Over the Land and Over the Sea
Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings
Published on 26. May 2005
Book
Paperback/Softback
265 pages
978-1-85754-759-7 (ISBN)
Description
Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun.
This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.
This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.
Reviews / Votes
Modern Painters, Friday 1st July 2005Edward Lear is one of the few figures in history to have achieved a (largely) positive reputation for consciously producing nonsense. (Remember, most of the artists and art critics you're now thinking of don't do it on purpose). Aldous Huxley described Lear's lymericks as part of an 'eternal struggle between the genius or the eccentric and his fellow human beings', and George Orwell also found his work to be an example of the right to individuality and difference (commenting on 'The Old Man of Whitehaven': 'There was an Old Man of Whitehaven, / Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;/ But they said - "It's absurd, to encourage this bird!" / So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.' - he said 'to smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is ['exactly what "They" would do'). More often than not, though, Lear still comes across as a poor man's Lewis Carroll (albeit darker and more adult). A greatest hits collection of his limericks forms the first part of the book. In the second half, however, Lear swaps the land of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo for the more sensible territories of Albania, Greece and Italy, which he records in a series of travel journals. Written in his guise as a landscape painter (which was how Lear earned a living after giving up working as a zoological illustrator), these texts provide an insight into the finely honed powers of real-world observation on which all that nonsense is based. A Summer Reading Selection by the London Review of Books, 7th July 2005:
Lear's nonsense verse is familiar to everyone, but his travel writing remains almost unknown: much of it has been out of print for more than a century. In this valuable anthology, Peter Swaab brings together both genres, arguing that they arise from the same restless sensibility. 'What, after all,' he asks in his introduction, 'is nonsense poetry if not a poetry of departures, always departing from our usual norms, often in stories of voyaging and questing?'
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 209 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
503 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85754-759-7 (9781857547597)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2012
Fyfield Books
€9.55
Available for download
Persons
Edward Lear was born in London in 1812. The youngest of a family of twenty children, he was largely brought up by his sister Ann. His first commission as a young artist, to make drawings of the parrots in the London Zoo,established his reputation as an ornithological illustrator and led to him being taken on by the Earl of Derby to produce illustrations of his menagerie at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. It was whilst working at Knowsley that Lear began to write nonsense verse, to entertain the Earl's children. In 1846 he was engaged to give a series of drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. Lear became a successful artist, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and with work accepted by the Royal Academy, but his health was poor, and he was prone to depression; the death of Ann in 1861 was particularly distressing to him, Throughout his life he travelled widely in Southern Europe and further afield in Egypt, the Holy Land and India, writing and painting. In 1870 Lear built a house in San Remo, where he died in 1888. Peter Swaab, Reader in English at University College London, has published Lives of the Great Romantics: Wordsworth (Pickering, 1996) and essays on Wollstonecraft, Hopkins, James, and Gunn, and a life of Charles Lamb for the New DNB. He edited Over the Land and Over the Sea: Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings by Edward Lear (Carcanet/FyfieldBooks, 2005) and the Collected Poems of Sara Coleridge (Carcanet/FyfieldBooks, 2007). He is also working on a book of essays on ideas of utopia in gay and lesbian literature.