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Edward Lear's Gift of Nonsense
From: The New York Public Library
| By:
Nancy Finlay |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Like many other children's authors of his time, Edward Lear wrote his nonsense stories and songs for real children. He originally composed his most famous work, A Book of Nonsense, as a gift for the grandchildren of the Earl of Derby. Nancy Finlay describes the life of this fascinating author and explains how he began writing for the offspring of some of England's most prominent citizens. She accompanies her accounts with drawings reproduced from a manuscript copy of A Book of Nonsense, which is held by The New York Public Library's Spencer Collection. |
  lmost everybody knows that Lewis Carroll wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for a real little girl named Alice Liddell, and many people are aware that Beatrix Potter wrote the first version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit for a real little boy named Noel Moore. Few people, however, realize that Edward Lear also wrote his nonsense songs and stories for actual children. A manuscript containing 46 poems and pictures from Lear's A Book of Nonsense, which was acquired by The New York Public Library, was originally written as a gift for a Victorian child. |
Edward Lear was born in 1812 in the London suburb of Upper Holloway. He was one of 21 children; with so many mouths to feed, it is perhaps not surprising that his family suffered financial hardship during his childhood and that his father was at one time a defaulter on the Stock Exchange. Raised largely by his older sister Ann, Lear was obliged to earn his own living by the time he was fourteen. (These and many other details of Lear's life are documented in Vivien Noakes's 1968 biography, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, still considered the best biography of Lear.) He was trained first as a zoological draughtsman and later as a landscape painter. He excelled at the representation of unusual and ungainly birds and animals: parrots and pelicans, kangaroos and tortoises. Among the works in this field to which he contributed are his own Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1830-32) and Thomas Bell's Monograph of the Testudinata (1836-42), later reissued as Tortoises, Terrapins and Turtles. |
 In 1830, while seeking permission to draw the animals in the Royal Zoological Society's Museum and recently opened zoo in Regent's Park, Lear made the acquaintance of the president of the Society, Lord Stanley. Lord Stanley, who became the 13th Earl of Derby upon the death of his father in 1834, had an impressive private menagerie at his country house, Knowsley Hall, outside Liverpool, where Lear soon became a regular visitor. A selection of the watercolors that Lear made to document Lord Derby's collection of exotic birds and animals was published in 1846 as Gleanings from the Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall. |
Stout and shy, with weak eyes hidden behind thick spectacles, the young artist hardly seemed destined for success in country house society. At first he dined in the housekeeper's room with the better class of servants. Such a position was perfectly in keeping with his modest origins and could hardly have been intended, or perceived, as an insult. Any other arrangement would have been most unusual. Lear was not only a clever
 draughtsman, however; he had a talent for making up funny poems, songs and stories. Throughout his life, his genius for sheer fun--for what he liked to describe as "nonsense"--endeared him to children, and soon he was writing poems to entertain Lord Derby's grandchildren, great-nieces and great-nephews. Before long, Lear's nonsense was equally in demand among Lord Derby's grown-up guests. Nonsense was to be Lear's entrée into some of England's stateliest homes, where in years to come he would be received not as an employee or servant but as an honored guest and friend. The first edition of A Book of Nonsense, consisting of poems written for the children of Lord Derby's household, was published in the same year as Gleanings from the Menagerie and Aviary at Knowsley Hall. |
 By the late 1830s, Lear's eyesight had begun to fail seriously. In 1837, he left England for Rome, where he began to study landscape painting, whose broader forms did not require the minute attention to detail that he now found impossible in his zoological work. He began to publish travel books. The first, Views in Rome and Its Environs, appeared in 1841. Later travels would take him to Albania and Greece, to Egypt and the Middle East--and ultimately to India. Peculiar animals and travel are two recurring themes in Lear's later nonsense poems: the Owl and the Pussycat go to sea in a beautiful pea green boat; the Jumblies go to sea in a sieve; the Four Little Children go round the world; and Mr. Lear, the Polly, and the Pusseybite have adventures on their way to the Ritertitle Mountains. Other poems reflect Lear's continuing sense of himself as a sad clown and perpetual outsider: the Yonghy Bonghy Bò with his unrequited love for Mrs. Jingly Jones; the Dong with the Luminous Nose who is left "on the cruel shore, Gazing, gazing for evermore"; the unspeakably melancholy "Calico Pie." |
"The Owl and the Pussycat," probably Lear's best-loved poem, was written in December 1867 for three-year-old Janet Symonds, the daughter of the essayist and biographer John Addington Symonds.
 Lear and Symonds and his family were spending the winter at Cannes on the French Riviera. The weather was cold and the Symonds' little girl was ill. According to entries for December 14 and 18, 1867, in his diary (now held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University), Lear wrote his poem in an attempt to amuse the child and cheer everybody up. "The Four Little Children Who Went Round the World," the story of four children named Slingsby, Guy, Lionel, and Violet, was written for Slingsby, Guy, Lionel, and Violet Bethell, the grandchildren of Lear's good friend, Sir Richard Bethell. And finally, "The Adventures of Mr. Lear, the Polly and the Pusseybite" was written for the children of Mansfield Parkyns, a well-known gentleman explorer who was involved in the quest for the source of the Nile. The adventures of the three protagonists, who ultimately are swept over a waterfall in a boat and dashed to bits, were inspired by the experiences of the children's father, as described in Sir Duncan Cumming's The Gentleman Savage: The Life of Mansfield Parkyns, 1823-1894 (1897). |
Although Lear continued to reside abroad, he frequently returned to England to oversee the publication of his books, exhibit his paintings and visit his ever-widening circle of acquaintances. "The Four Little Children Who Went Round the World" and "The Adventures of Mr. Lear, the Polly and the Pusseybite" were both written in 1867 during one of these visits. "The Four Little Children" and "The Owl and the Pussycat" were both published for the first time in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets, which although bearing a copyright date of 1871, was available in time for Christmas 1870. |
The New York Public Library's manuscript of <i>A Book of Nonsense</i>
 The manuscript in the Spencer Collection probably dates from the early 1850s. The selection of poems in it suggests that it originated while Lear was working on the second edition of A Book of Nonsense, which was published in 1855. During this period, Lear was a frequent visitor at Park House, near Maidstone, Kent, the family home of one of his closest friends, Franklin Lushington. On June 9, 1856, Lear presented a specially inscribed proof copy of the second edition of A Book of Nonsense to Frank Lushington; this copy is now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. |
Lear met Frank Lushington on Malta in 1849 and the two men became lifelong friends. They traveled through Greece together visiting ancient ruins and hilltop fortresses; when Lushington was appointed Judge to the Supreme Court of Justice in the Ionian Islands, Lear began spending his winters in Corfu to be near him. During his visits to England in the 1850s, Lear made the acquaintance of Lushington's entire family. In A Circle of Friends: The Tennysons and Lushingtons of Park House (1986), John O. Waller describes the composition of the Lushington household at the time. Frank was still unmarried, but his brother, Edmund Law Lushington, and Edmund's wife, the former Cecilia Tennyson, had four children: Edmund ("Eddy"), Cecilia ("Zilly"), Emily ("Emmy"), and Lucy. Lear's gifts to the Lushington children included an album containing drawings of birds, animals and landscapes, which he presented to Zilly on her tenth birthday in 1855. The Spencer Book of Nonsense was probably another gift to one of the children in this family. Frank Lushington married Kate Morgan in 1862, and Lear was subsequently godfather to their three children, Henry, Gertrude and Mildred. His gifts to them included a nonsense alphabet presented to Gertrude in 1867 and manuscripts of "The Pobble Who Has No Toes," given in June 1872, and "The Quangle Wangle's Hat," given in May 1873. |
The bookseller Justin Schiller acquired the Spencer manuscript from the descendants of a neighbor of the Lushingtons, Walter Marsham Hoare. The Hoares' estate, Staplehurst Park, was located south of Maidstone. Walter, who was born in 1840 and so would have been fifteen in 1855, was the second son and third child in a family of twelve children. Schiller has suggested that the drawings may have been given to the Hoare family by the Lushington family at a later date. One plausible occasion might have been following the death of little Eddy Lushington at the age of twelve in 1856. Not much is known of Lear's visits to Park House, but they presumably followed the pattern of his visits to other country houses where there were children. Lear's diary entry for November 6, 1867, for example, records a day when all morning was spent writing a nonsense story "very absurd, but good fun," and the afternoon writing, practicing singing and drawing pictures for the children, followed by a dinner party. On October 3, 1867, Lear recorded "an hour with the children--dancing, Book of Nonsense &c." |
The manuscript in the Spencer Collection fits the format of other manuscripts that Lear wrote as gifts for children. Unlike the presentation manuscripts of other writers and artists, these were not lavish and elegant copies intended for rich collectors; they were often hastily dashed off, and many are based on tracings of existing drawings. With their slapdash calligraphic style, they resemble the preliminary drawings of other artists, but Lear's few surviving preliminary drawings tend to be heavily worked over, with numerous corrections and notations. Only in his copies did he allow himself to be this spontaneous. |
Lear knew children well, and he expected his gifts
 to be read and enjoyed, not carefully put away and preserved. A child friend, Hubert Congreve, described in his preface to The Later Letters of Edward Lear (1911), the fate of the presents Lear gave to him and his brother in the 1870s: "a week seldom passed without his bringing us a nonsense poem or a funny drawing of some event in our lives, or of some plant which had flowered in our gardens. Unfortunately all these treasures perished, along with many others, in that not very safe deposit--a boy's pocket." The modern binding of the Spencer album in handsome brown morocco by Deborah Evetts is really not appropriate, because it turns the manuscript into a collector's item of a kind it was never meant to be. |
Lear died alone in his villa in San Remo, Italy, overlooking the Mediterranean, on January 29, 1888. He had come far from the sordid scenes of his London childhood. According to Vivien Noakes's Edward Lear, 1812-1888 (1986), he continued to give gifts to children even in his last years: a nonsense alphabet to young Charles Geffrard Pirouet, whose family was in San Remo because of ill health, and quantities of "ridiculous birds" for the little Fentons and the son of Evelyn Baring. One of his last recorded gifts was two nonsense books, which he sent to the sons of Arthur Severn in 1886. Severn was employed by the art critic John Ruskin, who in an article in The Pall Mall Gazette of February 15, 1886, had described Lear's Book of Nonsense as "the most beneficent and innocent of all books [for children] ... inimitable and refreshing and perfect in rhythm." |
Lear did not invent the limerick form, but he was certainly responsible for the popularity that it continues to enjoy to the present day. The poems in A Book of Nonsense are probably the best-known limericks in the English language. The name "limerick" may be derived from a late Victorian and Edwardian game, in which each of a group of people was expected to perform a funny poem or song. Each contribution was greeted with the chorus "Come up, come up, come all the way up, come all the way up to Limerick." Lear himself always called such poems his "Old Persons," or simply "nonsenses." The continuing influence of Lear's A Book of Nonsense has not been limited to amateur poets and performers. His impact is obvious in the work of such twentieth-century children's book authors and illustrators as Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. In her 1992 book The Senses of Nonsense, Alison Rieke notes that scholars have discovered similarities to Lear's work in the writings of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and Louis Zukofsky. Others have derived a kind of existential philosophy from his writings, finding in his nonsense the freedom to make up one's own rules. All of this would surely have pleased as well as surprised and amused the author of A Book of Nonsense. But what would have delighted him most of all is that his poems continue to be read and loved by the very young. |
While much Victorian children's literature seems quaint and dated today, Lear's limericks, with their arbitrary violence and unpredictability, remain as vital and startling as the latest animated cartoons on Saturday morning television. The Old Person of Buda (No. 5 in the manuscript volume) gets smashed by a hammer; the Young Lady of Clare (No. 35) is pursued (and presumably devoured) by a bear; the Old Man of the Nile (No. 38) cuts off his thumbs with a file. We may not agree with Ruskin that such poems are "beneficent and innocent" but certainly they are "inimitable and refreshing." Originally written in the 1830s for the grandchildren of the Earl of Derby, and copied in the 1850s for a little boy in Kent, the poems in A Book of Nonsense are truly ageless. Their celebration of nonconformity and of extravagant and ridiculous behavior is as relevant and welcome today as it was when Lear used to recite these verses at Knowsley Hall and Park House to audiences of delighted children. |
This feature was adapted from the article "A Gift of Nonsense: An Edward Lear Manuscript in the Spencer Collection of The New York Public Library," which originally appeared in the Fall 1998 issue of Biblion: The Bulletin of The New York Public Library. |
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