A Blog of Bosh

Don’t be so beastly!
There was a time when you could sing, ‘I love little pussy, her coat is so warm’ without fear of innuendo. There was no pun intended when Edward Lear wrote, ‘O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love, what a beautiful Pussy you are.’ Puss or pussy has been the nursery term for a cat since the early 16th century. For almost as long, of course, it has also been used to denote sexual intercourse, a woman and female genitalia. (It is safe to assume, for example, that the toast, ‘Here’s a health to thee, to Pusse and to good company’, recorded in 1664, was not a tribute to Tibbles.) But not everyone was familiar with tavern slang, and pussy remained a term of endearment for women, as well as cats, well into the 19th century.
[This interesting articles will explain why searching for The Owl and the Pussy-cat with a child on your lap is not a good idea.]
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian

Four larks and a wren
EDWARD Lear was no doubt thinking of the famous skylark of England, two pairs having nests in his beard. The UK has three lark species and Africa has 80% of all the world’s 75 lark species. Larks are mostly concentrated in the Old World in their distribution. The Horned Lark alone has colonised South America (Colombia).
[This is actually about larks, but I could not resist…]
The Natal Witness Group

Utter Nonsense
A nice general introduction to Lear for the Brazilian edition of Speak Up, a magazine for foreign students of English.

The height of nonsense
In 1886, the redoubtable Victorian critic John Ruskin was invited by the Pall Mall Gazette of London to draw up a “List of the Best Hundred Authors.” His top choice wasn’t quite what the Gazette’s high-minded editors had in mind: “I really don’t know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self,” Ruskin wrote, “as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.” With a hint of impishness, Ruskin declared Lear’s 1846 “Book of Nonsense” — a children’s book published under a pseudonym that eventually reached a whopping 19 printings during the author’s lifetime — to be “surely the most beneficent … of all books yet produced.” He went on to proclaim its unusual contents — a curious verse form we now call the limerick, accompanied by Lear’s equally curious pen-and-ink drawings — as “inimitable and refreshing.”
Lear’s vast outpouring of nonsense — from those early limericks, which established tomfoolery as a bona fide literary genre, to his beloved masterpiece, “The Owl and the Pussycat” (about the duo that famously went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat) — remains as Ruskin described it: instantly appealing, stunningly original, fiercely opposed to pretense and brimming with humor, melancholy and mystery.
Los Angeles Times | 5 January 2003

Edward Lear, by Jackie Wullschlager
… His fantastical characters mirror the passage of his own life. The Yonghy Bonghy Bo’s hilarious courtship of Lady Jingly Jones parallels his own failed attempts at proposing to a female friend who might have accepted him; just a shred of absurdity links the sad, ridiculous Dong with a Luminous Nose, half-menacing, half-pathetic, to the world of nonsense where at the end of Lear’s life “awful darkness and silence reign/ Over the great Gromboolian plain”. What gives depth to his escapist fantasies is the ability to transform emptiness and pain into a unique, attractive nonsense world, with its own evolving characters and landscape: the Jumblies, the great Gromboolian plain, the hills of the Chankly Bore…
Penguinclassics.com

Ridiculous rhymes
From the familiar “runcible spoon” and “hills of the Chankly Bore” to previously unpublished letters, this is an irresistible collection of Edward Lear’s poetry, prose and illustrations. Three alphabets introduce even the very youngest listeners or readers to the teasing word-play that makes old favourites such as “The Jumblies”, “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose” so memorable. Limericks, nonsense botany, nonsense cookery, and serious poems – a sheer delight. This anthology should be in every home.
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review