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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.

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Lear was a popular Victorian artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet.

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He's most well known today as the father of English nonsense and is especially famed for his limericks.

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A form he popularised. This hugely popular books included a book of nonsense, nonsense songs and stories, more nonsense, laughable lyrics,

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nonsense alphabets and nonsense botany, all variously published between 1846 and the end of his life.

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When thinking about leisure and fantasy as a genre, it feels important to consider the difference between the terms fantastical and nonsensical,

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fantastical means imaginative or fanciful remote from reality or as nonsensical means having no meaning making no sense.

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Ridiculously impractical or ill advised. That is to say, Liz writing is fantastical, which makes him a fantasy writer.

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But his work strong sense of the ridiculous and the satirical, also makes him a nonsense writer.

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The same might be said of Lewis Carroll, whose works often seek above all to entertain.

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According to Stephen Prickett, Victorian fantasy flourished in opposition to the repressive social and intellectual conditions of Victorian ism.

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Victorian writers such as Lee Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald all use non realistic techniques such as nonsense dreams,

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visions and the creation of other worlds to extend our understanding of this world

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and to question and escape from the ideology of Victorian culture and society.

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With Lear, that escape often comes in the form of laughter.

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To take a famous lyrical example.

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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.

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It's a fantastical idea that seven birds could build nests in one man's bed.

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But it's also a nonsensical one in which live satirises the fashion for glorious beards

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at the time while ridiculing his own distinctively over large and unruly beard.

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As this Limerick demonstrates,

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this fantastical nonsense particularly enjoys putting animals and humans beside each other in the vein of many traditional fantasy narratives.

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One of Labour's first jobs as an artist was to illustrate the birds and animals

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in a vast private zoo set up by the Earl of Derby on his estate near Liverpool.

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Painting the Owls animals from life was a key inspiration for this fantastical nonsense,

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where animals and especially birds appear here, there and everywhere.

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Illustrated cartoonishly often causing trouble or confusion and provoking laughter.

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And Liz, nonsense of actual animals also rub shoulders with entirely fantastical creatures such as the new Typekit Biscuit Buffalo,

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the quango wangle the dog with the luminous nose and the young donkey bow.

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There's also the thimble fowl. The public has no toes and the blue baboon who played the flute.

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Curiously, and perhaps deliberately less fantastical creatures are often not illustrated, and when they are,

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they tend to suggest a combination of the animal or vegetable and the human with fanatically expressive

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names that reach back to baby talk and the condition of expressing our feelings with sounds and not words.

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His illustrations to have a childish quality, deliberately crude and comical.

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Liz, fantastical nonsense was aimed primarily at children, but also delighted and continues to delight adults.

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His books were some of the first to mark the golden age of children's literature,

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in which all kinds of fantasies emerged, which crossed over child and adult readerships.

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For example, this work predates Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,

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Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows.

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It thus forms part of the fantastical literature, which set the stage for the later fantasies of the 20th century by Lewis and Tolkien.

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In Lou's entry in the Encyclopaedia of Fantasy, John Klute writes that although his poetry makes no literal or mundane sense,

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many of his narrative poems have an internal consistency and indeed pathetic intensity that gives his work close affinity to later fantasy.

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The term internal consistency draws on Tolkien's essay on fairy stories,

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where he writes that no story can be successful without maintaining the inner consistency of reality.

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Toking argues that the true fantasy writer creates a secondary world for their reader to enter where he relates what is true?

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Pathetic intensity refers to talking sense of fantasy as meaningful and in part, an allegorical reflection of the real world.

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Liz, fantastical creatures don't just inhabit their own songs and poems,

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but pop up all over his wider repertoire so that his over indeed provides a secondary world for his readers to enter.

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This fantastical world not only included versus songs and stories, but recipes, botany and alphabets.

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As Jordan writes at the end of his poem on less nonsense, he became a land and children swarmed to him like settlers.

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Klute adds that poems like the Owl and the Pussycat and the jumbles are sustained fantasy narratives and that the dog with the luminous

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nose is a verse tale whose pathos the dong being clearly Edward Lear himself quite overshadows the absurdity of the events depicted.

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All three of these narratives provoke a sense of otherworldly and fanciful wonder,

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describing heroic figures making epic journeys across far away magical lands,

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that wondrous ness and detachment from reality is a key aspect of Lear's work.

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Lear's private, fantastical language, for example, is both a pleasure and a provocation,

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not only making you laugh, but also imagine some of his invented nonsense.

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Words include rentable scrubs from Boolean fastidious and spontaneous.

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There are various critical interpretations of what these mean,

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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.

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According to Stephen Prickett, nonsense like this offered the Victorians an alternative language for coping

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with the conditions of a world at once more complicated and more repressive.

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Li's work has had a huge influence on fantasy literature at large.

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The young Tolkien, for example, invented a private language called Nev Bosch and wrote limericks in it.

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One of his efforts went.

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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.

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Tolkien also constructed alphabets at school with code symbols for each letter.

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Ursula Le Guin argues that fantasy is the language of the inner self,

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and as many critics have viewed Tolkien's fantasy narratives as allegories for his experiences during the war,

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Li's fantasy narratives often reflect his personal struggles with persistent illness, depression, loneliness and heartbreak.

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As Peter SUab describes it, Lear's nonsense songs transform woes relatable to his own into absurd and magical narratives,

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which both abstract from his life and reflect it.

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For example, the courtship of the young gibbon Bibeau is about heartbreak and Lear's failure to court a woman.

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He loved the quango and goes, hat is about being lonely, but being consoled by having all of your fantastical creatures flock to you,

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that is used his fantastical nonsense to console himself,

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allowing him to step outside of his struggles and shrink them into unthreatening little comic pieces.

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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.

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Schaller sees and stars uncounted beauty that is an enchantment and an ever present peril.

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Both sorrow and joy. As sharp as swords, Lear's nonsense presents a fairy world where joy predominates.

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It's a world where animals talk, sing, dance and strut about in human clothing,

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trees double as armchairs, fish walk around on stilts, cats and birds fall in love.

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Noses and beards grow to humongous sizes. Bodies shrink, kitchen utensils ride away on horses.

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Humans fly and people rise up against society's rules and comfortably act out their maddest instincts.

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It's a wonderful world, but as in life, with joy comes sorrow.

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Create a fantasy talking,

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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,

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but not a slavery to it. This is a helpful way of looking at this fantastical nonsense, I think.

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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,

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using the unbounded and releasing force of our imaginations, we are perhaps best placed to overcome them.