1852). Nonsense verse was already a thriving form in chapbook culture and there were
talented humorists with verbal facility before Lear’s time, like the brilliant Thomas Hood
(1799–1845): Ben Battle was a soldier bold/And used to war’s alarms/But a cannon-
ball took off his legs/So he laid down his arms. Hood’s robust humour works perfectly in
his parody of Ann Taylor’s loving, but sentimental poem, ‘My mother’, The original
reads: Who fed me from her gentle breast/And hushed me in her arms to rest/And on my
cheek sweet kisses prest/ My Mother: Hood’s version reads: Who let me starve, to buy
her gin/Till all my bones came through my skin/Then called me ugly little sin/My
Mother’. Hood was a popular humorist of his day with a strongly developed social
conscience (he was a friend of Dickens). After his death, his children collected his poems
for the young in Fairy Land (1861). He is best known for his Comic Annual (1830–1839),
and ‘I remember, I remember’ in Friendship’s Offering (1826).
But it took a poet of Lear’s originality to bring nonsense verse to a head and explore
its possibilities with an inventiveness and playfulness which was quite stunning,
equalled only, perhaps, by Lewis Carroll. Lear was also a talented musician (he set some
of his good friend Tennyson’s poetry to music) and this ear for musical language is one of
the reasons why the verse is so good. He also drew gloriously quirky pictures to
accompany many of his poems.
Lear’s Nonsense Songs was published in 1871, the same year as Jabberwocky and The
Walrus and the Carpenter appeared in Alice through the Looking Glass which Harvey
Darton (writing about Alice in Wonderland as well) described as ‘the spiritual volcano of
children’s books...the first unapologetic...appearance in print...of liberty of thought in
children’s books’ (Darton 1932/1982:260). Carroll was also an accomplished parodist: he
plays deliciously with Watts’s verse and with Jane Taylor’s ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’:
Twinkle twinkle little bat/ How I wonder what you’re at. Most of Carroll’s best verse is
contained in the two Alice novels: his verse collection, Rhyme? and Reason?, is
surprisingly dull.
Later parodists included Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) who wrote The Bad Child’s Book of
Beasts in 1896—a book which sold out of its first print run in four days. It shows that
children have always been quick to recognise what they liked and Belloc has been a
favourite on nursery shelves ever since: the sheer, wicked, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top
quality of the verse makes it very satisfying. More Beasts for Worse Children followed in
1897 and Cautionary Tales for Children in 1907. Harry Graham (1874–1936) writes in
the same style, in books like Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (1899), although he
is nastier than Belloc: Father heard his children Scream/So he threw them in the
stream/Saying as he drowned the third/‘Children should be seen, not heard!’. When
Grandmama Fell off the Boat (1986), is a recent collection of the best of Harry Graham. A
later master of this art is the American humorist, Ogden Nash (1902–1971), as in
Parents Keep Out (1951). All three owe a debt to poets like Jane and Ann Taylor who
explored some of the possibilities of this genre in 1804.
Three men stood out as the century drew to a close: William Brighty Rands, William
Allingham and Robert Louis Stevenson. William Brighty Rands (1823– 1882) is best
known for Lilliput Levee (1869) and Lilliput Lyrics (1868): there are too many mentions of
the prettiness and kisses of little girls for my taste, but the verse is lively and amusing.
Rhymes for the Young Folk (1886) by William Allingham (1824–1889) is very appealing:
196 POETRY FOR CHILDREN