by Jenny Uglow
The delegates heard learned arguments, toured the zoo and feasted in marquees in the Botanical Gardens. Alexis de Tocqueville, the first volume of whose Democracy in America, published in 1835, was making waves, reported to his mother, ‘We found there at least five hundred people; a great deal of noise and little work, as it happens generally in assemblies so numerous.’ Lear enjoyed the noise and talk, and was enrolled as a member of the BAAS. But a kind of unease affected him. Current arguments about design, creation and the long history of the earth still placed mankind at the top of a pyramid, with all other creatures below. As he drew and painted the animals and birds and reptiles, Lear was not so sure about man’s assumed dominion. The oppression of captivity was less obvious at Knowsley than at London Zoo – Derby valued the animals’ need for space and had no big cats pacing behind bars, no polar bears stuffed into cages – but still the zebras and antelopes in the park could not race in great herds across the plains. And the more Lear looked at the smart society set on the one hand, and the animals on the other, the more he seems to have asked, ‘What does it mean to be human?’
One watercolour from 1835 showed a chimpanzee clad in a little girl’s dress, holding a hoop, her gnarled, curved toes, beautifully drawn, peeping from beneath the dimity hem. This was a pet from another grand house – Derby would never have allowed such a thing – but the animal’s plight clearly fascinated Lear. Another sketch shows the chimp’s pensive head bending heavily over the childish collar. Beneath the dress the chimp has its own, individual consciousness. And surely, without much effort, you could reverse this and see the humans as the animals they were beneath their clothes, their wrinkles and spotted skin hidden by their dresses and suits, their passions and anxieties tucked beneath accepted social manners?
Lear’s dizzying sense of the overlap between animal and human looked back in part to Thomas Hood, who often drew this resemblance – a tall visitor to the zoo exchanging stares with a giraffe, a fat man with outspread coat-tails like a bird – and to George Cruikshank, who showed members of the Zoological Society as hippos, monkeys, lions and cranes. In Hood’s ‘Pythagorean Fancies’ the narrator prefers the idea of ‘inhabiting the body of a bird’ (like Lear), but notes how many people seem ‘semibrutal … What apes, foxes, pigs, curs and cats, walk our metropolis.’ Conversely many of Lear’s watercolours of birds and animals look curiously human, like the little Scops-eared owl, then called ‘Ephialtes’, who looks anxiously upwards like a man whose toupée is about to slide off.
Comic as such paintings are, Lear was scrupulously accurate, and he knew the rules of scientific writing as well as drawing – using it in topsy-turvy form in his nonsense. In standard natural history texts the format was a picture followed by a physical description and account of the habitat and habits, including odd traits and actions. Like an echo of this, Lear’s limericks list different species, Old Persons and Young, identified by place and behaviour. The human world, Lear implied, was quite as bizarre and protean as the animal. As humans and animals face each other, their likeness is clear. The beasts do sometimes get their own back.
There was an Old Man of the Cape,
Who possessed a large Barbary Ape;
Till the Ape one dark night, set the house on a light,
Which burned that Old Man of the Cape.
But sometimes, too, with the help of music, real, if noisy, happiness can be achieved.
There was an Old Person of Bray,
Who sang through the whole of the day
To his ducks and his pigs, whom he fed upon figs,
That valuable Person of Bray.
Perhaps fearing the effect of the figs, or exhausted by the songs, the neatly lined-up pigs and ducks are unimpressed. It is easy to see which is the odder species. ‘Goodbye, love to all,’ Lear ended one gossipy letter. ‘Must go & draw a Kangaroo.’
7: MAKE ’EM LAUGH
At Knowsley, Lear told George Coombe in June 1835, the place and the gossip were the bright side; ‘the darks I don’t bother you with’. ‘I think my stay here will make me burst to have some fun,’ he sighed. ‘I long to have a good laugh.’ The darks were his feelings of panic, of always having to be on good behaviour, of an inner loneliness, but his beguiling, fun-loving side was hard to keep down. From boyhood he had found that making people laugh won him acceptance, like his talent with music (and the two often went together). The first comic pieces he wrote and drew were parodies and illustrated songs for his family and friends. Then, at Knowsley in the 1830s, he found a new form: his nonsense rhyme, or limerick. And these, to begin with at least, were for the children.
From the age of thirteen, when he wrote the parodic account of the exodus from Bowman’s Lodge, Lear found that effervescent word-play and humour, pushed to absurdity but controlled by form, could deflect despair, loneliness, rejected affection. Sometimes a bizarre simile was both funny and an accurate description of feeling: ‘I must leave off, I feel like 5 nutmeg-graters full of baked eggshells – so dry & cold & miserable.’ He used nonsense to avoid sounding too serious, or too emotional, or too self-important, and in the process he often revealed the fears or emotions he wanted to hide. He also had fun. In his letters, for example, his exaggerated stories gave him control over a world in which he was marginal: his account of the fire at Knowsley was like a comic strip, scene after scene – it begged to be turned into drawings.
He was already turning stories and songs into drawings, especially songs. Lear was always ready to sing, to sit down at the piano, to bring out his flute, guitar or accordion. At Tabley Hall in 1835, he wrote, ‘Lady de T. & I duet wonderfully – & I only marvel at my not being hired as nurse to the baby – who was always quieted by my playing the Accordion.’ Like laughter, singing crossed barriers of class, race and culture. Travelling in the Abruzzi in the 1840s, staying with an oddly mixed group of people, Lear explained:
The only way to be comfortable was to adapt oneself to circumstances, so I did as everybody did after supper – namely, sang songs and played on the guitar perpetually, and was constantly pestered for ‘un’aria Inglese’ every five minutes. Two widows from Aquila were incessant in their requests for ‘Ye banks and braes’ but ‘Alice Gray’ had the greatest number of votes. Thus the evening went by merrily enough …’
Throughout life he would adapt himself to circumstances. ‘Alice Gray’ was a romantic ballad (‘But her heart it is another’s/She never can be mine’) that cried out to be made fun of. Lear could hit off such sentiment perfectly, as in this parody of a ballad by the singer John Barnett, ‘The Bride’s Farewell’:
Farewell Mother! Tears are streaming
Down thy pallid tender cheek,
I, in gems and roses gleaming,
One eternal sunshine dreaming,
Scarce this sad farewell may speak.
As the lachrymose verse rolls on, it’s clear that the bride is far from sad at leaving her sobbing family for a life of jewels and comfort. Written for the Drewitt girls, this mock ballad demands a turn at the piano with screwed-up face and sobs. Fanny Drewitt, in particular, appreciated Lear’s dark visual/musical burlesque: if she had written these poems herself, we would read them as fiery feminist outbursts against convention, family and stifling moral codes.
Instead of writing parodies often Lear simply illustrated the songs, so that the story as seen in his pictures is disquietingly out of key with the lyrics. For Fanny, Lear wrote and drew ‘Miss Maniac’, in a little notebook, with a plate signed to ‘Miss Drewitt, with his respects’ and a slightly sinister self-portrait. In the late eighteenth century, before the Romantic co-option of madness to the visionary bard, writers had poured out verses and stories demanding sympathy for animals, children, the weak and the mad. There were many ‘maniac poems’, telling of insanity brought on by hard luck, poverty or lost love, and evoking volcanic eruptions of feeling:
Shall I tell what fetters bound me;
Fetters forged by sorrow’s hand?
Shall I say how
mercy found me,
Friendless on the naked strand …
Belching torrents meet the sky,
Rocks the heavenly ramparts dare;
Then her mad convulsions die,
Wasted in the yielding air …
A maniac story even appeared in The Lady’s Magazine (oddly, right next to Ann Murry’s article on parrots), where the heroine, Selina, is abandoned by her sweet-tongued suitor for a richer bride: ‘Fair maniac! May the God of mercy soon release thy fetter’d brain, restore thy wandering sense, and lull thy pure, untainted soul to happiness and peace!’ Lear’s parodic version went further, embracing a tougher melodrama of seduction and parental rejection, using the stock tropes of a moral tale; the stern father banishes his pregnant daughter, who has been seduced and deserted by a stereotypical bounder (Lear shows him with eye-glass, curly beard and eerily fixed smile). Cast out, she wanders restlessly until a final descent into madness. From her madhouse cell she tells her story in couplets, their scansion perhaps echoing Hood’s mock-dramatic ‘The Demon Ship’. (‘What darksome caverns yawn’d before! What Jagged steeps behind!’) But Lear’s drawings, with something of the scratchy young George Cruikshank and something of Hood’s punning sketches in Whims and Oddities, transmuted her harrowing tale into black comedy.
‘O – thou who falsely lured my frail fond heart astray/Then left me like a broken flower, alone to waste away’
The counterpoint of picture and verse echoed the doubleness of Miss Maniac’s own thoughts. It was funny, but only just. There was real sadness here; real fear; real hatred of the scoffing crowd.
‘Still – still I feel the scoffs of those who, with a cruel scorn,/Made doubly sad the memory of hours for ever gone, –’
There is tenderness, too, for the baby sleeping in its mother’s arms, then cast aside on the ground: a kind of fellow-feeling.
‘I longed for morn yet feared it, and I wandered on and wept/Till, worn with sorrow and fatigue, – careless I sat me down …’
Above all Lear showed the terror of madness and the disappearance of self:
Around my brain there is a chain, and o’er my fevered soul
A darkness like that solemn gloom which once through Egypt stole;
Sometimes I feel, but know not why, a fire within me burn,
And visions fierce and terrible, pursue where’er I turn;
Then I forget that earth is earth, and that myself am life,
And nature seems to die away in darkness, hell and strife.
But when my phrenzied fit is o’er, a dreary hour comes on, –
A consciousness of unknown things, – of reason overthrown.
Cold runs my blood from vein to vein – all vacant is mine eye,
And in my ears a sound of death, and dread eternity!
Beneath his parodic wit the anxiety showed through. Here too he was one with the girls, no longer painting flowers, but writing of banishment, madness and loss.
A darkness underpinned these early picture-songs. Among the scariest images were his surreal illustrations to Lady Anne Lindsay’s ‘Auld Robin Grey’. In this popular dialect ballad the heroine’s lover drowns when his ship goes down, but although she cries ‘my heart was in the sea’, her poverty-stricken parents persuade her to marry a well-off neighbour, Robin Grey. Lear shows us her underwater love, as her tears flow down, with her feet below the tide-line and the fish swimming below, while her mother looms over above her. ‘My mother did not speak’, runs the line, ‘But she looked in my face, till my heart was like to break.’
A more terrifying image of parental pressure is hard to imagine. The monster parents win: a bearded Robin Grey pours booze down the father’s throat and spoons soup into the mother: ‘he fed them both’, runs the song. But where have they come from, in Lear’s imagination, these nightmare figures devouring their daughter’s life?
Scoffing at intense emotion and clichéd tales, Lear explored the threats of family demands, romance and sex, entrapment and rejection. In 1835, after the Dublin conference, he went walking in the Wicklow mountains with Revd Stanley and Arthur. It was an opportunity for landscape drawing, his new interest, but a chance for comedy too. The Stanleys had estates in Ireland and Lear had become intrigued by Irish traditions, legends and songs: one of the poems he illustrated, his pictures fiercely undermining nostalgia for childhood, began:
I slept – and back to my early days
Did wandering fancy roam
When my hopes were light and my fancy bright
And my own a happy home.
This seems to have been a parody of a poem in the Dublin Magazine of 1833 by George Fenton, whom Lear would know later as the chaplain in San Remo. And at Knowsley he drew quick, crude illustrations for two stories, ‘The Adventures of Daniel O’Rourke’ and ‘The Adventures of Mick,’ based on published folk tales.
He was well primed for Irish fantasy on this trip. At the romantic valley of Glendalough their guide, shouting ‘at the top of his voice’ according to Arthur Stanley, recited Tom Moore’s poem of St Kevin (or Kiven), who flees to his cave and rocky bed above the lake, to avoid the ‘unholy blue’ eyes of the beautiful Kathleen. The guide persuaded them to twine their legs round a stone cross, a sure way to win a fortune and a beautiful wife, he said. Lear won neither, but he did draw a version of Moore’s poem:
Here at least, he calmly said
Woman ne’er shall find my bed
Ah! the good saint little knew,
What that wily sex can do. –
Hunted down, Kevin takes drastic action.
Ah! yes saints have cruel hearts –
Sternly from his bed he darts
& with rude repulsive shock
Hurls her down the beetling rock.
Glendalough, thy gloomy wave
Soon was gentle Kathleen’s grave,
Soon the Saint, but ah too late
Felt her love, & mournd her fate.
Kathleen’s beaming ghost glides round the lake: there is no escape after all.
*
The nursery and schoolroom at Knowsley were full of children bursting from the effort of being polite in grown-up company. Lear did not seek children out, as Lewis Carroll did small girls, and he was far from sentimental about childhood. He felt for their untamed innocence and lamented its loss as they grew up, but he never believed in pure, untarnished souls ‘trailing clouds of glory’. He would never write, like Wordsworth, ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’, or like Carroll, ‘Their innocent unconsciousness is very beautiful and gives one a feeling of reverence, as at the presence of something sacred.’ If anything, it was the animal side of children he liked, not the ‘sacred’. He watched them, enjoyed the chaos they caused and could see that they were sometimes pests. At nineteen, writing to Ann about their sister Sarah’s boys, he summed them up in rhyme:
Little Charles – I must say, seems improved on the whole
But at books he’s extremely dull – poor little soul!
But the other child – Freddie – is noon night and morn
The most horrid young monkey that ever was born –
Such violent passions and tears in an ocean,
He kept the whole house in a constant commotion.
With children Lear did not have to put on airs. He could be one with them, without effort: ‘Never was there a man who could so live into the feelings of a child,’ remembered Mary Crawford, who knew him when she was a girl. Children loved to watch him draw, and he made them feel he was specially theirs: ‘He grew to be so much our own,’ Mary wrote. Robert Francillon (the nephew of Lear’s old friend Robert Leake Gale) never forgot Lear’s first visit, when he drew an Eastern landscape for him, with camels and palms: ‘I treasured it as long as the wear and tear of nurseries and schoolrooms allowed.’ Robert and his sisters watched Lear doing drawings for his limericks, standing by his knee, and when the collection was published, they felt oddly bereft because now it ‘was no longer our very own, that we had watched flow
for us from the pen’. Because Lear felt easy with children, they responded in kind. They felt safe and were always drawn to him: ‘And children swarmed to him like settlers,’ as Auden put it. ‘He became a land.’
If Lear was a land, at this point he was a country of misrule, nonsense, larking about, and only later a landscape of loneliness, courage and endurance. One visitor attributed Lear’s invitation to the family dinner table not to a nervous, kindly gesture of Lord Derby, but to his grandsons’ insistence on speeding away from the dining room because it was ‘so much more amusing downstairs’. Why? ‘Oh, because that young fellow in the steward’s room who is drawing the birds for you is such good company and we like to go and hear him talk.’ So Lear, allegedly, was summoned upstairs, to make the adults laugh too.
Being ‘much more amusing’ made him good company. The 1830s were years of games after supper, of silliness and risqué inventiveness, of blowing feathers round the room, men kneeling on all fours carrying women on their backs, word games like ‘The Three Kingdoms’ – animal, vegetable, mineral. There was even one called ‘Nonsense’, with ‘cross questions and crooked answers’, where players gave their neighbour an answer word, secretly, and the conductor put questions: