Two of his characters, for example, leave home to play “battlecock and shuttledore”, a spoonerism of the early sport battledore and shuttlecock. As well as completely invented terms, such as “slobacious”, “beasticles” and “scroobius”, Lear also engaged in witty word-play at all points along the spectrum of sophistication. Such unpredictable and incongruous twists and turns are Lear’s most consistent way of ensuring his stories and songs elicit a humorous response.įor the same reason he frequently employs fanciful made-up vocabulary, the most famous of which is “runcible”: the “runcible spoon” from The Owl and The Pussycat inspired so much curiosity that many different, and contradictory, rumours circulated regarding the origin of the neologism. Each element is linked by rhyme rather than rationale.

In the limericks, which account for a large portion of Lear’s output, there is no logical connection between the location by which the character is identified (“Old Man of the Hague”), their state (“whose ideas were excessively vague”) and the action (“he built a balloon to examine the moon”). Likewise, the reader cannot possibly predict that the eponymous Four Little Children would “return immediately to their boat with a strong sense of underdeveloped asthma”. All bets are off when the reader of Nonsense Cookery, instructed in the art of making of an “Amblongus Pie”, is finally directed to “serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible”. The sudden occurrence of the unexpected is generally regarded to be among the most successful ways of generating comedy, and Lear takes this to an extreme. It cannot be denied that Complete Nonsense is above all intended to entertain.

Described by Lear as simply ‘innocent mirth’, his Complete Nonsense is not only an experience in the absurd, but reveals much about children’s literature and culture of the nineteenth century. Although also an artist and composer, Edward Lear is deservedly best-known for his nonsense in all its many forms: songs, stories, poems, drawings, recipes, alphabets and limericks, a form which he popularized.

The complete nonsense book