“It is queer,” Edward Lear once wrote to a friend, “that I am the man as is making some three or four thousand people laugh in England all at one time. . . .” But to staid and sensible Victorians, who ...

“The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” has delighted generations of children, and this thoroughgoing picture book biography carefully documents the life of its author, Edward Lear (1812–1888). Hill details ...