ABSTRACT
The passage that Samuel Foote wrote to test Charles Macklin’s memory (p.21) led to some lively verbal clowning by some children, but nonsense verse is a surer bet – see the example above. Every language, I hope, has a tradition of this kind of material. English has, pre-eminently, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. There will be more of Carroll later, though nothing of Lear, who, with his Tonghy-Bonghy-Bo, his Quangle-Wangle, his toe-less Pobble, and his Dong with his worrying and (some say) Freudianly signi - cant luminous nose, has entranced a few children in every generation, and almost as certainly bored many more to tears. Either way, his owl and his pussycat have sailed in my imagination for most of my life. I remember, as a child, hoping that their marriage (symbolised, of course, by a ring that had previously adorned a Piggy-wig’s snotty nose, and performed by a turkey who lived, rather isolated, one might have thought, for an Anglican cleric, on the hill) was a happy one.
