A Blog of Bosh

Below is a pen and ink calligraphic drawing by Jacob Labotz representing a cat and an owl. Online translator software is not very good with 18th-century Dutch, but it is obvious they are fighting for the possession of the mouse the owl is holding in his bill. The image is part of a series Labotz [...]

You may remember that RS Productions started working on a documentary on Edward Lear’s travels in Greece and Albania almost two years ago, and I linked to a promo last year.
The first of the three parts is now going to be broadcast in Britain by SkyArts 2 and SkyArts HD on 16 January at 1 [...]

Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library has scans of a few of their Edward Lear manuscripts online; the small collection includes self-caricatures taken from letters and original cartoons for the Nonsense Botanies, but also the full manuscript of “The Nervous Family,” a parody of an old song “augmented” by Lear.
Unlike Lewis Carroll, Edward [...]

Edward Lear’s diaries have been used by all major biographers and extracts have been published in books about  particular locations, most notably by Philip Sherrard for Corfu and Rowena Fowler for Malta. Except for the Indian Journal, published by Ray Murphy 1953, no one has published long sequences in full, which is not surprising, given [...]

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 [...]

Like Thackeray, Alfred Crowquill (pseudonym for Alfred Henry Forrester) has his place in the prehistory of comics thanks to an 1849 booklet entitled A Goodnatured Hint about California, a satire of the California gold rush. Besides publishing a successful series of illustrated fairy tales, Crowquill collaborated with several magazines of the time, Punch among them.
One [...]

In his recent book on the Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), David Kunzle also discusses British parallels to the Genevan inventor of comics; among them a special section is devoted to William Makepeace Thackeray, in which Kunzle states that the Picture Magazine (vol. III, 1894) published [...]

Lew Stringer posts on Hunt Emerson’s comic strip adaptation of Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.”

If anyone has scans of the complete three-page story I would be interested in getting them (I can’t find The Beano here in Italy.)

In the early months of 1815 London was swept by reports of a pig-faced lady living in Manchester Square:
In the earlier part of this century, there was a kind of publication in vogue, somewhat resembling the more ancient broadside, but better printed, and adorned with a rather pretentious coloured engraving. One of those, published by [...]

Nancy Hill, a photographer and writer as well as old time fan of Edward Lear’s nonsense, has a new site showcasing her photographic work. Of particular interest are two portfolios: Fools and Limericks.