A Blog of Bosh

The following items link to pages in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, with descriptions of collections containing Edward Lear material.

STEVEN H. SCHEUER COLLECTION OF TELEVISION PROGRAM SCRIPTS
[Includes script for a 10 Jun 1956 ‘Nonsense (Edward Lear)’ program.]
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

OSBORN 19TH CENTURY BOUND MANUSCRIPTS (FOLIO)
[Full list of the Osborn shelves material, which includes Lear watercolors.]
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

BURNEY-LEAR DRAWINGS
The Burney-Lear Drawings consists of over 1,000 watercolors, sketches, and drawings by Edward Francis Burney, other members of the Burney family, members of the Hoare family, Edward Lear, and others. Most of the drawings are unsigned, and some of the attributions are still uncertain. The majority of the material appears to date from the first half of the nineteenth century.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Edward Lear.
The author of one of the most original books of comic verse ever written, Edward Lear, though he was a great traveller, had not much to do with Bohemia. An artist he was in more than one sense and in more than one branch of art; but none of his artistries led him Prague-wards, just as the fact that he owed not a little to patronage did not, in the least, subject him to any of the trials, or tempt him into any of the revolts and excesses, of Bohemia’s uglier elder sister Grub street. Severe critics in the arts of design have admitted him to be an excellent draughtsman: it would be a sufficient and final testimony of the hopelessness of a literary critic if he failed to find in Lear a super-excellent writer of an almost unique kind.
The delightful Book of Nonsense (the form of the verse of which was long afterwards senselessly vulgarised and, in fact, prostituted, in newspaper competitions under the equally senseless name “Limerick”), taking, perhaps, a hint from the immemorial nursery rime, combined sense and nonsense, after the specially English fashion, in a way never known before; while his somewhat longer peoms—The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, the famous Jumblies and others—readjusted the combination in a fashion almost more delectable still.
The Cambridge History of English Literature. Vol. 13. The Victorian Age, Part One. VI. Lesser Poets of the Middle and Later Nineteenth Century. §11.
Bartleby Project