Category Archives: Edward Lear

The Ladies and Scott

Moonshine, a magazine established in 1879, published the following parody of Edward Lear’s “Akond of Swat” on 1 January 1898 (p. 2); it was prompted by the leading dramatic critic of its age Clement Scott’s assertion that “it was practically … Continue reading

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Before Little Nemo

“Wicked Willie’s Dream” by Walter M. Dunk appeared in Harper’s Round Table, vol. XVI, no. 821, 23 July 1895, 760 (click for full story): It clearly anticipates Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, in particular for Willie’s position after his … Continue reading

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New Edward Lear Resources

Just a quick post to mention a few new resources relating to Edward Lear: Never Mind the Pussycat: The Ornithological Art of Edward Lear, the companion site for a 2008 exhibition at the Albert R. Mann Library at Cornell University, … Continue reading

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De kat en de uil

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 … Continue reading

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An Exile in Paradise

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 … Continue reading

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Edward Lear's Nervous Family

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 … Continue reading

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The Edward Lear Diaries Project

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 … Continue reading

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Irish Sources of Edward Lear's Early Picture Stories

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 … Continue reading

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Non-Limericks 2: Alfred Crowquill

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 … Continue reading

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Non-Limericks 1: W.M. Thackeray

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 … Continue reading

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