Nonsense ‘Beasties’

Abstract

This chapter focuses on nonsense literature and highlights how Edward Lear’s writings for children, as much as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass; and What Alice Found There (1871) reflected the scientific context of the time, often examining their era’s ‘zoological enterprise’. In their children’s prose and poetry, nonsense becomes a means for Lear and Carroll to accommodate resemblances and thus to humorously supersede contemporary classificatory difficulties. As this chapter shows, by taking readers into museums of unfamiliar objects, new or mythical monsters and even composites, Lear’s and Carroll’s ‘curious beasties’ probe the era’s taxonomic practices.