Over the Land and Over the Sea Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings

Comic invention and an unrestrained sense of the absurd are explored in this collection of one of England's best-loved poets. Adored by generations of nonsense-loving children and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun, these writings whisk readers away not only to the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo but also to 19th-century Albania, Greece, Calabria, and Corsica, where the poet's encounters with the people and customs are recorded with an acute and ruefully comical imagination. Setting Lear's nonsense verse alongside his six travel books, Swaab paints a complete picture of Lear, capturing his ability to see the uncanny and surreal in all things.

Edward Lear was born in London in 1812. the youngest of a family of twenty children, he was largely brought up by his sister Ann. His first commission as a young artist, to make drawings of the parrots in the London Zoo, established his reputation as an ornithological illustrator and led to him being taken on by the Earl of Derby to produce illustrations o his menagerie at Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. It was whilst working at Knowsley that Lear began to write nonsense verse, to entertain the Earl’s children. In 1846 he was engaged to give a series of drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. Lear became a successful artist, an associate of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and with work accepted by the Royal Academy, but his health was poor, and he was prone to depression; the death of Ann in 1861 was particularly distressing to him, Throughout his life he travelled widely in Southern Europe and further afield in Egypt, the Holy Land and India, writing and painting. In 1870 Lear built a house in San Remo, where he died in 1888.

PETER SWAAB, Department Tutor and Senior Lecturer in English at University College London, has published Lives of the Great Romantics: Wordsworth (Pickering, 1996) and essays on Wollstonecraft, Hopkins, James, and Gunn, and a life of Charles Lamb for the New DNB. He is preparing from manuscript editions of the poetry and prose of Sara Coleridge, much of it previously unpublished. He is also working on a book of essays on ideas of utopia in gay and lesbian literature.