Books with author Edward Lewis

A collection of tales and rhymes from the master of limericks including: Yonghy Bonghy Bo, Calico Pie, The New Vestments, The Dong with a luminous nose, The Cummerbund, The Duck and the Kangaroo and others tales.Edward was an English author and poet known for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.

Edward Lear was the greatest nonsensicalist of all time. He was the inventor of the limerick and created the Jumblies and The Owl and the Pussycat. This complete edition of Lear's nonsense verse - including the limericks, longer verses, alphabets and his own illustrations - is lovingly restored and beautifully presented, for adults and children to enjoy together.

Edward Lear (12 or 13 May 1812 – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, and is known now mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. Early years: Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of twenty-one children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business.He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Jeremiah Lear ended up defaulting to the London Stock Exchange in the economic upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars; owing to the family's now more limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home, Bowmans Lodge, and live together when he was aged four. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age. Lear suffered from lifelong health afflictions. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, and bronchitis, asthma, and during later life, partial blindness. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father. The event scared and embarrassed him. Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition. His adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the instability of his childhood. He suffered from periods of severe melancholia which he referred to as "the Morbids." Artist: Lear was already drawing "for bread and cheese" by the time he was aged 16 and soon developed into a serious "ornithological draughtsman" employed by the Zoological Society and then from 1832 to 1836 by the Earl of Derby, who kept a private menagerie at his estate, Knowsley Hall. He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from real live birds, instead of skins. Lear's first publication, published when he was 19 years old, was Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots in 1830.One of the greatest ornithological artists of his era, he taught Elizabeth Gould whilst also contributing to John Gould's works and was compared favourably with the naturalist John James Audubon. Unfortunately his eyesight deteriorated too much to work with such precision on the fine drawings and etchings of plates used in lithography, thus he turned to landscape painting and travel. Among other travels, he visited Greece and Egypt during 1848–49, and toured India during 1873–75, including a brief detour to Ceylon. While travelling he produced large quantities of coloured wash drawings in a distinctive style, which he converted later in his studio into oil and watercolour paintings, as well as prints for his books. His landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of colour. Between 1878 and 1883 Lear spent his summers on Monte Generoso, a mountain on the border between the Swiss canton of Ticino and the Italian region of Lombardy. His oil painting The Plains of Lombardy from Monte Generoso is in the Ashmolean Museum in the English city of Oxford.Throughout his life he continued to paint seriously. He had a lifelong ambition to illustrate Tennyson's poems; near the end of his life a volume with a small number of illustrations was published...................

There was an Old Man in a tree,Who was horribly bored by a Bee; When they said, "Does it buzz?" He replied, "Yes, it does!It’s a regular brute of a Bee."Generations of children and adults have delighted in the whimsical poems of Edward Lear (1812-88). And, despite his achievements as a noted English landscape painter and illustrator of animal life, Lear today is best known for his delightful volumes of nonsense verse. This work spanned several decades — from the first charming lines he wrote in the 1830s for the children of the Earl of Derby to his last collection of poems, published in 1877.This volume contains a rich sampling of Lear’s inspired nonsense, including more than 90 delightful limericks as well as a choice selection of longer poems along with the amusing illustrations he drew for each. Among these are such classics as "The Owl and the Pussy-cat," and "The Jumblies" as well as a number of lesser-known but equally charming selections: "Calico Pie," "The Duck and the Kangaroo," "Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly," "The Daddy Long-legs and the Fly," "The Broom, the Shovel, The Poker, and the Tongs," "Mr. and Mrs. Spikky Spider" and "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bó."

Edward Lear, the artist, Author of "Journals of a Landscape Painter" in various out-of-the-way countries, and of the delightful "Books of Nonsense," which have amused successive generations of children, died on Sunday, January 29, 1888, at San Remo, Italy, where he had lived for twenty years. Few names could evoke a wider expression of passing regret at their appearance in the obituary column; for until his health began to fail he was known to an immense and almost a cosmopolitan circle of acquaintance, and popular wherever he was known. Fewer still could call up in the minds of intimate friends a deeper and more enduring feeling of sorrow for personal loss, mingled with the pleasantest of memories; for it was impossible to know him thoroughly and not to love him. London, Rome, the Mediterranean countries generally, Ceylon and India, are still all dotted with survivors among his generation who will mourn for him affectionately, although his latter years were spent in comparatively close retirement. He was a man of striking nobility of nature, fearless, independent, energetic, given to forming for himself strong opinions, often hastily, sometimes bitterly; not always strong or sound in judgment, but always seeking after truth in every matter, and following it as he understood it in scorn of consequence; utterly unselfish, devoted to his friends, generous even to extravagance towards any one who had ever been connected with his fortunes or his travels; playful, light-hearted, witty, and humorous, but not without those occasional fits of black depression and nervous irritability to which such temperaments are liable.

"He reads but he cannot speak Spanish, / He cannot abide ginger-beer; / Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish, / How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!" writes the 19th-century English poet Edward Lear. When "The Book of Nonsense" was first published in 1845 it was a success--some say it turned the once stodgy, didactic world of children's literature on its head. Consisting of a slew of more-odd-than-bawdy limericks, "A Book of Nonsense" takes readers through a rollicking poetic romp. Lear's quirky sense of humor infuses every line of his ever skillful verse, which is often alliterative, and always very silly. Lear, the Laureate of Nonsense, frolics frivolously, and no one should ever go to sea in a Sieve without a copy of this book in tow. Also included in this volume two of Lear's other classic limerick works: "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "The Duck and the Kangaroo."

The owls, hen, larks, and their nests in his beard, are among the fey fauna and peculiar persons inhabiting the uniquely inspired nonsense rhymes and drawings of Lear (20th child of a London stockbroker), whose Book of Nonsense, first published in 1846, stands alone as the ultimate and most loved expression in English of freewheeling, benign, and unconstricted merriment.