A Blog of Bosh

Interest in Edward Lear must be on the rise, at least among writers: he has been making appearances in a number of novels, short stories and even as the central character in Clive Barker’s play Subtle Bodies (in Forms of Heaven: Three Plays by Clive Barker. London: HarperCollins, 1997).

A few stories have been made available online, the classic Donald Barthelme’s “The Death of Edward Lear,” from Overnight to Many Distant Cities (New York: Penguin, 1983), as well as two recent web originals: “Lear on Limbo: Journal of a Landscape Painter on the Island of Limbo” by Dennis List, and “The Old Man of Corfu” by Peter Byrne (at swans.com).

If the fictional Lear does not satisfy you, you can follow the adventures of a British family following in his (and Michael Montgomery‘s) footsteps across Sicily in last Saturday’s Telegraph Magazine: To Gromboolia and Back.

In my previous post on the sources of Edward Lear’s “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò” I forgot to mention William Wordsworth’s “The Blind Highland Boy,” noted by Michael Heyman in his Isles of Boshen; in the poem the boy escapes in a turtle-shell, but is ovetaken and saved by his good neighbours.

I have now found the Great Wolford text I mentioned online, and it is dated 1913 to 1916, a bit late to have had an influence on Lear, though I have not seen the printed text and cannot say for sure: it might well be that the Yonghy Bonghy-Bò is Fidler Wit’s predecessor.

The study of the sources of “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,” in any case, must include some mention of popular courting songs, often consisting of long lists of the lover’s properties, which often provide the comic element; e.g. see “The Clown’s Courtship” (Dixon, James Henry. Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of England: Taken Down from Oral Recitation and Transcribed from Private Manuscripts, Rare Broadsides and Scarce Publications. Ed. Robert Bell. London: Charles Griffin and Co., 1864: 155):

Quoth John to Joan, wilt thou have me?
I prythee now, wilt? and I’ze marry with thee,
My cow, my calf, my house, my rents,
And all my lands and tenements:
            Oh, say, my Joan will not that do?
            I cannot come every day to woo.

I’ve corn and hay in the barn hard by,
And three fat hogs pent up in the sty:
I have a mare, and she is coal black,
I ride on her tail to save my back.
            Then say, &c.

I have a cheese upon the shelf,
And I cannot eat it all myself ;
I’ve three good marks that lie in a rag,
In the nook of the chimney, instead of a bag.
            Then say, &c.

To marry I would have thy consent,
But faith I never could compliment;
I can say nought but ‘hoy, gee, ho,’
Words that belong to the cart and the plow.
            Then say, &c.

The same anthology, which you can download from the recently released Live Book Search, includes more courting songs. For a more explicitly comic example, see “Harry’s Courtship” (pp. 155-6), which presents the same story, but as “modest Mary” protests that she is not going to “sit at my wheel a-spinning, / or rise in the morn to wash your linen; / I’ll lie in bed till the clock strikes eleven,” Harry is forced to reply: “Why then thou must marry some red-nosed squire.”