The holidays are over, but if you are still looking for some good Edward Lear reading here is a list of relatively new items:

John Varriano has a long article in the Christmas 2013 issue of Treasures of Malta on “Edward Lear in Malta: New Revelations.” The Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti will also publish his next book, Edward Lear in Malta, some time in the spring. He is also working on an exhibition in autumn 2014 at Palazzo Falson Historic House Museum, Mdina, and one on “Edward Lear in the Holy Land” for the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in the spring of 2015.

“Edward Lear in Greece” is the title of the exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery which opens on 15 February. “This exhibition comprises an outstanding group of 32 watercolours of mainland Greece, Crete and the Ionian islands, from the collection of the distinguished historian Sir Steven Runciman.”

Carol Rumens’s poem of the week column in The Guardian for 30 December 2013 was devoted “Edward Lear’s The New Vestments: the Artistry of an Extraordinary Suit.”

Meanwhile, Anna Henchman’s paper on Lear’s dismembered bodies I mentioned in a previous post has been published as “Edward Lear Dismembered: Word Fragments and Body Parts” in Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 35, Issue 5, 2013, pp. 479-487.

Also, Tauris Parke Paperbacks has reprinted Peter Levi’s Edward Lear: A Life with a new foreword by Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

I do not think I mentioned Louise Schweitzer’s One Wild Flower, “a study of Victorian Nonsense,” published by Austin Macauley in 2012.

But the best book on Edward Lear I read in 2013 was not published in 2013 and is not about Lear at all: Sara Lodge’s Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play and Politics, Manchester University Press, 2007, sheds light on the influence of Thomas Hood and his circle on Lear’s early nonsense pictures and poems. You can get a print-on-demand copy at a reasonable price from many sellers on Abebooks.