Along with his contemporary, the great painter and poet Edward Lear (1812-88), Lewis Carroll, who was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), is one of the greatest Victorian purveyors of nonsense literature. Unlike Lear, Carroll poured his nonsense into fiction as well as some of the most famous and best-loved poems […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a glorious edition of the bestselling scouts’ manual Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Citizenship has become one of a select subset of books: the bestseller which hardly anybody has read. If, as Mark Twain […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle goes down the rabbit-hole in this enthralling history of children’s books of all kinds Around £2.2 billion is spent on books in the UK each year, and about one-fifth of this is spent on children’s books. The publishing industry […]