Description:
"The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note."
-Edward Lear
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1871), like much of Edward Lear's writing, is characterized by a joy of living. In this charming collection of nonsense verse children of all ages can delight in some of Lear's irreverent humor expressed in such classic poems as "The Owl and the Pussycat," "The Jumblies," "Calico Pie," and stories like "The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World" and the "History of the Seven Families of the Lake-Popple." In this edition, Lear's delightful text is illustrated with color drawings by the well-known British illustrator Leslie Brooke.
Brief description: EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888), was a British writer and artist, who created landscape paintings, nonsense verse, and the illustration of birds and reptiles. He was Queen Victoria's private drawing master and given a place in the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. As a naturalist painter, his work is often compared to the bird paintings of Gould and Audubon, who both worked with Lear. As a writer, Lear's humorous alphabets and wordplay influenced such twentieth-century writers as Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, and Laura Richards.