The “Nonsense” Botanical Illustrations of Victorian Artist-Poet Edward Lear (1871–77)

Since the Victorian era, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” has been, for generation upon generation in the English-speaking world, the kind of poem that one simply knows, whether one remembers actually having read it or not. As with most such works that seep so permanently into the culture, it doesn’t quite represent its author in full. Though more or less of a piece with his celebrated “nonsense” verse (which I myself read in childhood, more than a century after its initial publication)...