Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense
Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2018)

Probably the definitive biography of a polymath “who was large, who contained multitudes”

My title paraphrases Walt Whitman’s declaration in his classic work, “Song of Myself.”

Briefly, Edward Lear was born in 1812 in Highgate, near London, and died in 1888, in San Remo, Italy. He was the 20th of 21 children, but many of them — as was often the case — did not live past infancy. He was an English landscape painter who is more widely known as the writer of an original kind of nonsense verse and as the popularizer of the limerick. His true genius is apparent in his nonsense poems, which portray a world of fantastic creatures in nonsense words, often suggesting a deep underlying sense of melancholy. Their quality is matched, especially in the limericks, by that of his engaging pen-and-ink drawings. (Thank you, Encyclopedia Brittanica)

The Owl And The Pussy-Cat is probably his best known work. To give you at least a sense of Lear prime, here are the first two verses:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

I was a child when I first encountered what Lear characterized as his “nonsenses.” Yes, I chortled with delight and assumed the limericks had been composed by a “really goofy” person. I knew nothing about him until many years later and even then, I was only vaguely familiar with his creative talents, as indicated by this Wiki nugget: “His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes, and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson’s poetry.”

Jenny Uglow has written what will probably be considered the definitive biography of Lear, in large part because she so much enjoys the pleasure of his company. Those who read her book will share her delight. She confides to her reader that every time she revisits his nonsense (i.e. limericks and songs), she is amazed afresh. “They make me laugh with surprise. They are full of joys, shocks, rule-breaking freedoms and assaults. They open a window onto another world. Lear’s poems exist both within and outside the rules. They follow the logic of syntax, the linking of rhyme and off-rhyme, the strict dance of rhythm, but are peopled but oddities whose actions are bizarre, upsetting their neighbors.

A foremost Lear scholar, Vivien Noakes, has pointed out that “When Lear was first writing there was no such thing as an established literary genre of nonsense.” He was by all accounts a pioneer, to be sure, but also frustrated throughout his wandering global travels, never fulfilling what seems to have been an impossible dream. As Noakes observes, ” his search wasn’t for physical love, but for someone who would want him as a person in the way that his parents had not wanted him as a child. Through his sensibility and charm he was sought after as a friend, and he loved to be with children because they liked him and showed it. But what he was searching for, and never found, was real spiritual involvement with another person.”

These are among the hundreds of Uglow’s comments that caught my eye, also listed to suggest the thrust and flavor of her lively and eloquent narrative:

“Wherever he traveled, Lear stayed a Londoner.”

By his late teens, Lear “had an eye for detail that would make him one of the finest natural history painters of his day.”

“Birds gave Lear joy all his life, not in cages but in the freedom of the skies,lakes and rivers, forests and gardens. Every journey he made was crowned with birds.”

“In his poems, Lear had his own menagerie where all the creatures were free.”

“If Lear was an artvist of promise, a talented, published lithographer, he was also, in the third person, already the ‘Mr.Lear’ that children, friends and strangers would love: comical, accident prone, and non-sensically pleasant to know.”

“Lear took up his nonsense when tired, or bored, or when it was too dark to paint, images and words swimming upo from a realm below reason.”

“In a deep way, hard to articulate, Lear’s nonsense is comprehensible as both the foolery of childhood and foolery of carnival, turning the world upside down.”

“The key quality of the nonsense rhymes is surprise: this idx what makes us laugh. They ask us to believe in peculiar people, to accept strange happenings, to inhabit a world where butter is used to cure plague, a hatchet to catch a flea.”

“He had a sense of transcendent being, or at least of a power suffused in the universe; he accepted Christ as a teacher, and he clung to the hope of an afterlife.”

“Lear liked children, their spontaneous affection, their cheerful lust for violence, their acceptance of the odd. He avoided the Victorian doublethink that saw children as both innocentsto be cherished and savages to be tamed: he just saw them as individuals and tried to enter their world. he was entertained by their curosity, their language-struggles and non sequiturs. They made him laugh.”

“Nonsense let him snort and fling his hat, make faces in church, fulfill his old age to jig down the stately corridors of Knowsley. It defied gravity, in all senses, even if it risked a fall.”

Lastly, “Lear was an intelligent, self-aware depressive. Excitement ripples through his response to wide vistas, brilliant light, the great flight of birds. But he was easily knocked down and as he grew older the lows lasted longer than the highs. The triggers were darkness, cold, noisy crowds, loss of intimacy, memories of happiness lost. Abandonment, perhaps instilled by his childhood rejection [especially by his parents], was the worst of his fears.”

I urge those who read this brief commentary to allow Jenny Uglow to share with them an abundance of reasons why the pleasure of Edward Lear’s company is so delightful, yes, but also thought-provoking.  As I was about to complete reading the book the first time, I also felt a sadness that someone who had brought so much pleasure to others never found the nature and extent of happiness in his personal life that he had longed for since childhood.