publication of Edward Lear’s diaries. However, I have at last found time to add an article on Peter Newell to the nonsenselit.org bookshelf:

Hearn, Michael Patrick. “Peter Newell, American Comic Illustrator.” American Book [...]

Theodore Roosevelt’s refusal, in 1902, to shoot an imprisoned bear spawned a long series of political cartoons and, since the bound animal was often represented as a cub, and brought to the creation of the Teddy Bear.
Roosevelt’s hunting mania was the subject of a 1909 booklet by Peter Newell, Jungle Jangle, and of one of [...]

In a previous post I quoted a passage from Prothero’s biography of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley reporting the event that might have originated Edward Lear’s picture story “St. Kiven and the Gentle Kathleen,” an illustrated version of Tom Moore’s “By that lake, whose gloomy shore” (Irish Melodies, vol. 4, 1811). No certain date can be given [...]