A Book of Nonsense | work by Lear | Britannica (original) (raw)

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development of nonsense verse

• In nonsense verse
  …could be considered 1846, when Book of Nonsense was published; this was a collection of limericks composed and illustrated by the artist Edward Lear, who first created them in the 1830s for the children of the earl of Derby.
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discussed in biography

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  In Edward Lear
  …grandchildren that he produced his Book of Nonsense (1846, enlarged 1861). In 1835 he decided to become a landscape painter.
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limericks

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  In limerick
  …and illustrated those in his Book of Nonsense (1846), claimed to have gotten the idea from a nursery rhyme beginning “There was an old man of Tobago.” A typical example from Lear’s collection is this verse:
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place in children’s literature

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  In children’s literature: From T.W. to Alice (1712?–1865)
  …a genius, Edward Lear, whose Book of Nonsense (1846) was partly the product of an emergent and not easily explainable Victorian feeling for levity and partly the issue of a fruitfully neurotic personality, finding relief for its frustrations in the noncontingent world of the absurd and the free laughter of…
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