James Williams's account, the first book-length critical study of the poet since the 1980s, sets out to re-introduce Lear and to accord him his proper place: as a major Victorian figure of continuing appeal and relevance, and especially as a poet of beauty, comedy, and profound ingenuity.

James Williams is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of York. He is the co-editor, with Matthew Bevis, of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (OUP, 2016) and, with Anna Barton, of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense. His publications include essays on Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Alfred Tennyson, Samuel Beckett, and Victorian comic verse, as well as the introduction and historical notes to Alice Goodman, History is Our Mother: Three Libretti (NYRB, 2017).