Edward Lear’s Complete Verse

Intolerant, censorious, punitive, violent in spirit and deed, „they” are the majority, the great army of law-abiders and well-behavers, against whom the „Old Men” and other eccentrics of these rapid narratives are forever pitted. The fate of the Old Man of Whitehaven, who „danced a quadrille with a Raven”, is typical:

But they said – „It’s absurd, to encourage the bird!”
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

„They” appear so frequently and anonymously, that we forget to ask who „they” are, accepting them as one of the givens of life, as inescapable as the weather. Today, when the limerick is expected to build to a blatant pay-off in its final line and has become, in effect, the poetic form that „they” love best, the taste for Lear’s treatment of it may have been all but lost. / Christopher Reid Times Literary Supplement 12/20/01

Edward Lear
THE COMPLETE VERSE AND OTHER NONSENSE
Edited by Vivien Noakes
566p. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. £20 .