Nonsense & Common Sense: A Children’s Book of Victorian Verse

To be read aloud before bed or during a quiet moment, this book introduces a literature of delight to the whole family.

In the Victorian era, the best poets and literary minds created a special world for children. Today these poems, with their rollicking energy and old-fashioned values, are still brimming with charm, whimsy, and truth.

Here are offerings from Amy Lowell, Edward Lear, James Whitcomb Riley, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Louis Stevenson combined with treasures hidden for a century or more in scrapbooks, anthologies, and dusty copies of The Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas Magazine. Poems on the virtues of home and family, the seasons, animals, patriotism-and silly poems that mean nothing at all.

Charming full-colour pictures of the period decorate each page, and for parents and older readers, there is marginalia on the poem or poet.