It makes no sense. Straight-laced and po-faced, the Victorians took life very seriously, as summed up beautifully by their monarch Queen Victoria when she said, “We are not amused”.

Yet they were tickled pink by Nonsense, the “inspired lunacy” of Victorian literature by writers such as Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and W S Gilbert.

They turned logic on its head so that “what you get is not what you might think, neither is what you get, what you see”, explains Sussex writer Louise Schweitzer in a new book on Nonsense called One Wild Flower, a title plucked from a picturesque description of Nonsense by the poet Walter de la Mare.

It is the first literary and academic study of Nonsense for a long while and a study 50 years in the making.

Ms Schweitzer’s obsession with the genre, which spawned such classics as Lear’s The Owl And The Pussycat from 1871 and Lewis Carroll’s 1865 fantasy Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, is firmly rooted in her childhood.

“My family communicated largely by exchanging lines from [Hilaire] Belloc’s Cautionary Tales or [TS] Eliot’s Practical Cats,” she relates amusingly in One Wild Flower

 “We children spent the long drives to Cornwall learning Lear’s limericks off by heart, and any suitor for my hand who could complete [Christopher Isherwood’s] ‘The Cormorant’, or ‘Common Shag/lays eggs inside a paper bag’ was in with a fighting chance.”

The origins of nonsense lie in nursery rhymes written generations before the Victorian era, but “between the years 1840 and 1975, it was as if the children’s nursery rhyme had climbed upstairs to join the adults after dinner,” writes Ms Schweitzer. “Here, it would meta-morphose into poetry characterised by a uniquely English talent for the absurd.”

But One Wild Flower doesn’t simply define and analyse Nonsense, it dissects the lives of the Victorian Nonsense triumvirate.

“I think the thing that really sprang out at me as I explored each of the writers is that none of them are famous for what they wanted to be famous for,” says Ms Schweitzer, who lives in Hove. “Lear wanted to be an artist, Carroll a mathematician, Gilbert a dramatist. It was by chance that each came to Nonsense.”

Talented at drawing, Lear, who was born 200 years ago this year, worked for the Earl of Derby, employed to draw his menagerie. Lear wrote poems to accompany his drawings to amuse the Earl’s children, but it was simply a hobby: his overriding ambition to be a great artist.

In the 1840s his distinctive coloured wash travel sketches caught the eye of the young Queen Victoria and she summoned him to Osborne House, where she engaged him as her drawing master for 12 sessions. In 1846, he published his Book Of Nonsense, a collection of limericks including the classic:

There was an Old Man with a beard,

Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!

Two Owls and a Hen,

Four Larks and a Wren,

Have all built their nests in my beard!’

Lear went on to publish The Owl And The Pussycat in 1867, also written for the Earl’s children, by now a man famous not for his oil paintings but for creating “pictures with words as well as words with pictures”, as Ms Schweitzer puts it. “He created a new way of arranging words so that their meaning became dislocated from familiarity, and sometimes invented a new vocabulary entirely: runcible, scroobious, uffish and slobacious.”

Like Lear, the Rev Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, created his fantasies for children. A severe stammerer, Carroll spent many summer months at the home of his aunts in Wellington Square, Hastings, and later would be a frequent visitor to his sister’s house at 11 Sussex Square, Brighton.

A gifted mathematician who taught at Oxford, he yearned for a clergyman’s life and, less than a year before he joined the church, he stayed with a speech therapist, Dr James Hunt, at Ore House, near Hastings. It’s entirely possible that it was during his stay here that he wrote parts of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland for Alice Liddell, a colleague’s daughter. Its publication in 1865 propelled him to fame and fortune.

WS Gilbert is not such an obvious Nonsense writer. Sir William Schwenck Gilbert’s name is more recognisable when linked with that of the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, who wrote 14 comic operas as Gilbert and Sullivan, including The Pirates of Penzance. They were based on Gilbert’s earlier collection of short illustrated verses called The Bab Ballads with “Nonsense in their absurd premises, their arbitrary interventions and their comic brutality,” writes Ms Schweitzer.

Ultimately, what all three men had in common was their ability to connect with children. “They all identified with children,” says Ms Schweitzer. “They all stayed child-like in many ways, and someone who stays child-like has a childish side. Nice men do not grow up.”

Factfile

One Wild Flower by Louise Schweitzer, published by Austin & Macauley, £13.99.

Visit www.austinmacauley.com

The work of Edward Lear is on display at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Beaumont Street, Oxford, until January 6.

Happy Birthday Edward Lear: 200 Years Of Nature And Nonsense covers all aspects of his work. Details at www.ashmolean.org.