Tag Archives: Lewis Carroll

More Houghton Manuscripts

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Marco Graziosi

In his Course in Nonsense Tom Swifty comments on the feud between Learians and Carrollians: The nonsense of these two could not have been more different. We can make fun of rules by blithely ignoring them, like Lear, but also by … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WS Gilbert’s Nonsense Poems

Posted on July 18, 2014 by Marco Graziosi

W.S. Gilbert never really wrote Nonsense; his Bab Ballads and other collections, while obviously influenced by Edward Lear ― especially in the strongly caricatural style of the pictures accompanying his poems in the early editions – are rather in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Nonsense Lyrics, WS Gilbert | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gustave Verbeek’s Cruel Tales and the Nonsense Tradition

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Marco Graziosi

[I wrote this short article for The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek: The Complete Sunday Comics 1903-1905, edited by Peter Maresca, foreword by Martin Gardner. Palo Alto, CA: Sunday Press Books, 2009, where it appeared under the title “Verbeek’s Loony Lyrics … Continue reading →

Posted in Comics, Edward Lear, Gustave Verbeek, Lewis Carroll, Nonsense Lyrics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Unnatural History Lessons

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Marco Graziosi

The early newspaper comic supplements used a wide variety of materials to fill their pages, among them alphabets — which could be put to several uses: satiric or purely nonsensical — seem to have been particularly appreciated. Here is an … Continue reading →

Posted in Comics, Edward Lear, Gustave Verbeek, Lewis Carroll | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Weekend Reading

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Marco Graziosi

Here are some links to articles on Edward Lear and nonsense for your weekend reading: Francesca Bombassei Gonella. “‘Everything’s Got a Moral, If Only You Can Fint It’: Modernità, interculturalità e sovversione del canone nella letteratura vittoriana per l’infanzia: Lewis … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Limerick | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Children’s Books for Christmas 1871

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Marco Graziosi

Sing-Song: a Nursery-rhyme Book. By Christina G. Rossetti. With 120 Illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Routledge. The Princess and the Goblin. By George Macdonald. Strahan. Through the Looking-glass, and what Alice saw there. By the Author of Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland. … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Edward Lear and Phonetics

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Marco Graziosi

John Well’s phonetic blog discusses what we can learn on Victorian pronunciation from Edward Lear’s limericks. The Opinionator NY Times blog suggests that Victorian naturalists might be a model for some of Lear’s most famous characters: The Brittle-Stars Danced. The … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Lear | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Day of the Wombat

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Marco Graziosi

Peacay of BibliOdyssey posts “some delightful scratchy illustrations from the 1962 book by Ruth Park, ‘The Adventures of the Muddle-headed Wombat’” in honour of Australia Day. So here is my homage. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lament for the death of his … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mr Leer, Humpty Dumpty and Finnegan

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Marco Graziosi

There is an interesting article in the the London Review of Books (vol. 32, no. 24, 16 December 2010), “Quashed Quotatoes,” in which Michael Wood reviews a new edition of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The opening paragraphs discuss Joyce’s debt … Continue reading →

Posted in Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Limerick | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Frog and the Duck: A Romance

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Marco Graziosi

George du Maurier “took, in 1869-1870, a brief Darwinian respite from his usual labors of satirizing the Victorian drawing room” and, among other things, produced an “unusually extensive and charmingly anthropomorphic picture-story” (Kunzle 293), which appeared in three fortnightly instalments … Continue reading →

Posted in Comics, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Peter Newell | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments