The Morbids

This chapter considers Lear’s work in relation to his life-long struggle with depression, what he called in his diaries “the morbids”. It argues that Lear’s poetry draws on feelings of self-estrangement in characteristic and creative ways to create forms of absurdity central to his nonsense. It examines the prominence in his work of the words “never” and “despair”, and examines a group of works, many of them limericks, that represent suicide and other forms of violence. The chapter concludes with an extended close reading of “The Dong with a Luminous Nose”.

Odd Beasts

This chapter is concerned with the animals in Lear’s work. It considers the relevance of his background as a zoological illustrator, the relationship between human and animal protagonists in his limericks and drawings, and the attempt in the later poems to imagine entirely animal-populated worlds without human agents. It is concerned with how Lear explores the philosophical problem of imagining forms of social life for non-human creatures without straightforward anthropomorphism. It concludes with an extended close reading of “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”.

Beginnings

This chapter is concerned with Lear’s beginnings, both the beginnings of his poetry (how he came to write it, why, and for whom) and his interest in beginnings of other kinds: family histories, childhood, children’s language (and the forms of children’s poetry, such as the limerick), and the origins of rhyme. It concludes with an extended close reading of “The Pobble Who Has No Toes”.

The Scroobious Traveller

This chapter is about Lear’s experiences as a traveller, and how they shaped him as a writer. It considers the way his poems and paintings are animated by dramas of arrival, departure, and being left behind. It considers, using evidence from Lear’s travel writing, the relationship between the experience of being a foreigner, and hearing unfamiliar languages, and the creation of nonsense words. It concludes with an extended close reading of “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò”.

Coda

This extremely brief coda draws together the argument of the book by concluding that Lear’s poetry represents a testimony to the ambivalence of emotional life that is both truthful and, for all its nonsense, morally sensible.

Introduction

The introduction establishes some preliminary understandings that underpin the approach taken in this study of Lear. It asks whether nonsense is amenable to critical analysis, and how far “nonsense” will take us as a critical term for understanding Lear’s work, and considers the relationship between Lear’s work, morality and moralism. It presents the overarching argument of the book, that Lear’s nonsense is, without being moralistic, a moral art in that its representations of the absurdities of human experience are grounded in a cultivation of the capacity to see ourselves from various kinds of external perspective