Nursery Nonsense or Rhymes Without Reason

First edition, illustrated with numerous woodcuts by Charles Henry Bennett, signed with his characteristic monogram, including a frontispiece and an ornamented title page. A publisher's catalogue of other children's books available from Griffith and Farran is bound in at the end of the volume.

Publisher's red cloth binding, boards blind-stamped, humorous design with the title and illustrator's name lettered in gilt on the upper cover, smooth spine with the title lettered in gilt and ornamented. Binding rubbed and soiled, joints partly split, some soiling to the leaves.

Written by the Greek professor D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson for his son, this collection of poems belongs, as its title suggests, to the literary genre of nonsense verse introduced in England by Edward Lear in 1846; the genre's worldwide success, however, is chiefly owed to Lewis Carroll, whose Alice's Adventures in Wonderland appeared only a year after the publication of Nursery Nonsense, in 1865. Like Carroll, Thompson deploys strange characters placed in absurd situations; although the substance of his poems is devoid of sense, their form remains rigorous - this contrast between logic and illogic accounts for the success of nonsense verse, a genre less puerile than it appears. Thompson's poems, though intended for children, can all the more be appreciated by an educated adult readership attuned to the humour created by this absurdist formal play. The ingenuity of the text is heightened by the illustrations of Charles Henry Bennett, one of the artisans of the rise of Victorian comic illustration, who later became known for his contributions to the satirical weekly Punch. Anthropomorphic animals and humans with distorted features and exaggerated expressions populate this topsy-turvy world of nonsense literature.

A charming and skilfully illustrated work, representative of the English comic tradition.