Edward Lear
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Edward Lear | |
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Lear in 1888
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Born | 12 May 1812 Holloway, Middlesex, England |
Died | 29 January 1888 (aged 75) Sanremo, Liguria, Italy |
Occupation | Artist, illustrator, writer, poet |
Nationality | British |
Ethnicity | English |
Citizenship | British, Italian |
Period | 19th century |
Genres | Children's literature, literary nonsense |
Contents
Biography
Early years
Lear was born into a middle-class family in the village of Holloway near London, the penultimate of twenty-one children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear.[3] He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Owing to the family's limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home and live together when he was aged four. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age.[4]Lear suffered from lifelong health afflictions. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, and bronchitis, asthma, and during later life, partial blindness. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father. The event scared and embarrassed him. Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition. His adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the instability of his childhood. He suffered from periods of severe melancholia which he referred to as "the Morbids."[5]
Artist
Lear was already drawing "for bread and cheese" by the time he was aged 16 and soon developed into a serious "ornithological draughtsman" employed by the Zoological Society and then from 1832 to 1836 by the Earl of Derby, who kept a private menagerie at his estate Knowsley Hall. Lear's first publication, published when he was 19 years old, was Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots in 1830.[6] His paintings were well received and he was compared favourably with the naturalist John James Audubon.Among other travels, he visited Greece and Egypt during 1848–49, and toured India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) during 1873–75. While travelling he produced large quantities of coloured wash drawings in a distinctive style, which he converted later in his studio into oil and watercolour paintings, as well as prints for his books.[7] His landscape style often shows views with strong sunlight, with intense contrasts of colour.
Throughout his life he continued to paint seriously. He had a lifelong ambition to illustrate Tennyson's poems; near the end of his life a volume with a small number of illustrations was published.
Relationships
Lear's most fervent and painful friendship involved Franklin Lushington. He met the young barrister in Malta in 1849 and then toured southern Greece with him. Lear developed an undoubtedly homosexual passion for him that Lushington did not reciprocate. Although they remained friends for almost forty years, until Lear's death, the disparity of their feelings for one another constantly tormented Lear. Indeed, none of Lear's attempts at male companionship were successful; the very intensity of Lear's affections seemingly doomed the relationships.[8]The closest he came to marriage with a woman was two proposals, both to the same person 46 years his junior, which were not accepted. For companions he relied instead on friends and correspondents, and especially, during later life, on his Albanian Souliote chef, Giorgis, a faithful friend and, as Lear complained, a thoroughly unsatisfactory chef.[9] Another trusted companion in Sanremo was his cat, Foss, who died in 1886 and was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson.
San Remo and death
Lear travelled widely throughout his life and eventually settled in San Remo, on his beloved Mediterranean coast, in the 1870s, at a villa he named "Villa Tennyson."Lear was known to introduce himself with a long pseudonym: "Mr Abebika kratoponoko Prizzikalo Kattefello Ablegorabalus Ableborinto phashyph" or "Chakonoton the Cozovex Dossi Fossi Sini Tomentilla Coronilla Polentilla Battledore & Shuttlecock Derry down Derry Dumps" which he based on Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos.[10]
After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in 1888, of the heart disease from which he had suffered since at least 1870. Lear's funeral was said to be a sad, lonely affair by the wife of Dr. Hassall, Lear's physician, none of Lear's many lifelong friends being able to attend.[11]
Lear is buried in the Cemetery Foce in San Remo. On his headstone are inscribed these lines about Mount Tomohrit (in Albania) from Tennyson's poem To E.L. [Edward Lear], On His Travels in Greece:
- all things fair.
- With such a pencil, such a pen.
- You shadow forth to distant men,
- I read and felt that I was there.[12]
Author
In 1846 Lear published A Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks that went through three editions and helped popularize the form. In 1865 The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple was published, and in 1867 his most famous piece of nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the children of his patron Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Many other works followed.Lear's nonsense books were quite popular during his lifetime, but a rumor developed that "Edward Lear" was merely a pseudonym, and the books' true author was the man to whom Lear had dedicated the works, his patron the Earl of Derby. Promoters of this rumor offered as evidence the facts that both men were named Edward, and that "Lear" is an anagram of "Earl."[14]
Lear's nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet's delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. A stuffed rhinoceros becomes a "diaphanous doorscraper." A "blue Boss-Woss" plunges into "a perpendicular, spicular, orbicular, quadrangular, circular depth of soft mud." His heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. One of his most famous verbal inventions, the phrase "runcible spoon," occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat, and is now found in many English dictionaries:
- They dined on mince, and slices of quince
- Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
- And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
- They danced by the light of the moon,
- The moon,
- The moon,
- They danced by the light of the moon,
- They danced by the light of the moon.
Limericks are invariably typeset as four plus one lines presently, but Lear's limericks were published in a variety of formats. It appears that Lear wrote them in manuscript in as many lines as there was room for beneath the picture. For the first three editions most are typeset as, respectively, two, five, and three lines. The cover of one edition[16] bears an entire limerick typeset in two lines:
- There was an Old Derry down Derry, who loved to see little folks merry;
- So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook at the fun of that Derry down Derry.
- There was an Old Man of Aôsta,
- Who possessed a large Cow, but he lost her;
- But they said, 'Don't you see,
- she has rushed up a tree?
- You invidious Old Man of Aôsta!'
- He reads but he cannot speak Spanish,
- He cannot abide ginger-beer;
- Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
- How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
Portrayals
Edward Lear has been played in radio dramas by Andrew Sachs in The Need for Nonsense by Julia Blackburn (BBC Radio 4, 9 February 2009) and by Derek Jacobi in By the Coast of Coromandel by Lavinia Murray (BBC Radio 4, 21 December 2011).Works
- Illustrations of the Family of the Psittacidae, or Parrots (1832)
- Mount Timohorit, Albania (1848)
- Tortoises, Terrapins, and Turtles by J.E. Gray
- Views in Rome and its Environs (1841)
- Gleanings from the Menagerie at Knowsley Hall (1846)
- Book of Nonsense (1846)
- Journal of a Landscape Painter in Greece and Albania (1851)
- The falls of the Kalama Albania 1851
- Journal of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria (1852)
- Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870)
- Nonsense Songs and Stories (1870, dated 1871)[17]
- More Nonsense Songs, Pictures, etc. (1872)[18]
- Laughable Lyrics (1877)
- Nonsense Alphabets
- Argos from Mycenae (1884), now in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge [19]
- Nonsense Botany (1888)
- Tennyson's Poems, illustrated by Lear (1889)
- Facsimile of a Nonsense Alphabet (1849, but not published until 1926)
- The Scroobious Pip, unfinished at his death, but completed by Ogden Nash and illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert (1968)
- The Quangle-Wangle's Hat (unknown)
- Edward Lear's Parrots by Brian Reade, Duckworth (1949), including 12 coloured plates from Lear's Psittacidae
- The 1970 Saturday morning cartoon Tomfoolery, based on the works of Lear and Lewis Carroll
Illustrations
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Ara macao from his first book, 1830
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Illustration by Edward Lear for There was a Young Lady of Hull
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See also
- A Beach Full of Shells, the 20th album by Musician Al Stewart pays tribute in the song “Mr. Lear”, celebrating Foss and many events from Lear's life.
- Lear's Macaw
- List of wildlife artists
- Paperback Writer by The Beatles refers to "A novel by a man named Lear", though no such novel exists.
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