A Sense for Nonsense: From Edward Lear to Lewis Carroll to Dr. Seuss.
By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.
April 1, 2014
Every now and then the Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature gets ambitious and tries to live up to its name by buying something that is truly antique. This month we are proud to announce the acquisition of a first edition of Lewis Carroll’s book-length nonsense poem masterpiece The Hunting of the Snark (MacMillan and Co., London, 1876.) To be precise, the real first edition was a limited run bound in red that is very pricey to come by these days, but our copy is from the main press run bound between tan brown boards with front and back cover illustrations, gilt on all edges, and including nine interior panels illustrated by Henry Holiday (1839-1927), who was associated with the pre-Raphaelite group of Victorian artists. Snark is Lewis Carroll’s most famous and popular work outside of the two Alice in Wonderland books. The Holiday illustrations are priceless, quite unlike his other paintings, which were very much in the Edward Burne-Jones school of late Victorian sensual, romanticized realism. If you like the classic Tenniel illustrations for the Wonderland books, you will find the Holiday illustrations for the Snark poem to be in a similar vein, only more grotesque. An added treat in this edition is a little leaflet that has been attached to the front endpapers, dated Easter, 1876, and titled “An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves ‘Alice’.” While I suspect that mostly adults with an interest in 19th Century literature read The Hunting of the Snark these days, Carroll obviously intended it to be for the same youthful audience who inspired the Wonderland tales.
Henry Holiday’s interpretation of “The Beaver’s Lesson” from The Hunting of the Snark, bearing more resemblance to something by Hieronymus Bosch than to his fellow pre-Raphaelites. The lines that inspired this plate: “The Beaver brought paper, portfolio, pens, / And ink in unfailing supplies: / While strange creepy creatures came out of their dens, / And watched them with wondering eyes.”
The Hunting of the Snark recounts a nonsensical voyage in search of a mysterious beast, and it builds to a rather unexpected climax. As the story of a whimsical voyage, it is much more complex than but still very reminiscent of Edward Lear’s poem “The Jumblies,” which was written a few years earlier. The Jumblies go to sea in a sieve, which of course allows the water to get into their boat, but they manage to sleep in a crockery pot, somehow stay dry and alive, get to their destination, go shopping, buy some strange things (including a monkey with lollipop paws), and they come back home in twenty years having grown somewhat taller. In contrast, the crew of the Snark has a stranger, darker, more mysterious voyage, and the outcome is much less certain.
Edward Lear (1812-1888) is chiefly remembered and endlessly anthologized as the author of two poems published originally as “nonsense songs” in 1871. These are “The Owl and the Pussycat” (who also venture out to sea in the beginning of their poem) and “The Jumblies.” During his lifetime, Lear was predominantly a painter of animals and landscapes. He happened into writing by chance. While employed painting the avian collection and menagerie of the Earl of Derby, he took to writing nonsense limericks illustrated with pen drawings to amuse the children in the Earl’s family. The limericks were not published for 10 years (appearing in 1846). A second book didn’t appear until 16 years later (1862). By then, Lear must have had a following, because he trickled out a steady stream of nonsense stuff after his second book until his death in 1888.
Lear was a pioneer of this sort of whimsical writing. Lear is good, and in his time he had few if any competitors writing nonsense lyrics; but aside from a couple masterpieces, Lear is not great. His two famous poems are really his best, and there are not a great many other hidden gems. Mostly, his kind of writing has been improved upon by people who came along later and did his sort of poem better (such as Lewis Carroll, Eugene Field, Ogden Nash, and Dr. Seuss.)
Easily half of Lear’s nonsense output was limericks. He wrote more than two hundred. He was an early popularizer of the limerick, but he did not contribute much to its creativity. Most of his limericks are crafted in the old mold (going back to Mother Goose and before) of repeating the first line in the last line, often with a little variation. Unfortunately, this structure rather has the effect of making the last line anticlimactic because you have heard it before, like a joke without a surprise in the punchline. Lear’s limericks are silly and nonsensical, and the line drawings that accompany them are cute, but they are mostly not particularly funny.
Here are three of Lear’s limericks as originally written. Then I will follow with the Dale Dalenberg “improvements,” designed to demonstrate how replacing the repetitive final line with a new rhyming “punchline” can make the limerick both more interesting and more funny.
Edward Lear:
There was an Old Man on whose nose,
Most birds of the air could repose;
But they all flew away
At the closing of day,
Which relieved that Old Man and his nose.
Dalenberg version:
There was an Old Man on whose nose,
Most birds of the air could repose;
But they all flew away
At the closing of day,
Leaving night’s share of bird-stuff to hose.
Edward Lear:
There was an Old Person of Burton,
Whose answers were rather uncertain;
When they said, “How d’ye do?”
He replied, “Who are you?”
That distressing Old Person of Burton.
Dalenberg version:
There was an Old Person of Burton,
Whose answers were rather uncertain;
When they said, “How d’ye do?”
He replied, “Who are you?”
“Is he daft?” all would ask. “No—impertinent!”
Edward Lear:
There was an Old Person of Hurst,
Who drank when he was not athirst;
When they said, “You’ll grow fatter!”
He answered, “What matter?”
That globular Person of Hurst.
Dalenberg version:
There was an old Person of Hurst,
Who drank when he was not athirst;
When they said, “You’ll grow fatter!”
He answered, “What matter?”
They replied: “Keep it up and you’ll burst!”
Limericks were around before Edward Lear. Supposedly they first appeared in England in the early 18th Century. It is said that as folklore poetry, limericks were always raunchy. Lear took them out of the gutter and popularized the form as nonsense poems. Despite moving from the pub to the nursery, ribald limericks do still persist today. They are rather addictive to compose, and generally when you start, you keep coming up with more. I wrote a handful of raunchy ones for this blog, but I can’t publish most of them here, because we try to run a family-friendly blog. Still, I’ll push the limits with three of the cleanest of my naughty limericks, just to demonstrate and play with the form. These are my R-rated ones, not my X-rated ones (feel free to send me an e-mail request for those.) Two of these use the punch-line approach, and the other uses the repeated last-line approach (with a twist):
There was an unsatisfied suitor
Who returned to the girl’s house to shoot her,
But his crime proved a botch
When SHE aimed at HIS crotch
And inquired, “Is it better to spay or to neuter?”
There was a young man of Hong Kong
Who was oppressed by his over-sized schlong,
‘Til he sliced off his testes,
Took hormones, grew breast-ies,
Now he is a young girl of Hong Kong.
Two Sisters from down around Natchez
Turned tricks with their tongues and their snatches,
And sometimes for fun
They’d charge 2-for-1
And bang all the Brothers in batches.
Hallmarks of the limerick include a general sense of irreverence, caricature, and a mockery of more serious academic devices. Many limericks play fast and loose with geography and place names, for instance. Rather than telling us anything about the place, however, they place name is usually just there for rhyming purposes. Thus we have the classic limerick parody line, “There was a young man of Nantucket. . .”, which tells us nothing about Nantucket, but the place name is in the poem mostly just to rhyme with a variety of really vulgar phrases that can be used to end the next line. The word-play of the limerick, and the fact that random things must be plucked out of the air and plunked down in the poem just to fit the rhyme scheme, lends the form to nonsense content. Once you get into the idiom, it’s just as easy to write silly limericks as dirty ones. With apologies to the Japanese, here is one of my silly (non-filthy) limericks:
Drunk wrestler of sumo on saké
Ate way too much teriyaki,
Kept feeding and feeding,
Just wouldn’t stop eating—
And that’s how he got so damn stocky.
Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) improved on the nonsense poetry model that Lear established in poems like “The Jumblies.” Carroll’s work incorporates mathematical puzzles, political allegory, and mysterious in-jokes into a more fully realized fantasy landscape. Lewis Carroll’s “portmanteau words” are a lot like some of Lear’s nonsense words (e.g. “runcible spoon”), only with a more complex etymology.
Not quite sure what it is about nonsense poetry and beavers, but the opening lines go like this: “On the top of the Crumpetty Tree / The Quangle Wangle sat, / But his face you could not see, / On account of his Beaver Hat.”
Edward Lear’s influence can be felt far beyond Carroll, however. With his simple line drawings, he is a precursor to more modern author-illustrators of childrens’ books, such as Dr. Seuss. In fact, Seuss’s Thidwick, the Big-Hearted Moose is a fleshed-out retelling of Edward Lear’s poem “The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,” with a twist. In the Lear poem, a creature called the Quangle Wangle wears a beaver hat that is a hundred and two feet wide, and numerous animals come to live on the brim of the hat. In the Lear version they all have a grand old time, and the Quangle Wangle is perfectly happy to have guests. But Dr. Seuss takes the material in a different direction as the animals take advantage of Thidwick’s good nature and become freeloader guests over-staying their welcome. Lear’s emphasis is on nonsense. That is also Dr. Seuss’s emphasis, even though Seuss usually tells a story with a moral—he just doesn’t lay it on too thick. The moral is there in Thidwick—something like “don’t allow yourself to be a pushover and get taken advantage of by freeloader ‘friends’”—but the emphasis is still on the silly story, the whimsical illustrations, and the word-play.