Nonsense Pages

If you want to try your hand at 'writing' poetry, and find out how difficult it is to make Nonsense, visit this page at prominence.com.

Of course there are a lot of Lewis Carrol links:

• Carroll's Works:
  • Fireblade Coffehouse - Lewis Carroll has the most complete collection of Carroll works online, including the original Alice's Adventures Underground.
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a good multimedia edition of Carroll's masterpiece.
  • Alice Books and The Hunting of the Snark at Wonderland Org.
  • The Nursery Alice
     
  • The Jabberwocky Variations has a number of translations and parodies of Carroll's most famous poem.
  • Sylvie and Bruno at Bibliomania.
  • Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, the Gutenberg e-text.
  • Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter Writing, by C.L. Dodgson.
     

• The Lewis Carroll Home Page is a very god starting point: with a page devoted to Carroll Texts On-line.

• Alice in Wonderland Web

• The Lewis Carroll Societry of North America home page.

• The Lewis Carroll Page by Cameron Newham has a biography of Carroll.

• Dan Visel also has a list of all Carroll works available online, as well as other Nonsense-related links (Abbot's Flatland, Baum's Oz books etc.).

• The Victorian Web has fine Carroll pages. Here you can also find information on Lear's friend Alfred Tennyson.

• Carroll was also a good photographer, with a preference for young girls, at Charles Dodgson - photographer you can find a good selection of his photographs and the text of his A Photographer's Day Out.

• Joyce Carol Oates's Personal Best article is devoted to Carroll's Alice books.

A collection of W.S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads in text and PDF formats. Project Gutenberg also has Fifty "Bab" Ballads.

Wilhelm Bush was more or less Lear's contemporary and their stories have much in common, from the illustrations (he is recognised as one of the nearest predecessors of comic art) to the often cruel endings. His Hans Huckebein and Max und Moritz are available, both in German and English. Another very nice set of pages with these and other works of his are Busch - inventor of the comic strip.

Christian Morgenstern also wrote Nonsense poems; all the following sites present collections of his Galgenlieder in German:

• Stefan Plattner - Morgensterns Galgenlieder
• Some poems
• Some more poems
• And a few more

E. A. Abbott's Flatland.

T.S. Eliot's Old Possum Book of Practical Cats demonstrates how influential ninteenth-century Nonsense literature was on modernist literature.

This is confirmed by the works of the surrealists, dadaists etc.: If you read German, you should have a look at Imaginären Bibliothek, with sections on word-play and dada texts.

Edward Gorey has written wonderfully illustrated Nonsense books, as well as illustrating two of Lear's most famous poems (The Jumblies and The Dong with a Luminous Nose); if I were you I would not miss Ariel Rosenthal's Edward Gorey Pages with articles, interviews, a bibliography and even animations!
Another Gorey page, also containing a Gashlycrumb Tinies alphabet (without illustrations): G is for Gorey.

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