LINCS to the Past, a project “focused on giving access to cultural heritage collections,” and the Arts and Humanities Research Council sponsor a new website, Learical Tennysons, dedicated to Edward Lear’s relationship to Alfred Tennyson and his family. It has been designed and curated by Jasmine Jagger and is co-curated by Matthew Bevis, who are working “on an AHRC Leadership project called ‘Knowing Edward Lear’, examining Lear’s nonsense poetry alongside his natural-history drawings, landscape paintings, travel writings, correspondence, and diaries.”

The very well organized pages present pictures and letters, many never seen before, that Lear sent to Alfred Tennyson, his wife Emily, and their children over the years. I particularly enjoyed a sketch of the Tennysons’ house at Faringford with a huge bug in the garden and a letter with two self caricatures requesting “a ‘nautograph.”