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Edward Lear's illustrated nonsense verse, narratives, alphabets, and botanies are early and central examples of a type of literature for children that endures because it conveys humorous, vigorous, and accessible images of a skewed reality. Known as the laureate of nonsense, for the last 150 years Lear's work has been equally enjoyed by adults. In the nineteenth century, no less a critic than John Ruskin called the limericks "refreshing, and perfect in rhythm" and asserted, "I really don't know any author to whom I am half so grateful, for my idle self, as for Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors." In his 1927 essay on Lear, Aldous Huxley claims that the nonsense author is one of the "few writers whose works I care to read more than once," because "Lear had the true poet's feelings for words--words in themselves, precious and melodious, like phrases of music; personal as human beings."
Edward Lear was born on 12 May 1812 in the Holloway district of London, the twentieth child of the stockbroker Jeremiah Lear and his wife, Ann Skerrit Lear.
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