The Book of Nonsense, first published in 1846, stands alone as the ultimate and most loved expression in English of freewheeling, benign, and unconstricted merriment. The poems of the book tell the stories of the owls, hen, larks, and their nests in his beard, and other fey fauna and peculiar persons. They all inhabit the uniquely inspired nonsense rhymes and drawings of Lear, who was a 20th child of a London stockbroker.