approach we choose for our readings, the great popularity of these works in their own era encourages us to question the Victorians' reputation for somber and stuffy humorlessness.
EDWARD LEAR
1812-1888
Edward Lear was a landscape painter who spent much of his life in Mediterranean countries. In 1846 he published his first Book of Nonsense, a collection of limericks for children. The form of the limerick was not invented by Lear, but his use of it helped establish its popularity. In later volumes of the Book of Nonsense, he used other verse forms, some of them modeled on rhythms developed by his close friend Tennyson. Best-remembered as the author of 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' (1870), Lear classified his own poems as 'nonsense pure and absolute.'
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152 8 / LIGH T VERS E Limerick There was an Old Man who supposed That the street door was partially closed; But some very large rats ate his coats and his hats, While that futile old gentleman dozed. 1846 The Jumblies 5ioThey went to sea in a sieve, they did; In a sieve they went to sea; In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day, In a sieve they went to sea. And when the sieve turned round and round, And everyone cried, 'You'll be drowned!' They called aloud, 'Our sieve ain't big, But we don't care a button; we don't care a fig? In a sieve we'll go to sea!' Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumbbes live. Their heads are green, and their hands are blue; And they went to sea in a sieve. is20 They sailed away in a sieve, they did, In a sieve they sailed so fast, With only a beautiful pea-green veil Tied with a ribbon, by way of a sail, To a small tobacco-pipe mast. And everyone said who saw them go, 'Oh! won't they be soon upset, you know, For the sky is dark, and the voyage is long; And, happen what may, it's extremely wrong In a sieve to sail so fast.' 25so The water it soon came in, it did; The water it soon came in. So, to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet In a pinky? paper all folded neat; And they fastened it down with a pin. And they passed the night in a crockery-jar; And each of them said, 'How wise we are! Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long, Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong, While round in our sieve we spin.' tiny 35 And all night long they sailed away; And, when the sun went down, They whistled and warbled a moony song
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LEWIS CARROLL / 152 9
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong, In the shade of the mountains brown,
40 'O Timballoo! how happy we are When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar! And all night long, in the moonlight pale, We sail away with a pea-green sail
In the shade of the mountains brown.'
45 They sailed to the Western Sea, they did?
To a land all covered with trees; And they bought an owl, and a useful cart, And a pound of rice, and a cranberry tart,
And a hive of silvery bees;
50 And they bought a pig, and some green jackdaws, And a lovely monkey with lollipop paws, And seventeen bags of edelweiss tea, And forty bottles of ring-bo-ree,
And no end of Stilton cheese.
55 And in twenty years they all came back ?
In twenty years or more; And everyone said, 'How tall they've grown! For they've been to the Lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore.'1
60 And they drank their health, and gave them a feast Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast; And everyone said, 'If we only live, We, too, will go to sea in a sieve,
To the hills of the Chankly Bore.' 65 Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live. Their heads are green, and their hands are blue; And they went to sea in a sieve.
1871
1. Lear here invents names that are half plausible 'the Torrible Zone' is a play on the Torrid Zone, because they resemble the real names of geograph-the region along the equator between the Tropics ical features: a bore is a surge wave that rises reg-of Cancer and Capricorn. ularly in estuaries or when two tides meet, while LEWIS CARROLL 1832-1898
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a deacon in the Anglican Church and a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford as well as a pioneer in the art of portrait photography. Most of his publications were mathematical treatises, but his fame rests on the strange pair of books he wrote for children: Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking- Glass (1871), both published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The various songs and poems scattered throughout the stories are frequently parodies of ditties such as 'Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star' and 'How doth the little busy bee,' nursery classics that a child like Alice would have been able to recite. Others, like 'The Mouse's Tale,'
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whose text is set out in the form of a long and twisting tail, are playful in different ways. 'Jabberwocky,' provided here and followed by the discussion that Alice and Humpty Dumpty conduct about its meaning, is a particularly good example of Carroll's fondness for word games. It is an indication of the poem's popularity that the invented word chortle, formed by blending chuckle and snort, has passed into English.
Jabberwocky1
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the raome raths outgrabe.
5 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and
