Welcome to this short introduction to Edward Lear and fantasy. Edward Lear was born in North London in 1812 and died in northwestern Italy in 1888.
Lear was a popular Victorian artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet.
He's most well known today as the father of English nonsense and is especially famed for his limericks.
A form he popularised. This hugely popular books included a book of nonsense, nonsense songs and stories, more nonsense, laughable lyrics,
nonsense alphabets and nonsense botany, all variously published between 1846 and the end of his life.
When thinking about leisure and fantasy as a genre, it feels important to consider the difference between the terms fantastical and nonsensical,
fantastical means imaginative or fanciful remote from reality or as nonsensical means having no meaning making no sense.
Ridiculously impractical or ill advised. That is to say, Liz writing is fantastical, which makes him a fantasy writer.
But his work strong sense of the ridiculous and the satirical, also makes him a nonsense writer.
The same might be said of Lewis Carroll, whose works often seek above all to entertain.
According to Stephen Prickett, Victorian fantasy flourished in opposition to the repressive social and intellectual conditions of Victorian ism.
Victorian writers such as Lee Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald all use non realistic techniques such as nonsense dreams,
visions and the creation of other worlds to extend our understanding of this world
and to question and escape from the ideology of Victorian culture and society.
With Lear, that escape often comes in the form of laughter.
To take a famous lyrical example.
There was an old man with a beard who said it is just as I feared, 2000 hand for locks and Iran have all built their nests in my beard.
It's a fantastical idea that seven birds could build nests in one man's bed.
But it's also a nonsensical one in which live satirises the fashion for glorious beards
at the time while ridiculing his own distinctively over large and unruly beard.
As this Limerick demonstrates,
this fantastical nonsense particularly enjoys putting animals and humans beside each other in the vein of many traditional fantasy narratives.
One of Labour's first jobs as an artist was to illustrate the birds and animals
in a vast private zoo set up by the Earl of Derby on his estate near Liverpool.
Painting the Owls animals from life was a key inspiration for this fantastical nonsense,
where animals and especially birds appear here, there and everywhere.
Illustrated cartoonishly often causing trouble or confusion and provoking laughter.
And Liz, nonsense of actual animals also rub shoulders with entirely fantastical creatures such as the new Typekit Biscuit Buffalo,
the quango wangle the dog with the luminous nose and the young donkey bow.
There's also the thimble fowl. The public has no toes and the blue baboon who played the flute.
Curiously, and perhaps deliberately less fantastical creatures are often not illustrated, and when they are,
they tend to suggest a combination of the animal or vegetable and the human with fanatically expressive
names that reach back to baby talk and the condition of expressing our feelings with sounds and not words.
His illustrations to have a childish quality, deliberately crude and comical.
Liz, fantastical nonsense was aimed primarily at children, but also delighted and continues to delight adults.
His books were some of the first to mark the golden age of children's literature,
in which all kinds of fantasies emerged, which crossed over child and adult readerships.
For example, this work predates Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows.
It thus forms part of the fantastical literature, which set the stage for the later fantasies of the 20th century by Lewis and Tolkien.
In Lou's entry in the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, John Klute writes that although his poetry makes no literal or mundane sense,
many of his narrative poems have an internal consistency and indeed pathetic intensity that gives his work close affinity to later fantasy.
The term internal consistency draws on Tolkien's essay on fairy stories,
where he writes that no story can be successful without maintaining the inner consistency of reality.
Toking argues that the true fantasy writer creates a secondary world for their reader to enter where he relates what is true?
Pathetic intensity refers to talking sense of fantasy as meaningful and in part, an allegorical reflection of the real world.
Liz, fantastical creatures don't just inhabit their own songs and poems,
but pop up all over his wider repertoire so that his over indeed provides a secondary world for his readers to enter.
This fantastical world not only included versus songs and stories, but recipes, botany and alphabets.
As Jordan writes at the end of his poem on less nonsense, he became a land and children swarmed to him like settlers.
Klute adds that poems like the Owl and the Pussycat and the jumbles are sustained fantasy narratives and that the dog with the luminous
nose is a verse tale whose pathos the dong being clearly Edward Lear himself quite overshadows the absurdity of the events depicted.
All three of these narratives provoke a sense of otherworldly and fanciful wonder,
describing heroic figures making epic journeys across far away magical lands,
that wondrous ness and detachment from reality is a key aspect of Lear's work.
Lear's private, fantastical language, for example, is both a pleasure and a provocation,
not only making you laugh, but also imagine some of his invented nonsense.
Words include rentable scrubs from Boolean fastidious and spontaneous.
There are various critical interpretations of what these mean,
but to me is nonsense words are deliberate evasions or contortions of sense with sense just doesn't do justice to the thing or feeling in question.
According to Stephen Prickett, nonsense like this offered the Victorians an alternative language for coping
with the conditions of a world at once more complicated and more repressive.
Li's work has had a huge influence on fantasy literature at large.
The young Tolkien, for example, invented a private language called Nev Bosch and wrote limericks in it.
One of his efforts went.
There was an old man who said, how can I possibly carry my cow for if I were to ask it to get in my basket, it would make such a terrible roar.
Tolkien also constructed alphabets at school with code symbols for each letter.
Ursula Le Guin argues that fantasy is the language of the inner self,
and as many critics have viewed Tolkien's fantasy narratives as allegories for his experiences during the war,
Li's fantasy narratives often reflect his personal struggles with persistent illness, depression, loneliness and heartbreak.
As Peter SUab describes it, Lear's nonsense songs transform woes relatable to his own into absurd and magical narratives,
which both abstract from his life and reflect it.
For example, the courtship of the young gibbon Bibeau is about heartbreak and Lear's failure to court a woman.
He loved the quango and goes, hat is about being lonely, but being consoled by having all of your fantastical creatures flock to you,
that is used his fantastical nonsense to console himself,
allowing him to step outside of his struggles and shrink them into unthreatening little comic pieces.
As Tolkien writes, The Land of fairy story is wide and deep and high and is filled with many things, all manner of beasts and birds are found there.
Schaller sees and stars uncounted beauty that is an enchantment and an ever present peril.
Both sorrow and joy. As sharp as swords, Lear's nonsense presents a fairy world where joy predominates.
It's a world where animals talk, sing, dance and strut about in human clothing,
trees double as armchairs, fish walk around on stilts, cats and birds fall in love.
Noses and beards grow to humongous sizes. Bodies shrink, kitchen utensils ride away on horses.
Humans fly and people rise up against society's rules and comfortably act out their maddest instincts.
It's a wonderful world, but as in life, with joy comes sorrow.
Create a fantasy talking,
as is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the Sun on a recognition of fact,
but not a slavery to it. This is a helpful way of looking at this fantastical nonsense, I think.
These funny little fantasy narratives often seem to recognise that life involves struggles, but that if we look at those struggles in a different way,
using the unbounded and releasing force of our imaginations, we are perhaps best placed to overcome them.