ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the figuring of animal voices in the nonsense texts of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. Counting plays a prominent part in taxonomy and natural history and, as such, is inseparable from other linguistic operations to which we subject animals, such as naming, classifying, knowing, and silencing. In the 1830s, Lear worked as a natural history draftsman. He therefore bore first-hand witness to, and fully participated in, the Victorian practice of collecting and classifying animals from all over the Empire. In addition to precise counting, the story constantly uses words that signify large numbers or quantities to express nature’s abundance. Counting animals is replaced by the recounting of the text’s recurring sounds, as the children become enthralled by the alliterative rhythms of the nonhuman sounds all around them. Animal counting, however, works well only for smaller quantities, because, “as soon as one advances toward larger quantities, fuzziness increases”.
