by Jenny Uglow
PETER: Mr Charles, what do you think matrimony is like?
CHARLES: A mouse-trap.
PETER: You were at the last Lord Mayor’s ball, Miss Martha: what sort of stuff was Lady Nudeley’s petticoat made of?
MARTHA: A fig-leaf.
PETER: So, Master Simon, you went to the dentist this morning, what did he order you to pick your teeth with?
SIMON: A soup-ladle.
The Young Person at table, who picked at his teeth with a ladle, sounds like a Lear character. Another popular game, Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos, involved shouting out the names of invented characters faster and faster. The players then told the stories of these crazy characters at speed, with actions. From this, Lear made up his own, long nonsense name, varied over the years – ‘Mr Abebika, Kratoponoko, Prizzikalo, Kattefello, Ablegorabalus … Otherwise – Edward Lear’.
Storytelling, madness and speed came easily to him. And in his own – though unreliable – memory he found the perfect form at Knowsley almost by chance. ‘Long years ago,’ he wrote in 1872,
in days when much of my time was passed in a Country House, where children and mirth abounded, the lines beginning ‘There was an old man of’ were suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse lending itself to limitless variety for Rhymes and Pictures; and thenceforth, the greater part of the original drawings and verses for the first ‘Book of Nonsense’ were struck off with a pen, no assistance ever having been given me in any way but that of uproarious delight and welcome at the appearance of every new absurdity.
Lear’s model ‘There was an Old Man of Tobago’ came from Richard Scrafton Sharpe’s Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen, published by John Marshall in 1822 with illustrations by Robert Cruikshank. The book parodied The Adventures of Fifteen Young Ladies and A History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, from Marshall’s competitor John Harris, who had taken over the firm of Newberry, publisher of nursery rhymes, stories and alphabets. Similar forms can be traced back in time, for example to medieval French nonsense poems, but these were more like the bouncing nursery songs, tied to a place, that summon a character and tell a story with no explanation:
Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
In a shower of rain.
He fell in a puddle right up to his middle
And never went there again.
Lear’s verses shared other elements with the old lore of children: word-play, jingles, strange pairings and impossibilities. ‘Hey diddle diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle, the Cow jumped over the Moon’ was one of several rhymes he illustrated later for children. His nonsense had the arbitrary numbers, sudden surprises, disasters and attacks of those rhymes: Four-and-twenty Blackbirds bursting out of a pie and pecking off a nose: Three Blind Mice and the farmer’s wife, who cut off their tails with a carving knife; Humpty Dumpty, cracked for ever after his fall.
To begin with Lear treated ‘There was an Old Man of Tobago’ as he did the parlour ballads, illustrating it with three numbered scenes (later pasted into an album made from a pattern-book for swatches of material from a Manchester firm not far from Knowsley). Sharpe’s rhyme satirised fashionable non-meat diets, but it also touched on one of Lear’s pet subjects, the greed of the glutton. In his pictures a man with a hamster-like face and an old-fashioned bob-wig sits forlornly before bowls of sago and rice; in walk the physicians in boots and spurs, and as soon as they give him the go-ahead he attacks the huge leg of lamb, teeth first, waving knife and fork like weapons.
There was an Old Man of Tobago
Who lived on rice, gruel and sago
Till one day to his bliss
The Physicians said this
To a roast leg of mutton you may go.
Lear had a go at another of the Fifteen Gentlemen’s rhymes, ‘The old soldier of Bicester’, this time drawing only two scenes. Then came the moment when he realised that one picture alone would do. The verse form he chose did not follow the pattern of the Old Man of Tobago, but that used in Wonderful Old Women. In this, the character was introduced by a place, followed by a distinguishing action (often employing the terrible rhymes Lear enjoyed), and concluding with a statement of its effect – ‘which sadly annoy’d’, ‘which rejoiced’ – or a summarising final adjective – ‘worrying’, ‘whimsical’, ‘provident’, as in this rhyme from the original book:
There was an Old Woman of Norwich
Who lived upon nothing but porridge.
Parading the town,
She turned cloak into gown
That thrifty Old Woman of Norwich.
The short verse concertinaed a narrative: person, place and event, followed by consequence or judgement: no motive, no past, no future. The rhyme worked like a jack-in-the-box, springing a character into life, then snapping the box shut as it returned to the place of the opening line. Children would laugh, adults could make up their own meaning. And some of Lear’s rhymes were gleefully awful: ‘There was an Old Man of Kamschatka,/Who possessed a remarkably fat cur’; ‘There was an Old Man of Columbia,/Who was thirsty, and called out for some beer’. This playful rhyming often seemed to look back to Byron, his childhood idol, who compared the softness of Italian to ‘our harsh Northern whistling, grunting guttural/Which we’re obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all’.
The nonsenses were always a performance. Holman Hunt talked of how Lear ‘beat out’ his rhymes, reciting them with a thumping rhythm on their walks. The rhyming words were the kind that children loved to invent, and the weird happenings were very different to their usual fare of moral tales and the enjoyable yet didactic stories of Maria Edgeworth and others. Like Catherine Sinclair’s exuberantly original novel Holiday House with its noisy, mischievous, anarchic children, published at the end of this decade, Lear’s limericks challenged the teaching designed, as Sinclair said, ‘to stuff the memory, like a cricket ball, with well known facts and ready-made opinions’. Nonsense persons disdained facts. They were eccentric, mindless, violent, vague, sometimes peaceable, often cross. They had false teeth and gammy legs. They ate muffins and crumpets, fish and beans, tea and toast. They longed to escape but often failed: they set off, gave up and came back. They said what they thought and were rude. Their demands were infantile, their ambitions wild. There was ghoulish stuff here too, another childish taste of which adults disapproved: blood, amputation, screaming, dismemberment, ‘accidental’ baking in a cake.
In a nursery, designed to mould infants into rational shape, nonsense was a dance of unreason, showing strait-laced grown-ups dancing jigs, sleeping on tables, falling down volcanoes, climbing up trees. But they were not always happy.
There was an Old Lady whose folly,
Induced her to sit in a holly;
Whereon by a thorn, her dress being torn,
She quickly became melancholy.
This could work well to console a small girl for spoilt dresses and hurt feelings, but it could equally well be a dig at a disapproving aunt, who pursed her lips as though she had thorns up her dress. Yet there is sympathy and affection here too: in Lear, folly and melancholy often go together. What was the Old Lady’s ‘folly’? What form does her ‘melancholy’ take? Will she ever get down from this tree?
8: MOUNTAINS
Lear’s enthusiasm, his love of the ridiculous and his sense of wonder won him many friends. But he also liked being on the move. Doctors had decreed that exercise reduced the risk of epileptic seizures, and in his twenties he longed to get away from aviaries and studios and drawing rooms, to walk the country and sketch.
One way to combine freedom with an artist’s career was to take up landscape painting. This would also release him from exploitation by Gould, who was becoming increasingly demanding and impatient, and from the strain of such detailed, close work: ‘My eyes are so sadly worse’, he told Gould in the autumn of 1836, ‘that no bird under an Ostrich shall I soon be able to do.’ With this in mind, Lear became more and more interested in topographical art, accurate delineations of place inflected
by atmosphere. This would suit him. As well as working to commission artists could sell watercolours and oils at London exhibitions and publish books of their sketches, as Samuel Prout did in the mid-1820s and early 1830s with the Landscape Annuals and Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany.
Lear particularly admired James Duffield Harding, who took over from Prout as chief illustrator for the Landscape Annuals, and drew the landscapes for Hullmandel’s books: in 1830, he published his own Italian sketches on tinted paper, the start of a new vogue. Lear followed Harding’s style, particularly in his drawings of trees, balancing accurate depiction of form and bark against airy, impressionistic foliage. He used Harding’s recommended materials, graphite with highlights of white chalk on grey-tinted paper, and on a summer visit to Arundel in 1834, the year that Harding published his book Elementary Art: or, the Use of the Lead Pencil Advocated and Explained, he launched into landscapes: hedges in a country lane, the church at Peppering and the yard with its turkeys, the huge trees in the park at Parham. (Lear was always moved, and soothed, by trees, making them the focus of many works, and painting and drawing them separately all his life.)
New friends encouraged Lear’s interest, like the engaging Daniel Fowler and his future brother-in-law, Robert Leake Gale: both had been Harding’s pupils before going on a sketching tour of Holland, the Rhine, Switzerland and Italy. Lear met them both at Hullmandel’s. Fowler came from a well-off family who lived at Downe in Kent, Darwin’s later home. (His widowed mother had paid £300 for three years in Harding’s studio, the kind of training Lear could never afford.) The Gales became another family, as the Drewitts had been in Sussex: Robert’s nephew, the writer Robert Francillon, noted that ‘an almost brotherly and sisterly relation grew up between him and the group of bright young girls who then filled with life the house in Queen Square’. In old age Lear remembered sitting in Queen’s Square with Gale’s sisters, Lucy and Elizabeth (who married Dan Fowler in August 1835), reading Dan’s letters from Italy under a mulberry tree. When Fowler came back to London, with a face pitted by smallpox and an armful of sketches, an excited Lear thought his drawings ‘without exception the finest sketches I ever saw from any artist’s portfolio’.
In the week of Dan’s return Lear was planning a party. He had asked seven friends, including Robert Gale, thinking eight was the most he could squeeze into Southampton Row. Then in rushed Fowler, ‘red hot from Rome. – of course if he could be split into 10 – he must all come.’ Next Hullmandel asked to bring a foreign visitor; then Bernard Senior said his ‘only Brother in England’ was coming for the night – could he bring him too?
I own my blood curdled at this last volunteer … Conceive – for they can’t be described – the momentous cogitations with my landlady which ensued – the cleanings – the hurryings – the widening of table & multiplication of dishes, – & above all – add the misery of an Irish servant who almost always misunderstands whatever you say.
The Gales sent arack for punch and lent him a punch bowl, but then he found at the last minute that all his landlady’s ladles had been ‘smished’. In a panic Lear sent round ‘the following pathetic stanzas’:
My dear Mrs Gale – from my leaving the cradle
Till now I have never such agony known
What use is a Punch bowl without any ladle, –
Be it Ivory – Silver – Wood – China – or Bone? –
My landlady rushes & foams in a flurry
Her ladles for Punch & her Ladles for Soup
Besides all her Ladles for Butter & Curry
Are all, she vows – ‘smished’ in one family Group.
Then dear Mrs Gale – have a little Compassion
– If it’s only a Ladle full – Send me in one! –
And I’ll ever proclaim you in my estimation –
The most ‘Ladle-like’ personage under the sun!
Fowler always remembered these early days, the start of a lifetime friendship. Lear ‘must have then been about twenty’, he thought. ‘Tall, not handsome, and rather ungainly in figure, he was very agreeable and genial in manner. There indeed was partly the secret of his great success in life; he was all things to all people.’ He greatly admired Lear’s parrots, ‘drawn with great precision, truth and accuracy’, and loved his nonsense too, full of covert humour: ‘The astonishing vigour and drollery of the intentional bad drawing are quite past description.’
Later that summer, Lear was in Dublin, being ‘all things’ at once: naturalist, humorist, walker, and now landscape artist. In his brief tour with Revd Stanley and Arthur he drew the towers of Clondalkin and the valley of Glendalough, the cliff-top banqueting house of Bellevue and the crowded streets of Bray. It gave him a taste of something different, and he could not wait to set out with his sketchbook to draw mountains and mist again.
That summer a plan had been mooted that he might go on a painting trip with Audubon in the States. Audubon was kind, but tactfully pointed out to Lord Derby that the strain on Lear’s health would be simply too much. The idea was shelved. He was not done with painting animals. In early June 1836 he sent Derby an excited account of London Zoo’s first giraffes, the sensation of the year, whose arrival drew a crowd of nearly four thousand. ‘I never imagined any thing living of such extreme elegance,’ wrote Lear.
By the end of that month he was in Lancashire again for another long stay: ‘I never remember passing so happy a consecutive 6 weeks as I did this year at Knowsley.’ In early August, with Derby’s blessing and pockets stuffed with invitations to Stanley and Hornby connections in Westmorland and Cumberland, he set off on his own on a tour of the Lakes. At twenty-four, he could become a landscape artist.
*
A trip to the Lakes was a must for any aspiring artist, treading in the steps of Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. Lear knew what was expected, making several sketches from exactly the same position as the prints in contemporary guidebooks. But he was also agog for new impressions and keen to stray off prescribed routes. On his way he stayed with Derby’s nephew Edmund Hornby, who was Constable of Lancaster Castle and also had a home on Windermere. He summed up his visit in self-mocking raptures: ‘Mrs Hornby – the mountains of Westmoreland – the Castle – & the Lunatic Asylum – are all balanced in my mind – you might see them all at once – & each was perfection in its way.’
The perfection was marred by the fact that everywhere he went, it rained. On Saturday 20 August, he made a little drawing, wryly entitled Umbrellifera, a record of Kendal on market day, a huddle of women under umbrellas. ‘Nature’s slopbasin’, Lear called the town, ‘where it always rains’, where babies were born with fins. The clouds followed him to the southern flanks of the Lake District, where he sketched the abbeys of Cartmel and Furness in a deluge. He was still looking forward to the high mountains. ‘I have now been a month in the Lake Country’, he lamented in early September, ‘– & have seen nothing of a Lake at all! … almost all this time I have only made studies of rain.’ There were, however, some magical compensations, especially the Elizabethan Levens Hall, the home of Fulke and Mary Greville Howard, for whom Lear had been doing lithographs in London. He had met Mary Howard when he was eighteen, and thought her ‘one of the finest specimens of the Grand English lady of olden time’; she was fond of him in return, a friendship that would last until her death in 1874.
At Levens it still rained but he loved everything about the place, from the gardens to the dancing in the hall, ‘where ghosts are as common as mice, – & you sit among armour & starched ruffs till you find even your own limbs growing stiff & mouldy’. He enjoyed the absurd, like the great yew trees, ‘30 or 40 feet high – cut into cows – bottles – hats – & every possible shape – unaltered by an inch since 1680!! Imagine turf between walls of high beech trees – all magically shorn quite even – & looking like fable & nonsense!!’ There were more jollities – the daughters of Colonel Thomas Bradyll at Conishead Priory near Ulverston were ‘20 degrees beyond perfection – & w
hat with all sorts of singing & music with them, their father, & brother, & Admiral Sotheran – a band of 2 accordions, flute, harp, guitar & piano – we minded not the rain a tittle’. At Alexander Nowell’s Underley Hall near Kirkby Lonsdale, luxury replaced music. Nowell, he explained, ‘is a rich possessor of East Ind. Property, and the valuable splendour beats credibility! – & such living! Curries! Pilaus! champagnes! – Dear Me!’
At last, after that first rainy month, he reached the fells that were his real goal. On 9 September, he was at Storrs Hall on Windermere and from then on he refused further invitations. ‘This sort of life is all very fine,’ he decided, tongue in cheek, ‘but very improper.’ Instead he packed his bag, put on his boots, and set out.
He took with him a portfolio with blue-grey paper, a supply of pencils and stump, wad for shading and white chalk for heightening. His sketches, dated and numbered in pen and brown ink, showed a landscape at once familiar and strange. They began with a standard tourist view from Lowood on the eastern shore of Windermere, looking across the lake and up the valley beyond to the Langdale Pikes, their peaks emerging from drifting clouds. Then Lear went north, past Wordsworth’s home at Rydal Mount, through Grasmere and over Dunmail Raise, the old county border between Westmorland and Cumberland. Sometimes he hired a horse or took the coach but usually he walked. In mid-September he was high among the crags. ‘I know every corner of Westmoreland,’ he wrote later. ‘Scawfell Pikes is my cousin, and Skiddaw is my mother-in-law.’
Scafell Pike from Styhead Pass, 19 September 1836
From Wasdale he marched over the old packhorse route of Styhead Pass to Borrowdale, sketching the view back towards Scafell Pike. This was not a guide-book standard but an out-of-the-way view, and Lear conjured the great fells and the cloudy skies with simple, broken pencil lines and shading. The looseness and freedom of his drawing was itself a holiday, after years of detailed, intricate natural history work. Stopping in lonely uplands to sketch marshes and tarns, waterfalls in spate and the jagged crags silhouetted against the sky, he zig-zagged across the mountains. In his final few days he strode over to Ullswater before circling back over the Kirkstone Pass to Windermere. Now his great tour was over. By 30 October he was back at Knowsley.