A Blog of Bosh

A new Edward Lear animation is available on YouTube, Edward Lear Poetic Stories, in Czech, I think, written and directed by Jana Šobáňová in 2005. That’s as much as I manage to gather. Listening to the sung text it would appear to consist of three limericks (though the third one seems to add some text); [...]

Violets Adventure, based on Edward Lear’s “The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World“, here is what the author writes:
I started off by illustrating the characters then scanned them into a computer and put them against photo realistic backgrounds. I wanted the contrast between the hand drawn illustrations and the crisp [...]

A suitably obscure rendition of an Edward Lear poem (”Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly“) by Dudley Moore from the needlessly destroyed archives of “Not Only… But Also“.

This is clearly an amateurish home production of Edward Lear’s “The Pobble Who Has No Toes;” the image is quite dark and at times this makes it difficult to understand what’s going on.

The music for this video was first published in Ken Nordine’s CD A Transparent Mask (Asphodel ASP 2004, 2001): “The Akond of Swat” is one of Edward Lear’s Indian poems.

More Nordine on YouTube.

From YouTube, a short animated film by Doug Wilson, illustrating Edward Lear’s poem “The Two Old Bachelors.” This traditional animation movie was produced at the University Of Central Lancashire for his 3rd year degree and it was shown at the Flip Animation Festival in Wolverhamptin in October 2006.

A quick search revealed several other clips I’ll [...]

The whole of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (well, almost) in just 9 spectacular minutes, the original probably ran a bit longer as some scenes seem to be incomplete. On YouTube, in very low quality, but then I had never managed to see it:

For more information on the film and a some good comments see [...]

Tennyson was always very satisfied with Lear’s arrangements of his poems and did not refrain from praising them in public though, as Angus Davidson notes in his 1938 biography, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet (1812-1888) (London: John Murray), p. 87 , “severer critics did not quite approve.” He then reports an episode which [...]

One of the questions which are often asked about Nonsense is, Why did it disappear almost completely from literature after the great season of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll? As M.B. Heyman writes in his thesis (Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s literary nonsense in context, University of Glasgow, Faculty of Arts, Department of English Literature, [...]

The Owl and the Pussycat Wen to See… is a musical play adapted from the verses and stories of Edward Lear by Sheila Ruskin and David Wood (who wrote the music and lyrics). The LP (Philips 6308022) was published in 1970 with a colourful hippy-style cover and features Harry Secombe (Narrator), Roy Castle (Owl) and [...]