children, Songs of Two Seasons (1891), Flowers Bring and Songs Sing (1893), has been
forgotten. Her forte was nature poetry with a delicate touch, which is evident from this
extract from ‘The way of the wood’ in A Pomander of Verse (1895):
Sweet chestnuts droop their long, sharp leaves
By knotted tree roots, mossed and brown,
Round which the honeysuckle weaves
Its scented golden wild-wood crown.In the same period in America, Eliza Follen (1787–1860), a prominent abolitionist and
editor of the periodical, Child’s Friend, produced New Nursery Songs for all Good
Children (1832), Little Songs (1833), and The Lark and the Linnet (1884), while Clement
Clarke Moore, a Hebrew scholar (1779–1863) established his place in history by
publishing A Visit from St Nicholas (often known as The Night before Christmas) in 1823.
One of the many women writing for children to fall into obscurity was Sara Hale (1788–
1879), a journalist who wrote for various periodicals and who edited Boston Ladies’
Magazine and The Juvenile Miscellany during the 1830s. She was author of the
enduringly popular ‘Mary’s lamb’ and Poems for Our Children (1830). Eugene Field (1850–
1895), a literary columnist in Chicago, wrote poems of modest accomplishment, many of
which are still anthologised today. His best known collections are A Little Book of
Western Verse (1889) and With Trumpet and Drum (1892), but it was his poem, ‘Wynken,
Blynken and Nod’ that was published in many picture book versions: Wynken, Blynken,
and Nod one night/Sailed off in a wooden shoe/Sailed on a river of misty light/ Into a
sea of dew. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807–1882) The Song of Hiawatha (1885)
still enthrals children in Britain and America over a century later.
Robert Browning’s (1812–1889) The Pied Piper of Hamelin first put in an appearance in
Dramatic Lyrics (1842), and was immediately adopted by the juvenile market. Elizabeth
Barrett Browning wrote the passionate, but now forgotten, ‘The Cry of the Children’.
(F.G.Kenyon edited a volume, The Brownings for the Young, in 1896.) But it was ‘between
1865 and 1875 [that] the entire course of juvenile poetry was altered by two bachelor
writers who had little in common except an elfin lightsomeness and a love of other
people’s children’ (Shaw 1962:431); 1846 was actually the year when Edward Lear
(1812–1888) published A Book of Nonsense: the other bachelor was, of course, Lewis
Carroll (1832–1898).
Lear was first and foremost an artist who struggled all his life to earn a precarious
living as a professional painter specialising in landscapes. The nonsense verse came
about as a refuge from the trials and irritations of his life—epilepsy, lack of funds, an
eccentric personality and regular bouts of severe depression. Like many of those writing
after him who chose to express themselves primarily in nonsense, Lear felt somewhat
alienated from society. The urge to comment sardonically on the conventional world and
escape from its restrictions is evident in the verse: ‘My life is a bore in this nasty pond/
And I long to go out in the world beyond’. Friendship with children and writing for them
gave him a welcome respite from his problems.
Lear made the limerick form his own, though it really began some years before with
Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen by Richard Scrafton Sharpe (1775–
TYPES AND GENRES 195