Lear’s island with a single tall tree
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Fables and talesFour little children who went round the worldEdward Lear, published 1871The first days of the voyage, with fish for dinner and a happy party on board.easy352 characters
Fables and talesThe Fox and the GrapesAesop, published 1867A famished fox tries every trick to reach the grapes, then calls them sour.medium303 characters
ProseLittle Women, the gray dawn of ChristmasLouisa May Alcott, published 1868Jo wakes early on Christmas morning and finds the gift her mother promised.easy363 characters
The island in this passage is made of water surrounded by earth and holds a single tree five hundred and three feet high. Lear liked exact figures in impossible places, and the tale parodies the travel writing of his day. It first appeared in 1871, when Lear was living in Italy. The full text sits in Nonsense Books at Project Gutenberg, which gathers several of his volumes in one file.
Where this text comes fromAn island made of water surrounded by earth is an inversion, not a mistake, and Lear states it in the same tone he uses for the distance sailed and the height of the tree. The parody works on precision: travel books of the period were full of exact measurements offered as proof of reliability, so measuring an impossible thing to the foot is the sharpest way to mock them. The figure given for the tree is oddly specific and that oddity is the joke.
What you might not noticeThe height of the single tree is given to the exact foot, a level of precision no traveler could have obtained, applied to an object that could not exist. Source
What it trainsThree digits appear in 335 characters, which is unusual for prose here and pulls the hands to the number row in the middle of a sentence. Seven commas and two semicolons divide two sentences averaging thirty words. One hyphenated compound, gulf-stream, is written with the hyphen that modern English has dropped. Only two capitals appear and neither falls inside a sentence, so the Shift load is almost entirely in the punctuation rather than in the letters.
From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits
Public domain status: published in 1871, more than 125 years ago. public domain, Project Gutenberg
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