Edward Lear: A Biography

Rex Roberts

Long celebrated as the author of "The Owl and the Pussycat" and recently rediscovered as a landscape painter, Edward Lear has emerged as one of the formidable figures of 19th-century England - a larger-than-life and gloriously eccentric Victorian, part naturalist, part artist, part raconteur. He wrote voluminous letters and kept meticulous journals of his travels throughout the Mediterranean, where he sketched and painted most of his life, all the while writing limericks and nonsense verse such as his well-known self-portrait (see sidebar).

Lear was born in May 1812, the 20th of 21 children. When he was four, his father went bankrupt trying his hand at the new profession of stockbroker and apparently served time in a debtors' prison - his wife sent him six-course dinners daily. Despite this, Lear seems to have had a normal childhood, except that he suffered from epilepsy - 10 to 15 seizures a month.

"Edward brooded over his epilepsy," writes Peter Levi in Edward Lear: A Biography (Scribner, 382 pp), establishing from the start the moody side of his subject's character. His sister Harriet taught him how to control the spasms, "and he did so to the degree that few or none of his friends guessed the secret until he was dead and it was found in his diaries." Levi speculates that he took up his "active, outdoor landscape painter's life as a kind of therapy."

Lear was raised by his sister Ann, although Levi is unclear about when she took over his tutelage. (He attended school for but a short spell and perhaps as a result was a terrible speller, which like everything in his life he turned into humor: "Two phier phlies eggspatiated up and down the walks, keeping to regular path like respectable Christians.") Ann taught him to draw the usual birds, flowers and shells, and he composed parodies of poets and wrote songs. "At that stage he might have been a vicar's daughter," notes Levi. Lessons in natural history and art coincided, but "there was still thought to be something old-maidish about natural history."

Certainly Lear would become a kind of old maid, a lifelong bachelor if not a homosexual, as previous biographers have suggested. (Levi argues adamantly to the contrary: "He was a warm, affectionate, somewhat frustrated man, who tried to marry but failed, and that is all - there is no evidence whatever of homosexuality in his life.") He attached himself to surrogate mothers - after Ann it was Emily Tennyson, wife of Alfred - and he developed into a chronic if comic complainer, restless when home in England or at his villa in Italy, yet lonesome when away on his many sketching tours. He indeed made stabs at "the marriage fantasy," as he once called it, but his most serious proposal was to a woman 46 years younger.

Clearly Lear was a true eccentric, a man of contradiction and ambiguity. He became one of the most vigorous travelers of this time, determined to capture the grand vistas of Italy and Greece - still wild country in the early 19th century - as well as Egypt, Palestine, Corsica, Albania, Corfu and India. All the while, however, he obsessed about his health, his finances, his stature as an artist. He had established himself as a rival of Audubon with two volumes of colored lithographs, Parrots and Owls, undertaken while he was still in his teens, yet he suffered crises of self-confidence until his death. At age 38, for example, he fell under the spell of Holman Hunt, 23-year-old founder of the Pre-Raphaelites - Lear's greatest misjudgment, according to Levi, who has nothing good to say about Hunt or his school. "One must assume that Pre-Raphaelite technique, based on the German Nazarenes, a lugubrious fellowship, satisfied a sense of guilt," writes Levi. "Painting must not be easy, it must be drudgery and intricate in detail, so that one comes to hate doing it."

As with Lear's sexuality, Levi has decided opinions on his art: In brief, Lear was a genius. The author manages to compare his subject's watercolors and oils favorably not only with those of Poussin and Turner, but also of Van Gogh and countless others; he makes similar boasts for his verse in regard to Tennyson, Keats and even Shakespeare. "My first intention was to explore Lear's poetry, and I suppose that I thought a note on his travels would do no harm, since I had explored and loved many of the same places," writes Levi. "I swiftly discovered (but a little too late) the magnitude of this task, and I have tried to do justice to every aspect of it."

As this revealing disclaimer suggests, Levi not only admires Lear but also identifies with him; that's all well and good, except the author uses this as a license to comment personally on the events he describes, an annoying and sometimes silly practice. Here's Levi describing Lear as he waits for passage to England, using the time to itemize his garden: "carnations, Guernsey lilies, hollyhocks, datura, geranium, passion-flower and solanum, which last, if I may intrude, I regard as the most deadly weed and puller down of walls, but Edward Lear liked it."

The end result of this odd narrative approach, as well as Levi's inability to choose among details or make clear the chronology of Lear's peripatetic life, is tedium. At Avezzano in 1843, Lear and his touring companion, Charles Knight, "passed Sulmona without thinking of Ovid who was born there: they did not even see the ruined temple baptized as his birthplace." Levi continues, "By the end of the month they were at Chieti, with more passport trouble to amuse them while a horse was shod. Charles took a carriage to Pescara, Edward walked, and they swam in the Adriatic, then came back to Chieti and bought straw hats." And so it goes for hundreds of pages, with Levi pausing to critique Lear's always marvelous oils and watercolors.

Lear left a complete record of his life in the world: He was a prolific letter writer - up to 20 a day - and kept 40 thick diaries, a complete set of which could be had for 5[pounds] in 1930. (As late as the 1950s one could buy a Lear watercolor for 5[pounds] or 10[pounds].) While Levi has added to the effort to restore this talented man to his place in the pantheon of renowned Victorians - he is quite good describing Lear's working habits, both painting and writing, as well as his fascination with new techniques from lithography to photography - the author sheds no light on the soul of this charming but solitary man. Certainly the people in Lear's life, from his eminent English friends to his faithful servant and companion Giorgis Kokalis, who traveled with Lear for three decades, remain two-dimensional figures. In short, Levi sticks to the facts. But in Lear's case, the facts are less important than nonsense.

The Illustrated Lear

A number of children's books featuring Edward Lear's nonsense verse, including the two below, recently have appeared in bookstores. Many people believe that Lear is the best illustrator of his own work, as the sketch of himself startled by Foss the cat (right) argues. Below, an excerpt from the poet's whimsical self-parody:

How pleasant to know Mr Lear! Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer But a few think him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious, His nose is remarkably big; His visage is more or less hideous, His beard it resembles a wig.

From There Was an Old Man ...

There was an Old Man of Dumblane, Who greatly resembled a crane; But they said, "It is wrong, since your legs are so long, To request you won't stay in Dumblane?"

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers, Leastways if you reckon two thumbs; Long ago he was one of the singers, But now he is one of the dumbs. ...

He weeps by the side of the ocean, He weeps on the top of the hill; He purchases pancakes and lotion, And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

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!

From the Pelican

Chorus and Other

Nonsense

Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee! We think no birds so happy as we! Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill! We think so then, and we thought so still!

Rex Roberts is deputy managing editor of Insight.

COPYRIGHT 1995 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning