Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  This was where Lear was born. In 1863, when he was fifty, after his sister Ann died, he went back to look at their old house, finding that roads now covered the garden and paddocks, and men were demolishing the house for building materials. He had been to look at ‘old Bowman’s Lodge, & its Limes’ five years before when he happened to be nearby, but this time a woman showed him round. It was like a parody of the broken eggshell from which he emerged. Some of the steps were gone and so were small rooms like the study and conservatory, the ‘greenhouse room’. New buildings were all around. But the parlour, he said, ‘at once annihilated 50 years’: the room was empty, but there were the two bookcases, ‘& the old “Secretary” my father used to write at – I saw every possible evening for years. Would I could see the pictures as they were!!’ An inventory made in 1845, when the house was sold to become a girls’ school, describes the fittings: ‘Two mahogany doors, Recess Bookcases with glazed doors, secretaire drawers, paneled doors under, & shelves’. It was a fine place for the master of the house, the collector of pictures. Lear went upstairs, past the drawing room, and found:

  Bowman’s Lodge

  My room – ehi! ehi! – Henry’s – Mary’s – Mother’s, and the spare room. Down stairs again – the nursery, a large low room – just as it was – only with no view. Dear Ann’s – & the painting room – the happiest of all my life perhaps – the ‘dark room’ and the ‘play ground’ … Gave the woman 2 shillings – a cheap & wonderful lesson.

  ‘No view’. In his childhood there had been views in every direction: west across flat fields to the slopes of Camden, north to Highgate, east to the market gardens, and south to the spires and smoke of the City. From the windows he could see lights glimmering in the dusk, lighting the roads to the river and the docks, filled with ships sailing to unknown lands.

  When these smart Regency villas were built, Holloway was still a village on the Great North Road. One stagecoach a day went into town from the Plough Inn. Shepherds herded flocks down the street, and the remains of the old moated manor house could still be seen. A scattering of houses lined the road and the Lear children could walk up Highgate Hill or across into Hornsey Wood, where families came on trips to Eel-Pie House, with its pleasure grounds along the New River. Up the hill, Highgate had a new theatre, a library and smart monthly assemblies, and this was where the Lears felt they belonged – Lear always said he came from Highgate, rather than Holloway. By contrast Holloway was almost industrial. Near the end of Heames Lane Elizabeth Duke ran a manufactory ‘wherein clothes and other articles were rendered water-proof’, making cloaks and greatcoats for Wellington’s army in the Peninsula.

  Lear was born in the year of Wellington’s victory at Salamanca and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, when the fortunes of war seemed to turn. His first real memory, so he said, was of the end of the war. Writing to a friend in 1884, four years before he died, he said:

  I think a great deal in these later days of all my life, every particle of which from the time I was 4 years old, I, strange to say, can perfectly remember. (Even earlier for I well remember being wrapped in a blanket & taken out of bed to see the illuminations in the house at Highgate, on the Battle of Waterloo occasion – and I was then, 1815, just 3 years and odd weeks.)

  The Waterloo fireworks were a signal of joy. But within months the slump came. No troops needed waterproofs now, and trade collapsed at the Heames Lane manufactory. In 1816, the year without a summer, when the skies were black after the eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies, the streets were full of demobilised soldiers and sailors hunting for work. With a huge national debt to be paid, taxes rose, loans were called in, and investors stayed away. In the City great firms like Barings and men like Nathan Rothschild could make fortunes, but smaller brokers suffered. Jeremiah Lear was a defaulter, owing £2150 11s. 1d., his name called out loud to blows of a hammer on the wainscoting of the Exchange, and written on the blackboard for all to see. This was a ceremony ‘so very awful’ for the defaulter ‘that he always takes care to be at a reasonable distance from the house on the occasion … and dare not show his face in the house until he gets his affairs managed’. In this case, a friend settled the debt, with the creditors accepting 2s. 6d. in the pound. Jeremiah could show his face again.

  For a time the Lears had to let their house. It seems that they packed their bags and trundled off to the family’s old properties in the City, where the sugar houses smoked in the narrow streets by the quays. Their exile was not long: back they moved to leafy Holloway. Yet by 1820 the Lears were in trouble again. Lear once wrote bitterly of a local woman who might remember that his father was imprisoned ‘for fraud and debt’. Exaggerated family stories talked of Jeremiah as a debtor in the King’s Bench prison, of his wife carrying him six-course dinners in gaol, of the older girls becoming governesses and dying in distress. None of this was true. They kept afloat: Mrs Lear had some money, Frederick went to work as a Stock Exchange clerk and Henry briefly joined the army.

  *

  An image recurs in Lear’s limericks of men feeding queues of hungry offspring: this is what Jeremiah managed to do, although the upheaval was too much for his wife, who clung to the mirage of a different life, the one they could have, should have, led.

  There was an Old Man of Apulia,

  Whose conduct was very peculiar;

  He fed twenty sons, upon nothing but buns,

  That whimsical Man of Apulia.

  During the turmoil of moving out and moving back four-year-old Edward was handed over to his eldest sister Ann, who was twenty-five in 1816. She may, indeed, have been responsible for him since he was born and she became, he always felt, his true mother. Ann and his other elder sisters played with him, read to him, and he learnt his letters with them, peering myopically at the alphabet books with their squares of letters illustrated by crude animals and birds – A is for Ass, C for Crow, Z for Zebra.

  Ann was fun and liked to laugh, and, despite the family piety, for Lear as for all well-off children there were games and jokes, nursery rhymes to sing and books to read, like The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, written by the MP William Roscoe for his ten children, with every small page showing insects, animals and birds thronging to the feast. A host of small pleasures: birthday dinners of bacon and beans, and his sister Sarah teaching him to draw in the small parlour downstairs. But a year or so after their return, when Edward was five or six, it became clear that something was wrong. He had bronchitis and asthma, frightening for children who find themselves gasping, feeling that a monster is sitting on their chest. Worse still was the onset of some kind of fits – he remembered these clearly from the age of around five, but sometimes thought that they may have occurred earlier, even at one. These would last all his life, and he marked their onset and severity with ‘X’ in his diary. In his early fifties, mid-August 1866, after a bibulous dinner, Lear jotted down a grim ‘XX 5’, with a note, ‘very unwell all night’. He rose late:

  more or less stupefied all day. But, before I rose – reflected on days long gone – when I was but 8 – if so many years old. And this demon oppressed me then, I not knowing; its worry & misery. Every morning in the little study when learning my lessons – all day long: & always in the evening & at night. Nor could I have been more than 6 I think – for I remember whole years before I went to school – at 11.

  The attacks were a form of epilepsy. Lear did not usually experience grand mal seizures, where the electric discharge affects the deep structure of the brain, bringing full-scale convulsions without warning. More often he had what are now called ‘complex partial seizures’, focal epilepsy affecting the temporal lobe, involved in processing memory, smell, taste, music and language. Sufferers experience a powerful ‘aura’, a wave of overwhelming dread, or a surging thrill of ecstatic joy, or a tremor of physical excitement. As this spreads, it can bring a rush of strange sensations, hallucinations of smell or taste, distortions of memory such as déjà vu or jamais vu, a sense of shri
nking and expanding like Alice (Lewis Carroll was also a sufferer), of spinning through space, watching the self from above or dissolving in a storm of images. This state can be linked, too, to violent emotions, and – as for Lear – it can bring confusion, twitching and strange, jerky movements. Lear almost always felt the fits coming and could hide himself away. His bad times tended to come when he was tired or resting: the seizures lessened in adolescence then returned when he was about twenty and increased in force in later life, often arriving suddenly, marked by a swimming head and a feeling of nausea, ‘– & frightful dyspepsia – no relief till sudden X6. Then as usual deep sleep for ¾ hr. more epileptic then and later.’ He was quick to spot signs in others. Visiting one family he noted, ‘breakfast & after that, came George W. the second son – they told me he had “fallen on the stove – or grate” – & his face was dreadful to see. I have an impression he may have had epileptic fits … There is great sadness in this house, evidently.’

  For a small boy it was terrifying, more so as he had seen his sister Jane, who was about seventeen when he had his first fits, suffer severely. Thinking about her years later, after a short midday fit, he wrote, ‘How I remember my sister Jane’s epileptic attacks, now! Child as I was then, & quite unable to understand them. The wonder with such attacks with me is the way wh. I have nearly always been able to be aware of the time they come to prevent publicity accordingly.’ Jane was not looked after by her mother but by kindly ‘Aunt Knight’, a fixture in the family. Although epilepsy no longer carried the stigma of demonic possession, fits were still a cause of shame, linked to lack of will power, thought to be caused by masturbation, private pleasure, jerking off in secret. For a while Edward’s sister Harriett shared his room, bossing him out of his ‘impurity’. ‘The strong will of sister Harriett put a short pause to the misery – but very short,’ he wrote. With extraordinary strength he kept the seizures hidden. ‘It is wonderful’, he wrote in old age, ‘that these fits have never been discovered – except that partly apprehending them beforehand, I go to my room.’ He had been told, he said, of a doctor who was periodically mad, ‘& always knows beforehand when he will become so’. Lear’s epilepsy, and the secrecy with which he guarded it, set him apart: it was the root of the profound loneliness he felt all his life.

  Even as a small boy he was on guard, fearful of his own body. He lived with apprehension, hoping he would grow out of the fits, or could reduce them by walking, exercise, diet. He was vulnerable too because he was so shortsighted – much of his childhood was, literally, a blur. In his late thirties, when he reminded Ann jokingly of their trips to Margate together (fresh sea air and sea bathing was thought good for lung ailments like bronchitis), he tossed out a scatter of images: Mr Cox’s hawk, colliers unloading coal at the pier, windmills, and a chimney sweep that Ann teasingly made Edward walk round ‘to be sure he was not smoking – shocking. My imperfect sight in those days – ante-spectacled – formed everything into a horror.’

  *

  When the Lears returned to Bowman’s Lodge after a few months away, with no spare cash for carriages and grooms, or tutors or governesses, life was simpler. Ann looked after Edward. She taught him about plants, insects and birds, and she and Sarah drew with him in the painting room across the hall from the nursery. She read him Greek myths, stories and poetry – the eighteenth-century favourites, Gray, Collins, Thomson’s Seasons, and the new poets, especially Byron. She gave him her own love of the exotic: when he saw the statues of Abu Simbel in Egypt, a sight that took his breath away, he wrote of it as ‘a place earliest known to me from the tales of my dear sister Ann – 48 years ago’. He thrilled to Thomas Stodhard’s illustrations to Robinson Crusoe, which made him long to see ‘similar realities’. Ann understood this. She painted a portrait of him when he was nine, in a dark-blue velvet coat, Sunday best, with a ruff like a miniature clergyman, his brown hair swept forward in a fashionable Napoleonic style, his long nose and gentle mouth already recognisable features. The setting was not Holloway fields but a landscape with jewel-like flowers and a gushing waterfall, with a glimpse through the trees of pink sunset, smooth seas and spouting whales. Behind the boy, hidden by tree trunks and vines, is a rough structure, like Crusoe’s hut. He is holding his flute, to charm the beasts.

  The duo of Edward and Ann formed a family within a family. In the background moved his shadowy mother, who had no time for him, and his father, who was rarely there. Lear never forgot or forgave, or really understood, his mother’s rejection. In all his work, although birds and animals snuggle up together, Lear never drew parents and children embracing. When he noted her birthday in his diary, as he did for all his family, he put ‘mother’, in eloquent quotation marks. His father too was distant. Looking at a miniature of him, Lear thought it was not as ‘agreeable in the face’ as he really was. ‘Agreeable’ is a remote term. It suggests a man he never really knew, who was either in the City, or in his study, or in his fabled workshop or laboratory in the attic.

  Lear remembered odd scenes with Jeremiah, like driving through Holborn one day, ‘remembering my father & a gig – a gray mare, Peggy – driving me by Theobald’s Road, & shuddering about a murder close by …’ One memory, often quoted, was of Jeremiah taking him to see some travelling showmen in a field near Highgate. Such shows had tumblers and acrobats, barkers shouting out the acts, music and gravity-defying feats on the slack rope and tight rope. ‘Equilibristes’ stood on their heads on the wire, or balanced in a tottering pyramid, the women were tinselled and daring. In the dusk they looked entrancing. When he thought of this in March 1877, Lear was going through a bad phase: on the top of the diary page he scrawled ‘XX 3’, and ‘The Demon chain though loosened for 16 days’. He was feeling great swoops of mood and that evening he added, ‘One had hoped to have got into smoother waters at 65; but not so.’ Next day he went to a sociable dinner and played the piano: he put on a good front, he knew, ‘but the heartache of many phases of life breaks one to pieces’. Then he went on:

  The earliest of all the morbidnesses I can recollect must have been somewhere about 1819 –when my father took me to a field near Highgate, where was a rural performance of gymnastic clowns &c. – & a band. The music was good, – at least it attracted me: – the sunset & twilight I remember as if yesterday. And I can recollect crying half the night after all the small gaiety broke up – & also suffering for days at the memory of the past scene.

  The yearning for vanished happiness swamped his delight in the music and the spinning acrobats. But the perilous, ecstatic balance would return in his nonsense, where people could still leap and cavort with one foot – two feet – off the ground.

  2: WITH THE GIRLS

  Lear’s favourite early books were myths and poems, stories of travel and distant adventures. He idolised Byron for his bravura defiance of ‘they’, for his struggle for Greek independence, and for his poetry. He loved the music, wit and wide horizons of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair, which, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review, ‘spread around us the blue waters and dazzling skies – the ruined temples and dusky olives – the desolated cities, and turbaned population, of modern Attica’.

  It was not surprising that Edward dreamed of distant lands. Something strange happened in Bowman’s Lodge just before his tenth birthday, surfacing in his diary decades later when he heard of the death of a cousin, Frederick Harding. ‘It is just fifty years since he did me the greatest evil done to me in life’, he wrote ‘– excepting that done by C: – which must last now to the end – spite of all reason and effort.’ Fifty years back was Easter Monday 1822, when Frederick was staying with the Lears. Lear never clarified this, or identified ‘C’ – perhaps his brother Charles. But the event was clearly momentous, inviting speculation that this must have been abuse of some kind, which he related to his own difficulties with relationships and sex – Lear rarely writes of touch, or physical desire. Once the memory surfaced he returned to it con
stantly, marking the date in his diary each year.

  He went away to school, briefly, when he was eleven and twelve, and hated it, leaving no account except of hearing of Byron’s death, ‘in a crowd of horrid boys at the dreadful school of ——’. For many nights, he remembered, he did not sleep, and could not talk without crying. Elsewhere he wrote of his memory of a pale, cold moon and the yard and passages where he sat looking at the stars, ‘when I heard that Ld Byron was dead, stupefied & crying’. Lear does not say he was bullied, but a weeping, poetry-loving eleven-year-old is an easy target, and his experience at school, like the incident with Harding, left deep scars. Indeed the scar tissue was building: the fits, the financial crash, his mother’s rejection, the Harding incident and now the school. In later life, when he scratched these memories, he bled.