Edward Lear

James Williams is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of York. He is the co-editor, with Matthew Bevis, of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (OUP, 2016) and, with Anna Barton, of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense. His publications include essays on Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Beckett, and Victorian comic verse, as well as the introduction and historical notes to Alice Goodman, History is Our Mother: Three Libretti (NYRB, 2017).

• AcknowledgementsBiographical OutlineAbbreviations and ReferencesList of IllustrationsIntroduction1: BeginningsThis Mystery of EggsLittle Folks MerryThe Pobble who has no Toes2: Odd BeastsAmiable FrogsVirulent Bulls, Triumphant ChimpanzeesThe Owl and the Pussy-cat3: The Scroobious TravellerAgonies of PackingGooseberries and GringhegiThe Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò4: The MorbidsNever . . . againFull of DespairWorse ThingsThe Dong with a Luminous NoseCodaNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

'This is a study whose significance for the field belies its physical size, standing not only as the best account of Lear’s poetry yet published, but as a work which ought to reorient our sense of Lear’s place in the history of nineteenth-century poetry. […] Williams’s patient explication of the truth it speaks about both sense and nonsense should be regarded as a foundational articulation of Lear’s poetic achievement.'Benjamin Westwood, The Review of English Studies