There was a fine man called Ed...
...whose verses were very well read; he was bullied at school, life treated him cruel but he turned it to laughter instead
On one of his perpetual travels abroad, Edward Lear stopped at a village in Albania, next to a stream full of watercress, which he gathered and ate with bread and cheese.
The villagers thought of watercress as an inedible weed and gathered round to laugh at him. ‘Every portion I put into my mouth delighted them as the most charming exhibition of foreign whim,’ he recalled.
Youngsters began to gather new stuff for him to eat, the odder the better. ‘One brought a thistle, a second a collection of sticks and wood, a third some grass; a fourth presented me with a fat grasshopper – the whole scene was acted amid shouts of laughter, in which I joined in as loudly as any.’
Has there ever been a writer or artist quite so loveable as Edward Lear? That little tale encapsulates much about his character: his sense of fun, his friendliness, his eccentricity, the way he liked to see the world refracted through the prism of nonsense.
On another occasion, in Greece, he had ridden for 15 hours on horseback across mountain paths before sitting down on what he took to be a bank, only to hear the grunt of a cow, which sudsexual denly rose from under him and tilted him headlong into mud. He immediately got to his feet and burst into song:
‘There was an old man who said, “Now
I’ll sit down on the horns of that cow!”’
Unlike his down-in-the-dumps namesake King Lear, Edward used his imagination to turn tragedy into comedy. For him they were, if you like, two sides of the same coin.
Born in 1812, he was the youngest of his mother’s 21 children, and the 13th to survive infancy. Throughout his life he suffered from epilepsy, often enduring several fits a day. As he put it in an autobiographical verse, this gave him ‘A consciousness of unknown things, of reason overthrown’. But in those days epilepsy was also a cause of shame. Feeling a fit coming on, he would retreat into solitude, locking the door behind him. Even close friends, of whom he had many, had no idea how he suffered. ‘It is wonderful that these fits have never been discovered,’ he wrote in old age.
So his epilepsy set him apart. The sense of solitude was increased by his mother’s indifference to him, the bullying he suffered at school and something unspeakable – possibly abuse – that happened to him when he was 10. These days, publishers would no doubt badger him for a Misery Memoir but Lear was made of stronger stuff and spent a lifetime battling against self-pity. ‘The morbids are not allowed,’ he told himself. Instead, he used his genius to transform sadness into art and by doing so changed the way we see the world.
‘Lear’s great poems and songs are not “about” his life – they float free,’ writes Jenny Uglow in this wonderfully sharp and sympathetic biography. ‘But their gaiety and sadness feel even keener when set against the tensions he saw and suffered.’
Despite his trying circumstances, Lear’s energy was boundless. He taught himself to draw and, by the age of 13, sold pictures to passengers waiting for coaches. Before long, he was teaching classes of girls barely younger than himself. Though most of us know him best for his limericks and nonsense verse such as The Owl And The Pussycat, he was also a gifted landscape painter, who, in his early thirties, was summoned to teach Queen Victoria how to paint. His exact and vivid paintings of birds remain highly prized: he even has three particular types of bird named after him: a macaw, a cockatoo and a parakeet. As if all his other accomplishments were not enough, Lear was also a skilled musician, able to sing and play the piano, flute, guitar and accordion. Over the course of 30 years, he set Tennyson’s poems to music, much to the poet’s satisfaction. He was a friend to everyone and painter Holman Hunt called him ‘beyond doubt the most considerately kind and good-natured man alive’. On his travels around the world, he kept in touch with up to 400 different correspondents. Towards the end of his life, he felt that everyone on Earth must have written to him at one time or another, ‘with a few exceptions
perhaps, such as the prophet Ezekiel, Mary Queen of Scots and the Venerable Bede’.
I am lucky enough to own one of his letters and I have it framed on my wall: it is an exuberant affair, full of delightful descriptions of his travels, all finished off with a comical drawing of Lear himself in a huge hat, ‘a turban resembling a dinner table’, astride a donkey.
Above all, it is for his limericks that Edward Lear is remembered. Some people simply don’t get the point of them and find their repetition irritating. The New Zealand satirist John Clarke cruelly parodied them like this:
There was an old man with a beard. A funny old man with a beard. He had a big beard, A great big old beard. That amusing old man with a beard.
But, for me, they – and the surreal cartoons, half-comical, half-scary, that accompany them – constitute Lear’s outstanding achievement. More than 200 years since his birth, you can still spot his influence everywhere, from Beatles’ song lyrics to the poems of TS Eliot and John Ashbery, all the way to South Park and Family Guy.
Jenny Uglow’s publishers have really gone to town, creating a beautiful object, full of gorgeous colour illustrations and peppering the text with Lear’s verse and drawings.
Uglow herself is a perfect biographer and, under her benign gaze and beautiful prose, Lear emerges as a wholly original artist, as well as a heroic human being, who, as she says, ‘wanders hopefully, without hope, in a desperate refusal to despair’, not unlike The Dong With The Luminous Nose.