Cultures, like caterpillars, crawl forward in contradictions, drawing back and then suddenly springing forward. The Victorians, famously puritanical, are also famous for providing the template of modern pornography—the words “Victorian classic” on a paperback have long meant a dirty book—while on the other side of that earnest, progressive Victorian rationality are the mad leaps of Victorian irrationality. All that sense, decorum, and propriety produced the first fully achieved literature of nonsense. Like the porn, it was amazingly generative, so that most works of Dada and Surrealism bear the marks of mid-Victorian Englishness, descending from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, as much as modern erotica takes on those nineteenth-century disguises.
Of the two great makers of nonsense, Carroll rightly has received more attention, because of his twists and quirks, because of his photography and the ghost of pedophilia falsely supposed to cling to his obsessions. About Lear less has been written, perhaps because there does not seem as much to say. His classic love ballad, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” was voted the most popular British childhood poem in 2014, and has been set to music by everyone from Stravinsky to Laurie Anderson. And no history of the limerick, or of light verse, can escape his imposing presence. But his work seems so self-enclosed and self-evident that championing him has felt unnecessary, even impudent. Lear has a certain amount of nursery nationalism about him; if you read him when you’re a small child, as more Brits seem to than Americans, he becomes, as W. H. Auden wrote, an entire land.
No one would seem better qualified to write a biography of Lear than Jenny Uglow, and now she has, with “Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Uglow is a matchless popular historian of the British nineteenth century; her 2002 book, “The Lunar Men,” is among the best social histories of British life to have appeared in the past twenty or so years. It’s an account of the intermingling of art and science in the circle around Joseph Priestley and the young Erasmus Darwin at the dawn of the industrial revolution in the Midlands, and the book revealed a kind of mini-Enlightenment centered in Birmingham.
When it comes to Lear, Uglow’s disability, if there is one, is that she is such an enthusiast that her enthusiasm crowds out, a little, her urge to explication. That nursery nationalism kicks in. She takes Lear’s greatness for granted, piling on limericks and sketch drawings as though we, too, had known them since infancy. Her enthusiasm can become a velvet rope separating us from her subject, more than an invitation to the dance. (Enthusiasm, whatever they may say, is never actually “contagious.” Eloquence about an enthusiasm alone is.)
What is eloquent and astonishing in Uglow’s biography is her demonstration of how embedded Lear was in Victorian art and culture. Given the eccentricity of his tone and the sad, self-mocking little-Englishness of, for instance, his verse “Self-Portrait of the Laureate of Nonsense”—
—you might have expected a second William Blake, living as a recluse in a row house in Lambeth. Not a bit of it: the younger Lear was a social figure, a permanent house guest, as deep in his time as Truman Capote was in his.
He knew everyone. Reading his melodic nonsense lines, one might entertain the thought of Lear as a kind of comic Tennyson, with the same gift for murmuring sounds disguised as philosophy—and then, reading Uglow, one discovers that Lear and Tennyson were friends, sharing ideas and rhymes. (In fact, Lear set much of Tennyson’s verse to his own music.) A diligent student of Charles Darwin might be struck by how much the creatures in Lear’s verse—the Pobble Who Has No Toes, et al.—are part of a new vision of life that includes an expanded place for chance and oddity in nature, with the extra idea that animal happiness comes from nothing more than filling a precarious niche for a necessary moment. Then one discovers that Lear was an attentive and informed reader of Darwin; he worked with John Gould, the natural-history entrepreneur who had actually picked apart the varieties of finch that Darwin had brought back from the Galápagos Islands. Lear has Ruskinian notes of dense, worried aestheticism—and then, reading the biography, we get Ruskin weighing in on Lear’s lyrics. We find, in Lear, the immersive, overstuffed feel common to all Victoriana—and here is Victoria herself, getting a drawing lesson from him. Because Lear was lodged far more securely in Victorian society than the donnish Carroll was, his art mirrors and parodies it more precisely. Carroll was making jokes about Oxford; Lear about London and the world.
Throughout, Uglow patiently traces the contours of a closeted gay man’s life. Lear participated in the classic Victorian pantomime in which an older man supported or befriended or mentored younger ones, often handsome and foreign-born fellow-pilgrims and guides. The pantomime tends to fall into two orders: in one, the relationship was discreetly consummated; in the other, the pathos of yearning and missing feels overwhelming. All of Lear’s romances seem, with perhaps one exception, to belong to the second category.
We know Lear best as a befuddled middle-aged man, but he was a prodigy of printmaking, a sort of Victorian David Hockney, with a charming if odd manner that brought him early fame and easy access to the famous. Born in 1812, he rose from an erratically middle-class background as—it sounds like the beginning of one of his limericks—the twentieth of twenty-one children, by his own account. (Uglow thinks that he might have been the sixteenth of seventeen.) Epileptic, and seemingly what we would now call “on the spectrum,” he became known as an ornithological illustrator when still a teen-ager. Under the indirect influence, and then the firsthand mentoring, of the master John James Audubon himself—they met on one of Audubon’s fund-raising trips to Britain—the adolescent Lear had the brilliant idea of publishing a picture book about parrots, just parrots, and nothing but.
If he had published only his “Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots” (1832), Lear would still occupy a solid paragraph in the history of Victorian art. (A parrot watercolor, rather than a “nonsense” sketch, graces the cover of Uglow’s book.) Lear’s parrots, for all their exoticism, strike a distinctly English note, and are almost like Regency political cartoons in their airy, bright-colored clarity. In fact, the differences in style between Audubon’s and Lear’s birds suggest almost perfectly realized national types. Audubon was drawn to the democratic and the encyclopedic—birds of all kinds occupying a common space. Lear’s subject was the eccentric individual, poised on its perch. His parrots display plumage, fashion, and intelligence, mixed with aristocratic unself-consciousness. Where Audubon’s parrots gyrate and foreshorten themselves—one can almost hear them chattering as they press their beaks toward the picture plane—Lear’s are sphinxlike in their mysterious stillness. Audubon fixed a whole nation of birds in action in the wild, even when he had had their corpses wired and posed beforehand. Lear’s parrots, drawn from living captives in the newly opened London Zoo, are rich and self-sufficient on their perches. Their minimal movement—a feather astray here, a wing akimbo there—makes them look uncannily like Gainsborough’s feathery society beauties, who are equally silent, equally sure.
His animal illustrations made his reputation, if not a lot of money, and on the strength of it Lear began to travel. For the next forty years, he was mostly on the road, painting pictures—sometimes in watercolor, sometimes in oil—of exotic places for subscribers at home. Greece, Egypt, Italy, India, Ceylon: for most of his life, Lear was known primarily as an intrepid traveller and landscape painter. The sharply etched nonsense verse (first published under a pseudonym) and hard-edged cartoons that we know best were sidelines to his dreamy watercolors and oils, which occupy a stylistic space somewhere between late Turner and Holman Hunt—a Turner-like love of light effects married to a Pre-Raphaelite conscientiousness about details.
Nothing in the pictures would make you think that the two Edward Lears, picturesque and parodic, were related. If Victorian history were as muddled as that of early Renaissance art, generations of scholars would be puzzling their way through the coexistence of two distinct Lears. Occasionally, in the more exotic reaches of his travels—as in a beautiful view of Ceylon that he painted in the eighteen-seventies—some small note of significant strangeness intrudes, ravishing color and breeze-blown reeds too intense to quite credit as reportage. But for the most part his work is dutifully, if cosmetically, reportorial, placing him in the line of the great British travellers, like Laurie Lee and Bruce Chatwin. He was always going somewhere.
One of the odd things about Lear’s pensive wanderings is how often they tracked the sanctified wanderings of the British Romantic poets. He loved visiting Shelley’s and Byron’s haunts, Greek shores and Italian lakes, and he patronized the same class of locals, but he did it in a spirit that was self-consciously comical, rather than defiantly adventurous. This immersion inspired his deeper art. By recalling the Romantic voyaging that had preceded him, he could evade the straitlaced Victorianism that surrounded him. If Victorian nonsense was a response to unbending Victorian sense, the forms it borrowed for this mockery were typically Romantic. Carroll takes Wordsworth’s imposing poem “Resolution and Independence” as his model for the White Knight’s song, from “Through the Looking-Glass,” and Lear uses the legendary excursions of Byron and Shelley as models for the wanderings of Dongs and Pobbles.
Even relatively late in Lear’s career, he was set alight by memories of the Romantics. Uglow makes the suggestive point that Lear’s great ode “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” published in 1876, must have been sparked by his surprising encounter, the previous year, with the Romantic wanderer Edward John Trelawny, the sailor and friend of Byron’s, who found Shelley dead and cremated his body on a beach in Italy. (Lear had presumed Trelawny to be as dead as the poet.) “The Dong, like Trelawny, is a Romantic relic roaming high Victorian terrain,” Uglow remarks. (One might add that the line about the Dong’s “weary eyes on / That pea-green sail” recalls Trelawny’s search for Shelley’s foundered boat.)
This residual Romanticism gives surprising pathos and dignity to the Dong’s ode. We learn the tale of how the graceful Jumblies once danced to his pipe, and of how one beautiful singer in particular, the Jumbly Girl, was the joy and fascination of his life but then took ship and sailed away. “For day and night he was always there / By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair, / With her sky-blue hands, and her sea-green hair.”
In the Dong’s world, the dance is over.
It is significant that the luminous nose of the Dong is not biological, like Rudolph’s. It is hand-tooled, like a steampunk machine,
His nose is not his wound but his bow—an up-to-date device, like an iPhone flashlight, for finding Jumbly Girls in the dark.
Victorian nonsense showed that parody can be a vehicle for the renewal of feeling. The Dong is in one way a mockery of all those other lonely Byronic wanderers. Yet his pathos and his persistence are meant to touch us, and they do. This is not merely mock-Romantic verse; it is, in its own way, very good Romantic verse, comparable to Byron’s “So We’ll Go No More a Roving,” which must have been one of its inspirations. The Dong, longing for his Jumbly Girl, is certainly a more persuasive, and pensively dignified, image of longing than Tennyson’s poet moaning maudlinly for his Maud. Mockery cleanses clichés, and then restores emotion.
Lear was a funny man from early on, entertaining with songs even the family of the Earl of Derby, whose son later served three separate terms as the British Prime Minister. (His residency began after he was commissioned to paint creatures in the Earl’s personal zoo.) But Lear didn’t publish his “Book of Nonsense” until he was thirty-three, and it was more for the amusement of his friends than as a serious money-making enterprise.
With the book’s hard-contoured, deliberately naïve sketches, he found a second manner of drawing that was more potent than his first. Lear, the consummate insider, became his own outsider artist. This was in part a Victorian pattern: Arthur Sullivan wrote cantatas to Longfellow’s verse and the airs for “The Mikado.” But no one was quite so extreme as Lear when it came to practicing the same art in a completely different mode.
The book worked. He eventually became famous for his limericks—though the term didn’t exist until much later—but he disarmed the limerick, so to speak, before he fired it. The classic dirty-joke limerick depends on a twist or turn in the last line. One famous limerick of this kind is attributed to Lear:
But it isn’t in his style, and the attribution seems doubtful. Lear’s typical limericks instead always insist on a repetitive last line:
The joke is always on the dignity of the formal designation. Someone is, insistently, something, usually a very particular if not terribly distinguished something—an Old Man on a hill, a young person of Smyrna, an old lady of Chertsey, a man with a beard. (They would have a different effect if they were more glamorous: it’s never, in Lear, a young person of Venice, or an old lady of Rome, or a man with a goatee.) Then something bizarre happens to or is made to happen by that person—he is horribly bored by a bee, or she sinks underground, or he runs up and down in his grandmother’s gown—and yet there they are, these people, at the end, still of Smyrna or Chertsey or just old. The activity may alter their life but it doesn’t alter their designation. Even threats of burning can’t change them. A name, once fixed, is fixed for good. Like Trollope’s Phineas Finn, the characters have experiences without arcs.
Lear’s verse also reflects the naturalist’s turn of mind. If Carroll’s nonsense satirizes the rise of philosophical idealism and the university, mocking people who think for a living and end up with absurd results, Lear’s is a mockery of Victorian natural science, particularly the life sciences. Taxonomy, naming new species, domesticating the wild—that’s the ground of his joking. When Carroll deploys the White Knight or Humpty Dumpty, he is mocking the intellectual’s habit of trying to think through things that you can’t really think through. (“But I was thinking of a plan / To dye one’s whiskers green, / And always use so large a fan / That they could not be seen.”) When Lear invents the Pobble Who Has No Toes, he is mocking the naturalist’s need to give a name to each new thing. (As with his parrots; Lear gave a new Latin name to at least two.) Carroll is obsessed with un-naming, with showing us how odd names are. (“ ‘The name of the song is called “Haddocks’ Eyes.” ’ ‘Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?’ Alice said, trying to feel interested. ‘No, you don’t understand,’ the Knight said, a little vexed. ‘That’s what the name is called. The name really is, “The Aged, Aged Man.” ’ ”) Lear is obsessed with the power of naming, with sticking a tag on a thing which gives it a place at, and on, the table.
The nonsense in Lear is suggestive of new sense, more than cracking wise at the old kind. It is not an accident of the language that some of Lear’s terms, read today, have erotic-slang overtones: “What a beautiful Pussy”; the Dong. Not that he intended those overtones. It’s our need to fill up space with meaning that makes us rush into verbal voids, supplying words that have not yet been given meaning with meanings that are always seeking new words. (Nonetheless, the use of “dong” to mean “penis”—as in Long Dong Silver, who contributed so much to the politics of the American judiciary—seems to follow Lear’s use of it, though a competing case is that it derives from the onomatopoetic “dong” that results when a clapper hits a bell.) Dongs must ring.
For a long time, Lear’s amours had to be cloaked in the neat periphrases of “bachelordom” and eccentric reclusion. Uglow, a circumspect biographer, does discuss his many friendships with women, and some avowals about wanting a wife, but the general outline seems clear enough, and she devotes many forthright pages to Lear’s unbearably melancholy love life. He was, in the Victorian manner, of the confirmed-bachelor, not-made-for-women’s-comfort kind. “Alack! For Miss Cotton!” he wrote, about a woman whom friends were trying to fix him up with. “And all admirers. But we all know about the beautiful glass jar which was only a white one after all, only there was blue water inside it.” A white jar trying to fill itself with blue water to “pass”—an image made all the more fetching by the truth that it was often in crossing blue water that a gay Victorian could hope to find happiness. His friend John Addington Symonds—it was for Symonds’s two-year-old daughter that Lear wrote “The Owl and the Pussycat”—could write frankly of gay love abroad, “All kinds of young men—peasants on the Riviera, Corsican drivers, Florentine lads . . . used to pluck at the sleeve of my heart.” (The fact that a leading voice for male love was contentedly married, with a two-year-old daughter, is also very much part of the classic Victorian picture.)
Abroad, it was possible for men to live more or less openly as homosexuals—if not “out” as lovers, then certainly enjoying the kind of intimate male friendship that was so much a part of Victorian values, the kind that Tennyson had celebrated in his relationship with Arthur Henry Hallam in the most famous of all Victorian poems, “In Memoriam.” Lear tried repeatedly to make that kind of lasting connection with a male companion, and seems always to have failed. Frank Lushington, a Cambridge-educated young man who became a successful lawyer, was one of the most intense of these amours. On an 1855 trip to Corfu, which Lear clearly intended as a courting expedition, Lushington relegated Lear to the friend zone, seeing him only, Uglow says, as “an older, kindly, amusing mentor.” It must have been agonizing, and it nearly broke Lear’s heart. He found comfort only in painting Corfu in a Turneresque mode. (At one point, he found there a truly Lear-like scene, of farm animals brought on boats from Albania that were purposefully tipped into the sea to swim ashore: “All the harbour is full of black pigs—swimming away like a shoal of porpoises!”)
The one exception to his unfulfilled romantic life seems to have been a connection he made in Rome, around 1840, with a Danish painter named Wilhelm Marstrand, who belonged to a circle of German and Scandinavian artists. Lear burned his diary for that year, but Marstrand’s portrait of him in pencil is by far the most sympathetic and sensual image of Lear anyone ever composed: for once he looks not silly but sensitive and handsome, even though, as shy men will, he hides behind glasses and affects newly sprouted facial hair. “Do you know I wear very considerable moustaches now?” he wrote with delight to a friend. Twenty years later, now on his way to bachelorhood, he wrote of the time “when W. Marstrand & I used to be always together!!”
One striking truth about Lear is how little nonsense writing (and drawing) he actually did. Compared with Carroll’s two masterpieces, his long epic poem about the hunting of the Snark, and his massive “Sylvie and Bruno” and “Sylvie and Bruno Concluded,” it’s a meagre harvest. Lear, as Uglow’s book reminds us, was a visual artist in the first and last instance, with the rhymes and jokes the smaller, if longer-lived, portion.
Lear’s last years were mostly good, if persistently melancholy, spent largely in Italian villas, with Ruskin himself offering a late critical tribute to his nonsense. His last diary entry was addressed to Frank Lushington, and so was a final letter. His literary afterlife has been happier, and richer. Carroll these days seems mostly to inspire scientists and philosophers; Lear inspires poets. John Ashbery credited Lear as one of his chief influences, and Wallace Stevens’s murmuring measures echo him as well: “There was a mystic marriage in Catawba, / At noon it was on the mid-day of the year / Between a great captain and the maiden Bawda . . . Each must the other take not for his high, / His puissant front nor for her subtle sound, / The shoo-shoo-shoo of secret cymbals round.”
In the middle part of the twentieth century, Lear inspired two remarkable works of literary art. One is Auden’s poem to Lear, written around the same time as his dedications to Henry James and Sigmund Freud: “Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white / Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose / Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night, / A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.” Lear becomes one of Auden’s furtive masters, remaking the imagination through the power of wounded withdrawal.
The other is an extraordinary short story by Donald Barthelme from 1971, called “The Death of Edward Lear.” It invents a scenario far from the actual circumstances of Lear’s death, which occurred peacefully, at his Italian villa, in 1888. Barthelme turns Lear’s death into a parody of Victorian gentility, with Lear organizing the event as something between a picnic and a coronation: “Mr. Lear next offered a short homily on the subject of Friendship. Friendship, he said, is the most golden of the affections. It is also, he said, often the strongest of human ties, surviving strains and tempests fatal to less sublime relations.” But it’s a mordant evocation, too, of the miseries of any old artist on his deathbed: “He then displayed copies of his books, but as everybody had already read them, not more than a polite interest was generated.” The story also contains some shrewd commentary on Lear’s verse. Barthelme writes, “Then something was understood: that Mr. Lear had been doing what he had always done, and therefore, not doing anything extraordinary. Mr. Lear had transformed the extraordinary into its opposite. He had, in point of fact, created a gentle, genial misunderstanding.”
That’s true. Lear doesn’t find the amazing in the ordinary; he finds the ordinary in the amazing. In Carroll, the other side of the Victorian looking glass shows us a hallucinatory and satiric version of the normal side. In Lear, everything strange is, to use the word of our decade, “normalized”:
Life on top of the wall for the Discobboli is no different than life anywhere else. Lear’s people venture into the mouths of volcanoes and report that they are not hot at all. This gift for creating pathos without sacrificing absurdity is what makes “The Owl and the Pussycat” one of the greatest love poems in the language, of a kind that even Carroll could never write. (When Carroll wanted to be moving, he wrote with a much more conventional Victorian lyricism, as in the prefatory and postscript verses to the Alice books.) In “Jabberwocky,” conventional meaning rushes out, and has to be restored by Humpty Dumpty’s explanations. In “The Owl and the Pussycat,” meanings rush in:
Not even Humpty Dumpty could explain what a runcible spoon is. We know it by its verbal vibration, by its presence, by its sheer runcibleness.
It was a dream poem of a love he had never enjoyed, helped along by a well-wishing community. (“ ‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling / Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’ ”) This gift for making something felt without having first to make it familiar is one that we later admire in Beckett. Nonsense suggesting sense is a familiar pattern. Nonsense suggesting the numinous is not. G. K. Chesterton once wrote that Lear’s rhymes “constitute an entirely new discovery in literature, the discovery that incongruity itself may constitute a harmony,” and that if “Lewis Carroll is great in this lyric insanity, Mr. Edward Lear is, to our mind, even greater.” Lyric insanity! A menagerie marriage with a pig supplying a ring ends as the perfect image of romance. An affair that should be silly, absurd, and ridiculous resolves into a poem that is touching, poignant, and dignified. It’s a modern melody, and Lear its first plaintive piper. ♦