Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  It was a relief to come home, away from the schoolboy ‘they’, and he had at least one good Holloway friend, William Nevill, with whom he always stayed close, becoming godfather to his sons. Like many boys unhappy at school Lear built an inner life and learned that one way to be accepted was to make people laugh, to become an amiable buffoon. While he fretted about being ‘half-educated’ he was glad, he said later, to have escaped the straitjacket of conventional teaching, as so many of those who had been laboriously and expensively educated lost their learning, ‘& remain like Swift’s Stullbruggs – cut & dried for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures: – whereas I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge’.

  *

  Lear’s life was shaped less by school and childhood friends than by his sisters. If his Byron-worship spelled adventure, sex and glamour, his Holloway world was that of modest, accomplished girls. His elder sisters, Ann, Sarah, Mary and Eleanor, were Regency girls, born before Victorian proprieties took hold, high-spirited and zestful despite their evangelical faith. In teaching Edward they passed on their own education, on the lines that Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice lays down to merit the adjective ‘accomplished’, to wit ‘a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages’. They appeared at dinner in white dresses with blue sashes. They played the piano and shared the current taste for Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies like ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’. Lear had a natural ear and could play the guitar, flute and accordion and pick up any tune on the piano. This gift would serve him all his life as a means of getting to know people, being a good man to have around, but music was also a private solace and pleasure: he composed his own settings, and his love of playing and singing flows through his poetry. The songs of Moore, Byron’s friend and first biographer, remained an echo in his head and while he copied the popular parodies, the romantic melancholy of Moore’s songs, like ‘The Boat’ of 1807, settled even deeper in his mind.

  I saw from the beach, when the morning was shining,

  A bark o’er the waters move gloriously on;

  I came when the sun o’er that beach was declining,

  The bark was still there, but the waters were gone.

  And such is the fate of our life’s early promise,

  So passing the spring-tide of joy we have known;

  Each wave that we danced on at morning ebbs from us,

  And leaves us, at eve, on the bleak shore alone.

  Lear often saw himself on this bleak shore.

  His fear of being cast out was also heightened by his family’s evangelical religion: the dread of losing heaven’s ‘golden shore’, promised by the hymns. For his sisters, Sunday services, daily prayers and Bible reading were backed by a strong ethic of charity, hard work and self-improvement, and although Lear came to reject their fervent piety, he kept some of the habits ingrained in childhood: the self-examination of the diary, the dedication to work, the importance of ‘improvement’. ‘I lead as quiet a life as I can,’ he once wrote, during some rare weeks of calm, ‘being strongly convinced that a regular application to some kind of self-improvement by way of work is more necessary to ensure comfort than any variety of social fuss.’

  He was happy with his sisters, taught by the older ones and tolerated by the younger. But gradually the family changed. In 1821, when Edward was nine, Ann was thirty, Sarah twenty-six, Mary twenty-five and Eleanor twenty-two. Then all in a rush, three of them found husbands. That same year Mary married Richard Shuter Boswell, who worked in the Bank of England; a year later, in 1822, Sarah married Charles Street, a Sussex banker’s clerk, and a year after that Eleanor married William Newsom, the son of old sugar-house friends, who also worked for the Bank of England.

  The house was emptying of the young women who petted and played with Edward. Mary and Eleanor’s marriages strengthened the family’s evangelical strain: the kindly William Newsom was a staunch Calvinist and Richard Boswell would become accountant and assistant secretary of ‘The Language Institution, in Aid of the Propagation of Christianity’ (whose vice presidents included William Wilberforce and Stamford Raffles), founded in 1826. By contrast, Sarah’s marriage was less solemn, and it came with a good story. Walking through the City her father had seen a name-plate for ‘Jeremiah Lear’ and on impulse he introduced himself to his namesake. The two families were unrelated but came to know each other well and the wealthier Jeremiah welcomed the Holloway Lears at his country house, Batsworth Park, near Arundel in Sussex. Here Sarah met Charles Street, the fifth son of a Surrey squire, and a clerk in the bank in town.

  From now on Edward often took the coach down to stay with Sarah and Charles in Arundel. But his London life was still shaped by Ann. Together they pored over his father’s collection of pictures and prints, like the ambitious Boydell Shakespeare with its engravings of works by contemporary artists, including Fuseli, Romney, Benjamin West, Angelica Kauffman and Thomas Stothard. Other prints looked back to great artists of the past and Lear grew up with a love of superb, meticulous drawing. Many years later, between trains in Vienna, he spent a day in Duke Charles’s gallery, and wrote to Ann:

  I had folio after folio of Albert Durer’s drawing all to my blessed self. I never looked at anything else, but passed the whole morning on the old Nuremberger’s works, getting a good lesson as to what perseverance & delicate attention to drawing may do. You would have liked to see some of the wonderfully beautiful sketches of weeds – flowers, & birds, which were there – much reminding me of certain hedgehogs, shells, flies, & pole cats etc. etc. – of other days.

  With Ann, too, Lear read classics, travel books and the poetry of Byron, Keats and Shelley, giving him a yearning for liberty and a sense of glory past, as well as of the fleeting nature of happiness. (He was thrilled, years later, to meet Shelley’s son Percy and play him his setting of ‘O world! O life! O time!’.) He and Ann also enjoyed the spoofs of Byron’s orientalism, Wordsworth’s ballads and Tom Moore’s songs in The London Magazine, whose authors included De Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb, and Thomas Hood, especially the parody and puns of Hood’s light verse, like the lament of Mary’s ghost, her corpse seized by the body-snatchers:

  The arm that used to take your arm

  Is took to Dr Vyse;

  And both my legs are gone to walk

  The hospital at Guy’s …

  Don’t go to weep upon my grave,

  And think that there I be;

  They haven’t left an atom there,

  Of my anatomie.

  ‘An atom … anatomie’ is exactly the kind of punning word division Lear made his own. Lear admired Hood all his life, and Hood’s sense of language as alive and fluid, his grotesquery, his sense of fragmentation and blurring of boundaries between animal and human, as well as his edgy violence, seeped into Lear’s writing from the start.

  Even as a boy, encouraged by Ann, he wrote parodies. When he was thirteen, he turned the disaster of his father’s defaulting and the flight from their home into a comic saga in imitation of ‘Hassan: or, the Camel Driver’ from William Collins’s Persian Eclogues of 1742. He copied the length, eighty-two lines, and echoed Collins’s dynamic rhyming couplets, undercutting the high-flying original with prosaic details and bathetic rhymes. In place of Hassan trekking across the scorching sands with his camels,

  In dreary silence down the bustling road

  The Lears – with all their goods and chattels rode;

  Ten carts of moveables went on before,

  And in the rear came half-a-dozen more.

  Just as Hassan strikes his breast in a mournful refrain: ‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day/When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way,’ so the Lears, doomed to stay in ‘thrice odious New Street’, tortured by fears of radical mobs, burglars and house fires, wail: ‘Sad was the hour – and luckless was the day/When first from Bowman’s Lodge we bent our way.’

  He teased his mother’s delusions of lost grandeur too, i
n ‘The Sunny Side of Durham’, and became adept at bravura word games, odd diction and bad rhymes. In 1826, when he was fourteen, he gave Ann a poem for her thirty-fifth birthday:

  Dear, and very dear relation,

  Time, who flies without cessation, –

  Who ne’er allows procrastination, –

  Who never yields to recubation,

  Nor ever stops for respiration,

  Has brought again in round rotation

  The once a yearly celebration

  Of the day of thy creation …

  His own ‘dire depauperation’, with no money to buy her a present, pushed him back on his own resources, wrenching his imagination to ensure that in all the poem’s 110 breathless lines, ‘every termination/To every line should end in -ation’. Beginnings and ends come together as the teenager collects existing words and tumbles into coinages and inventions. He imagines her life fading: may Ann be loved with veneration, ‘towards the life’s advesperation’, but also ponders her nearer future: ‘If as report gives intimation/You are about to change your station’, he wishes her bliss in ‘matrimonial elevation’. That ‘report’ came to nothing. Although Ann did love one man, a Major Wilby, and turned down a proposal from another, she never married. Her life was bound up with her brother.

  *

  Apart from odd hints, Lear stayed quiet about the darker sides of childhood. In 1868, enjoying the beauty of a spring day in Cannes, he wrote, ‘Considering all I remember to have passed through from 6 years old to 15 – is it not wonderful I am alive? – far more to be able to feel & write.’ The significant age, ‘15’, saw the end of the Holloway years. In 1827, when Jeremiah Lear reached seventy and his wife was entering her sixties, they left London and retired to Gravesend. Florence and Catherine went with them and the rest of the family scattered. Ann took lodgings for herself and Edward on the top floor of 38 Upper North Place, off Gray’s Inn Road, using a small annuity of £300 a year from a trust set up by her maternal great-grandmother. Four years later Lear complained bitterly of being someone who, ‘at the age of 14 & a half, was turned out into the world, literally without a farthing – & with nought to look to for a living but his own exertions’. Elsewhere the farthing became a halfpenny, or a penny.

  Central London was dark with smog from coal fires, its streets crowded, its slums riddled with disease. The city’s population had soared to two million, and in the long depression thousands of Londoners were driven to emigrate, joining the rural poor and the paupers from the industrial towns. By those standards Ann and Edward were comfortably off, although the gulf between their family and the Sussex Lears of Batsworth Park became even more obvious. This year, 1827, George Lear from Arundel started work with the lawyers Ellis and Blackmore in Gray’s Inn: in May, the fifteen-year-old Dickens, Lear’s contemporary, joined the firm as a clerk. Dickens put George into the Pickwick Papers as the ‘Articled Clerk’ who has paid a premium, runs a tailor’s bill, receives invitations to parties, ‘and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks’. For his part, George thought he knew London, ‘but after a little talk with Dickens I found I knew nothing … he knew it all from Bow to Brentford’, and could imitate every kind of street-seller in town. Edward Lear’s London was nearer to that of Dickens than that of George – he too was a boy scurrying to make a living. Later letters to Ann hum with London memories; Bologna is ‘as full of beggars as Russell Square used to be’; the stern palaces of Florence look like Newgate; the streets of Tivoli, however beautiful its gardens, are as narrow and filthy as the dog-leg alleys behind Gray’s Inn Road. His nonsense language often has the Cockney twang and glottal stops of Dickens’s madder characters, splitting and combining words: ‘a nother taito’, a ‘chikkiboan’, and dropping or adding ‘h’s. In his fifties, he came out with a bravura diary entry about a Mrs Deaking:

  Mrs D. has haspirated her haitches more amazingly than ever: she said ‘the Hice-hickels ung hin hevery hexposed helevation, & on hall hobjects’. Really I never did hear such pronunciation, & hit hoppresses me.

  Wherever he travelled, Lear stayed a Londoner.

  Ann faced noisy inner London head on, if modestly. ‘How you used to swear: such oaths!!! – don’t you recollect? – “by the soldiers!”’ Lear teased her. Since money was short, he turned to the one thing he was good at: in about 1827 he began to draw, he said, ‘for bread and cheese … but only did uncommon queer shop-sketches – selling them for prices varying from ninepence to four shillings: colouring prints, screens, fans: awhile making morbid disease drawings, for hospitals and certain doctors of physic’. At times he sold his drawings to passengers in the inn-yards waiting to change coaches.

  The medical drawings, perhaps studies of different conditions as a guide to diagnosis, perhaps drawings to teach students, or advertisements for medicines (like the ‘Propter’s Nicodemus Pills’ he mentions in his poem ‘Uncle Arly’), were a training in precise observation and anatomy, useful to Lear in natural history painting. But with the coloured prints and painted screens and fans he was still with the girls. He had learned from the drawing manuals published for women like his sisters, with etchings to copy after old masters, and from the lessons in drawing and watercolours in magazines like Ackermann’s Repository of Arts and the Ladies’ Monthly Museum, squeezed between fashion plates, new songs and household hints. Now he began teaching well-off girls hardly younger than himself, sometimes on their own, sometimes in groups of six or eight. He remembered one group in St James’s, presided over by the daunting Madame Zielske in her turban; his sister Cordelia gave him instructions on how he should behave when he went into the drawing room. He enjoyed teaching, although his friend Daniel Fowler found it agony: ‘Every teacher will have a parcel of young girls on his hands, who have not the remotest idea what art means,’ Fowler groaned.

  They do not, and never will, begin at the beginning. They must do something that looks pretty; some copy that they have made, with about as much comprehension of it as a parrot has of the speech it learns. This is the case with ninety-nine out of a hundred young ladies who take it up as an accomplishment, so called, I suppose, because nothing is accomplished.

  Several of Lear’s pupils lived in smart London streets and squares but one, Miss Fraser, came from the old Highgate milieu. He gave her an album as a ‘First Drawing Prize’, a gift that fitted a current craze. A poem on the first page of one album belonging to Robert Southey’s daughter Edith summed up the form:

  What is an album? Tis a thing

  Made up of odds and ends,

  A Drawing here and there, and Rhymes

  By dear poetic Friends.

  Wit thinly scatter’d up and down,

  And lines of every measure,

  A Tree, a Butterfly, a Flowr

  Compose the motley treasure …

  In 1827 Charles Lamb fled Islington, he said, to escape ‘Albumean persecution’. Sighing that albums would pursue him to the uttermost parts of the earth, he published Album Verses in 1830. Ten years later, in ‘A Shabby Genteel Story’, Thackeray’s Miss Caroline ‘had in her possession, like almost every young lady in England, a little square book called an album, containing prints from annuals, hideous designs of flowers, old pictures of faded fashions, cut out and pasted into the leaves; and small scraps of verses selected from Byron, Landon or Mrs Hemans’.

  On Miss Fraser’s opening page Lear drew a vignette of a lyre, an open book with a sketch of hummingbirds, and a palette surrounded by a colourful swag of flowers, with a rhyme:

  My album’s open, come and see: –

  What, won’t you waste a thought on me:

  Write but a word, a word or two,

  And make me love to think on you.

  Inside, he gummed in paintings of birds against palm-studded scenery, joined by his own sketches of a beady-eyed tiger, a peasant woman, rococo flowers, and the ‘Temple of Jupiter, Aegina’, copied from a print, with mournful, but heartfelt, sub-Byronic verse:

  But Greece has fallen, like
thee, –

  Desolate – wildly lone; –

  Her sons – the brave and free,

  Forgotten and unknown …

  Lear knew how to charm. And the flowers he drew showed genuine skill. Sometimes they resembled embroidery designs – curling convolvulus, sprays of apple blossom – but several detailed studies suggest he was copying the classic Bowles’s Drawing Book for Ladies; or Complete Florist, which gave precise rules for drawing flowers, with plates of examples. Hexandria Monogynia, ‘The Common Fritillary’

  Hexandria Monogynia, ‘The Common Fritillary’

  Sarah was the most knowledgeable botanist among the Lear sisters, and the finest painter. In her late fifties, writing to her brother Fred about his daughter, she exclaimed:

  gladly would I supply little Rosita with a Book of drawings, if you were more accessible, for it is such a delightful, as well as inexpensive amusement. I hope, if spared she will make progress in it, and copy Flowers, Houses, Trees, etc. from Nature for if she inherits the taste for it some of our family possess, it may in some future day be very useful.

  Ann too was skilled at drawing plants, in elegant, formal compositions, noting that one flower was picked in a garden at Hackney, and signing another ‘Drawn from Nature, Holloway A.L.’ Edward painted an exquisite study of ‘Eleanor’s Geranium’ from nature when he was sixteen. He developed lasting working habits, making outline sketches and adding notes for later watercolours, reminders of colour and texture. The careful dating and annotations on these pictures suggests that he and his sisters were noting the place and flowering time, and the genera and species. Below a pencil drawing of tall mushrooms he wrote about their ‘striae’, the bands and stripes of colour: