A Blog of Bosh

Here is a previously unpublished letter by Edward Lear which was offered some time ago on eBay. It includes one of his delightful self-caricatures representing the painter watching the swallows.
15 Stratford Place,
Oxford Street, W
4 Sept. 1865.
My dear Mr. Ashton,
You are right about me & the swallows - for I AM here still. You see the [...]

In July 2000 Charles Lewsen gave a performance at the Redgrave Theatre in Bristol of the solo theatre piece, How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear, first given in 1968 at Hampstead Theatre and the Edinburgh Festival, and subsequently at venues throughout Britain, and festivals in Tel Aviv and Charleston, South Carolina. One such performance also [...]

You may remember that a few months ago I posted on a projected TV series on Edward Lear’s journey through Albania in 1848. A promo of the documentary is now available on YouTube.

A.E. Stalling has a very interesting post on Edward Lear on her blog at Poetry Foundation. After a short general introduction, she states that
The Akond of Swat, [...] with its strict adherence to the form and “exotic” eastern locale, [... is] a ghazal, and consciously so.
The idea, as far as I know, was first advanced [...]

Two new early essays on Edward Lear are available at the nonsenselit.org’s library:
Holbrook Jackson, “Masters of Nonsense.” All Manner of Folks: Interpretations and Studies. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1912; pp. 30-44.
Hildegarde Hawthorne, “Edward Lear.” St. Nicholas: A Monthly Magazine for Boys and Girls, Volume XLIV, part I, November 1916 - April 1917; pp. [...]

A controversy seems to have been raised by the Ofsted report on poetry in schools, which maintains that British pupils are not prepared to appreciate classic poetry because of a focus on a few poems, which are considered not “genuinely challenging.”
When it comes to citing these supposedly unstimulating poems, newspapers, in particular the Times that [...]

Part of Stanley’s first Long Vacation (1835) was spent in a visit to Dublin, where he joined his father at a meeting of the British Association. Though unable, as he confesses, ‘to enter into the scientific business from my ignorance of the subject,’ he was keenly interested in seeing the eminent men who were assembled [...]

On Edward Lear’s Nonsense Books, published by the Robert Bros, in “The Literary World.” October 13, 1888:

Sumanguru Gyra Jones, from Somewhere West of the Everglades, proposes his own arrangement of Edward Lear’s poem:

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He also has an arrangement of Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky”:

From The Young and Field Literary Readers. Book Three. By Ella Flagg Young and Walter Taylor Field. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1914; available through Google Books: