Portrait of a potty genius
A biography of Edward Lear delves deeply into his life and rhymes.
A biography of Edward Lear delves deeply into his life and rhymes
Nestled among the crumbling tombs of the Foce Cemetery in Sanremo, Italy, is the headstone of Edward Lear – naturalist, landscape artist, travel writer and creator of nonsense. His grave stands at a distance from those of other British expatriates. “He is just round a corner,” writes biographer Jenny Uglow, “on a separate path. Slightly apart.”
In this absorbing biography, Uglow traces that path back to Lear’s birth in London in 1812, the 13th surviving child of Jeremiah and the emotionally absent Ann. As a child, he suffered from asthma and epilepsy, the latter then considered a shameful infliction. The weepy, poetryloving boy did not find school easy, but under the wings of his sisters, in particular his oldest sibling Ann, he was raised into a world of art, music, poetry, nursery rhymes and word games.
At 15, Edward was living, with Ann, in the Gray’s Inn district in London and he was selling drawings to coach passengers to make a meagre living. He was largely self-taught, and his drawings of plants, birds and animals quickly attracted the attention of wealthy patrons, naturalists and commissioning artists such as John Gould and John Selby.
Turning to landscape painting, he began to travel, first through England’s Lake District, then to the Continent, the Middle East and India, lured by remote topographies, historic towns and the constant pressure to accept more commissions for his watercolours and oils.
Based in Greece, then Italy, with regular returns to England, he lived in a strong network of fellow artists and writers – Alfred Tennyson and his wife, Emily, in particular – patrons and an army of wealthy travellers marching across Europe on their Grand Tour. He was admired as an accomplished artist, an affable friend, an engaging guest and a slightly potty uncle, larking about with childish absurdities and some “gleefully awful” rhymes (“There was an old man of Columbia/Who was thirsty, and called out for some beer”). But he was dogged by a deep sense of loneliness that he called “the Morbids”, the result, Uglow argues, of childhood rejection, recurring epilepsy (marked by an X in his diaries) and homosexual yearnings.
Lear’s landscape paintings reveal a deep sense of affinity with the natural world, but it is in his poems that the peripatetic artist addresses this outsider status, using nonsense, incongruity and, often, violence in the face of the everjudging “they”. Like Lear, “The Old Man of …” or “The Young Woman from …” seem impetuous, odd, eccentric. Like him, they are on the move, jumping over stiles, sailing away in a pea-green boat or, like the rejected Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, travelling on the back of a turtle, “With a sad primeval motion/Towards the sunset isles of Boshen.”
His nonsense verse, writes Uglow, was “the explosive expression of an outsider who had to smile and sing for lords and ladies, bishops and bankers … nonsense let him shout and fling his hat, making faces in a church, fulfil his old urge to jig down the stately corridors”.
Lear died in his home in Italy in
1888, leaving a legacy that continues to influence writers and delight readers; in 2012 The Owl and the Pussycat was voted Britain’s favourite poem.
In telling his story, Uglow proves to be a consummate biographer, writing with a voice that is as engaging and effervescent as the bespectacled man who defied the Morbids with the gleeful resolve of the Jumblies in their ocean-going sieve: “Our sieve ain’t big,/But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!/In a sieve we’ll go to sea!”