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3 December, 2018<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_EdwardLearSelfPortrait.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
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\u201cLear showing a doubting stranger his name in his hat to prove that Edward Lear was a man and not merely a name\u201d, 1866: Lear continually caricatured himself<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nSo wrote Edward Lear and a Miss Bevan in 1879. This extract from their longer collaboration is not a bad summary of what Sara Lodge seeks to convey in her new book on the Victorian author and artist whose \u201cThe Owl and the Pussycat\u201d was voted the nation\u2019s favourite childhood poem in 2014. \u201cSo little is known of the late Edward Lear, the nonsense Laureate,\u201d The Globe<\/em> commented in 1889, just a year after Lear\u2019s death at his Italian home in San Remo. Now, 140 years later, comprehensive biographies including Jenny Uglow\u2019s recent Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense <\/em>and Vivien Noakes\u2019s pioneering Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer<\/em>, mean that we know far more. However, Sara Lodge seeks to add her own unique perspective and, while she introduces the book as an \u201cacademic discussion\u201d, Inventing Edward Lear <\/em>is clearly borne of a very personal love of Lear\u2019s work. The book makes a valiant effort at tackling Lear\u2019s \u201cvolumes of stuff\u201d \u2014 his prolific output not just as a poet but as an artist, musician, travel writer, diarist and correspondent. In the final chapter, from which the book derives its title, Lodge engages with some of the contradictions at the heart of a man deeply concerned to create a persona with which to both express and conceal himself. <\/p>\n
Lodge\u2019s own personal fascination with Lear is easy to understand. While she never quite makes the claim that Lear was a tortured genius, he certainly had the background of one. Born in Holloway in 1812 as one of at least 17 children and subsequently neglected by his mother, Lear suffered the material consequences and social stigma of his stockbroker father\u2019s bankruptcy. This complex background was further darkened, Lodge claims, by the high likelihood that Lear was the victim of fraternal child abuse which he himself called \u201cthe greatest evil done to me in life\u201d. On top of this layered family trauma, Lear was a lifelong sufferer of asthma, epilepsy and depression. And yet, surprisingly, the product of these difficult circumstances was not a social recluse but a textbook extrovert. Lear described himself in an 1867 letter to Lady Waldegrave as \u201ca queer beast to have so many friends\u201d and Lodge concurs that \u201c[Lear\u2019s] talent for friendship was perhaps his greatest gift\u201d.<\/p>\n
Indeed, Lodge does well to convey vividly Lear\u2019s extraordinary genius for friendship, showing just how well acquainted he was among the great and good of Victorian society. Not only did he give drawing lessons to Queen Victoria but he knew the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson, who wrote a poem for him, \u201cTo E.L., on His Travels in Greece\u201d, while Tennyson\u2019s wife, Emily, was Lear\u2019s close confidante and correspondent. In addition, Lear was a regular guest of the Earl of Derby and later struck up professional and personal links with William Holman Hunt, whom Lear called \u201cDaddy\u201d in acknowledgement of the pre-Raphaelite luminary\u2019s artistic pre-eminence. It would appear that Lear\u2019s social compulsion, his need for connection and his desire and ability to make friends, shaped his choice of limerick and nonsense verse forms. Lodge posits that \u201cnonsense is . . . a game in which the reader is invited to take an active part\u201d and it is easy to see how literary absurdity draws together reader and writer as intimate co-conspirators in silliness. <\/p>\n
Although now best known for his nonsense poetry and limericks, Lear was a quintessential polymath. Lodge works hard to convince her readers of Lear\u2019s cultural and intellectual breadth, squarely resisting the reductive readings of critics such as George Orwell, who famously dismissed Lear\u2019s \u201camiable lunacy\u201d. More than once, Lodge reminds us that Lear was a voracious and eclectic reader with a \u201cwide range of cultural influences \u2014 from Byron to Bird and Baylis to Beuler, from Turner to Thomas Hudson and Tennyson.\u201d While still a teenager, Lear received commissions as a skilled zoological artist specialising in parrots \u2014 three species of which, including Anodorhynchus lear, otherwise known as Lear\u2019s macaw, are named after him. Indeed, for much of his life, Lear made a living as a travelling landscape painter of foreign scenes for subscribers back in England. In addition, although not formally musically trained, Lear set the poetry of Shelley and Tennyson to music and was a popular pianist and performer in some of the smartest drawing rooms of the time. Lodge seeks to capture the multiple facets of Lear\u2019s talent by avoiding the chronological structure of Jenny Uglow\u2019s biography in favour of academic essay-based chapters dealing with various aspects of his life and art. <\/p>\n
This structure has its benefits: the first chapter on \u201cMusic and Memory\u201d reveals Lear as a passionate and gifted musician and sheds fascinating light on other aspects of his art, not least his distinctive use of evocative noises in his nonsense verse. This chapter also introduces us to Lear\u2019s affinity with the deaf children of his friend, Sir Thomas Fairbairn, and the ways in which his drawings so often sought to convey sound in a visual way. <\/p>\n
Similarly, Lodge\u2019s second chapter, \u201cNonsense and Nonconformity\u201d, outlining Lear\u2019s furious rejection of biblical Christian orthodoxy, provides a novel and intriguing frame from within which to view rejection of authority in Lear\u2019s work. As Lodge points out, while much Victorian children\u2019s literature was didactically moralistic, Lear\u2019s limericks and nonsense verse celebrate those who do not conform to societal norms. The \u201cwayward old man of Kilkenny\u201d, the \u201cold Person of Chili\/Whose conduct was painful and silly\u201d, and the \u201cold Person of Ischia\/Whose conduct grew friskier and friskier\u201d, are just three examples of unrestrainable unruliness in Lear\u2019s work. Figures like these show how Lear, who could not bear sermons and exploded with rage at any suggestion of God as righteous judge, peoples his poems with characters who are prone to outbursts of inappropriate behaviour. \u201cI am weary of restraint ever,\u201d Lear wrote in his diary in 1860 and \u201cNonsense and Nonconformity\u201d strikingly introduces us to Lear\u2019s unrestrained anger at its sharpest edge. It is the chapter which brings us closest to the artist whose real character must at times have borne more resemblance to his \u201cirascible old person of Bangor\u201d than to his genial, bumbling self-portraits. <\/p>\n
Other chapters are less successful. A focus on \u201cQueer Beasts\u201d has Lodge ruminate confusingly, and ultimately fruitlessly, on whether inter-species love in Lear\u2019s poems might provide insights into the vexed question of his sexuality. However, this chapter also draws our attention to the extraordinary scientific context in which Lear, who spent many hours sketching at the London Zoo, lived. Lear was both a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and a keen, if late, reader of Charles Darwin\u2019s contemporary writing. As a result, Lear\u2019s work, especially his drawings of animals and his beautiful Nonsense Botany<\/em>, appears to both salute and parody the feverish scientific discovery and taxonomy of his day. Even as Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution suggested how, over time, one species might change into another, Lear was drawing fictional mutations of his own. Lodge perceptively comments how \u201c[Lear\u2019s] pen catches life at the quick edge of change\u201d, life in which people and animals are not so different after all.<\/p>\n
Indeed, many of Lear\u2019s sketches of human-animal hybrids consist of less than flattering versions of himself, as an irritating bee, surreal snail or portly partridge. Even when Lear sketched himself as human, he was prone to distort or exaggerate at least one of his fairly average physical features. Time and time again, Lear depicted himself as clumsier and more grotesque than he actually was. Lodge describes Lear\u2019s self-caricature as \u201ca celebration of a character whose every quality is ambiguously delightful and repulsive\u201d, the work of a man whose \u201cself-fashioning was insistently performative\u201d. Given what Lear\u2019s diary and letters reveal about his spells of acute depression \u2014 or what he called his \u201cmorbidiousness\u201d \u2014 it seems natural to make links between the constant distortions of his self-image and his mental illness. Lear\u2019s collaborative autobiographical verse with Miss Bevan continues:<\/p>\n
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His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big,
His visage is uncommonly hideous
And his beard it resembles a wig.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe great achievement of Lodge\u2019s richly illustrated and carefully researched and referenced work is to convey the reach and rigour of Lear\u2019s \u201cconcrete and fastidious\u201d mind alongside his discomfiting combination of dazzling self-confidence and intense self-loathing. Lodge compellingly contends that Edward Lear\u2019s greatest creation was not the Scroobius Pip or The Owl and The Pussycat or even his sweeping oil landscape of the Marble Rocks at Jabalpur in India, but Edward Lear himself. Like the Romantic poets, whose melodramatic style and self-regard he both admired and slyly parodied, Edward Lear was his own favourite subject. <\/p>\n
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\n![\"Default](\"http:\/\/standpoint.thewebsitespace.com\/wp-content\/themes\/tws\/images\/thumbnail-default.jpg\"\/)
Secrets and lies<\/a>
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\n![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/books-Carl_Spitzweg_047.jpg\"\/)
Insights and outings<\/a>
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\nBig Brother is watching you<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
<\/h3>\n
\nSecrets and lies<\/a>
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\nInsights and outings<\/a>
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\nBig Brother is watching you<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In her biography of Edward Lear, Sara Lodge engages with the contradictions at the heart of a man determined to both express and conceal himself<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6903,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}