Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  The same month saw the publication of the second volume of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, in which Ruskin made a distinction between the old masters, like Claude and Poussin, and the new, like Turner, who had a different understanding of ‘truth to nature’, not as a following of convention but as profoundly imaginative, displaying a moral as well as material truth. This idea caught Lear’s heart. In 1880, after he went to see the Turners that Ruskin had donated to the Taylorian in Oxford, he wrote to tell him that this was ‘a treat for which I may also take this opportunity of thanking you, as I often do mentally for having by your books caused me to use my own eyes in looking at Landscape, from a period dating many years back’.

  *

  Among the admirers of Lear’s Views and Excursions was the young Queen Victoria and in July 1846 she asked Lear to give her drawing lessons. Since her marriage to Albert in 1840, Victoria had had five children in rapid succession – the oldest, Vicky, was now six, and the latest, Helena, was born in late May. This summer she was at Osborne House in the Isle of Wight, to recuperate and get back her boundless energy and also to escape, at least briefly, from the keen eye of the public and the tussles of politics. On 25 June, Peel’s government had collapsed after a vote on Ireland, and much to the queen’s dismay a new Whig government came in, under Lord John Russell.

  At Osborne, by contrast, all was peace, except for the noise of builders, and she confided in her uncle, Prince Leopold, how ‘snug and nice’ she found it ‘to have a place of one’s own, quiet and retired’. Victoria and Albert had bought the house the previous year, and Albert had immediately drawn up designs for rebuilding it in an Italianate style, with a tower looking over the gardens to the sea – he said the view of the Solent reminded him of the Bay of Naples. Sixteen years later, after Albert’s death in December 1861, Lear remembered how he had showed him a model of the new house ‘& particularly a Terrace, saying – “This is what I like to think of – because when we are old, we shall hope to walk up & down this Terrace with our children grown up into men & women.”’

  Victoria liked to breakfast on the terrace and spend the morning painting. Encouraged by Albert, who was a talented amateur artist, she was keen to learn. She had been taught as a child by Richard Westall, and in the early 1840s both she and Albert practised etching with George Hayter and Edwin Landseer (who found her ‘all whim and fancy’, while she found him annoyingly unreliable). Lear turned up at the back door of Osborne in mid-July, six weeks after Helena was born, to begin his lessons. Lear’s nerves disappeared, perhaps remembering his years of teaching well-bred young women in St James’s, and the lessons were a success. Their sessions were squeezed between government business, drives in the country and visits to the children in the nursery, and Victoria noted that Mr Lear ‘teaches remarkably well, in landscape painting in watercolours’. A diligent pupil, she copied Lear’s drawing and he, hardly surprisingly, was pleased and encouraging. ‘Gave Vicky her religious lesson, as most days,’ she wrote on 17 July. ‘Had another lesson with Mr Lear, who much praised my 2nd copy. – Later in the afternoon I went out and saw a beautiful sketch he had done of the new house.’ Next day, ‘had another drawing lesson, and am, I hope, improving’. When she returned to London, Lear gave her more lessons at Buckingham Palace: she even fitted one in on the morning of Helena’s christening, a grand occasion, with the little girls in satin dresses, Bertie in a white merino blouse and ‘little Alfie’ looking lovely ‘in a white frock trimmed with silver … The Baby 1st cried & then (shocking to relate) proceeded to suck her thumb, but looked very dear.’ Amid this mix of domesticity and state affairs, Lear taught Victoria how to select her composition without cramming everything in and introduced her to ink and wash. Although she went on to study for many years with the Scottish painter William Leighton Leitch, her watercolour style stayed faithful to Lear’s: trees in the foreground, flat horizontal planes, and hills in the distance.

  Lear was touched when Victoria sent an engraving of one of his drawings of Osborne to him in Rome, but he was determined not to boast about this, or about all the commissions he had, warning Ann against mentioning it lest his success brought ‘complaints from those who are more skilful & yet have little to do’. But he did dine out on stories of being shooed sideways when he stood with his back to the fire – not the place to stand in front of royalty – and of his famous gaffe when the queen proudly showed off her display cases. ‘Oh! how did you get all these beautiful things?’ he asked, to which she replied mildly, ‘I inherited them, Mr Lear.’

  *

  In his preface to the Excursions in April, Lear had hinted that if the book should ‘meet with approbation’ a second volume might follow. And it did, a few days after his last lesson with Victoria on 6 August, this time dedicated to Derby’s son, Lord Stanley, with a text giving short descriptions of the scenes. And if the books were a success so were the travels themselves, in a more personal sense. Lear valued his tours of the Abruzzi, he said, less for the landscape, which was often too barren to provide ‘picturesque’ subjects, than for its novelty and for the warmth of the people. Over the next couple of years he sent drawings of their towns or churches to the families he had stayed with, ‘and every day there come such nice letters from those good people who are quite delighted with these trifling presents’. He knew that he would never forget the time he had spent with them, ‘and should I never revisit this part of Italy, I shall not cease to cherish the memories of my stay in the three provinces of Abruzzo’.

  13: DERRY DOWN DERRY: NONSENSE, 1846

  There was an Old Man of the West,

  Who never could get any rest;

  So they set him to spin, on his nose and his chin,

  Which cured that Old Man of the West.

  Chichester Fortescue, who met Lear in mid-April 1845 before his return to England, caught his amiable, music-loving, companionable spirit straight away. ‘I like what I have seen of him very much,’ he wrote soon after they met, ‘he is a good, clever, agreeable man – very friendly and getonable with.’ Fortescue was twenty-two, a brilliant student with a First in Classics from Oxford, shy, with an occasional stutter but easy-going among his friends: he would soon plunge happily into an affair with Polly Fleming, the star equestrienne of Astley’s circus. As the son of an Irish MP he was destined to enter politics himself and was touring with his friend Cornwall Simeon while waiting for the next election, due in 1847. Lear took the two young men sketching, explored Tivoli and the Campagna, rode out to villages and dined with gaggles of their friends. Lear was, Fortescue thought, ‘full of nonsense, puns, riddles, everything in the shape of fun, and brimming with intense appreciation of nature as well as history. I don’t know when I have met any one to whom I took so great a liking.’ When Lear left for England, Fortescue was full of laments: ‘I have enjoyed his society immensely and am very sorry he is gone. We seemed to suit each other capitally. Among other qualifications, he is one of those men of real feeling it is so delightful to meet in this cold-hearted world. Simeon and myself both miss him very much.’

  The Views and Excursions showed Lear’s appreciation of nature and of history, and his humour and capacity for feeling. And the second volume of the Excursions also carried an advertisement for a completely different kind of book without naming the author: A Book of Nonsense. This had appeared in February, with Lear paying the costs, published by Thomas McLean in two volumes, each carrying thirty-six rhymes, priced at three shillings and sixpence (a marked contrast to the four guineas for Excursions).

  ‘There was an Old Derry down Derry,/ Who loved to see little folks merry; So he made them a Book, /And with laughter they shook, At the fun of that Derry down Derry!’

  Lear’s name did not appear on the cover until this third, expanded edition of 1861. But on all the editions, the author, toes pointed, feet off the ground and arm raised, bounds into a group of eager children, so excited that one boy stands on his head and the others rush forward shrieking with pleasure. Their delight
was understandable: the books were quite unlike the standard fare, positively naughty. They looked different for a start, like rectangular sketchbooks, with drawings that raced right across each page, open and unframed. Each right-hand page carried a separate image, so that when you turned the page a surprise leapt out at you. The pictures caught the eye first: below them the verses, printed in sloping capitals, ran in three lines, not the four of later versions used here. The whole effect was freewheeling, anarchic, full of fun.

  Nonsense never seemed to cause Lear trouble or headaches. In his drawings he ushered forth old men and young women, pigs and ducks, rabbits and bees, in untidily effortless lines. He wrote and drew them fast. His preliminary drawings have a marvellous free-hand vivacity that cannot fail to make one smile, like the plain, large-busted Euphemia (not living up to her name ‘of good report’), who runs off, clearly pleased, with her long-haired crook clutching the family silver:

  There was an Old Man of Bohemia,

  Whose daughter was christened Euphemia;

  Till one day, to his grief, she married a thief,

  Which grieved that Old Man of Bohemia.

  Lear took up his nonsense when tired, or bored, or when it was too dark to paint, images and words swimming up from a realm below reason. Sometimes a name, a place passed or mentioned, prompted a rhyme, which might grow into a verse or be casually abandoned. Answering an invitation from a friend, he once wrote:

  I shall come up from Barnes and hope to be with you at 6 –

  There was an old person of Barnes

  Whose stockings were covered with darns: –

  A new idea & good for my new publication …

  Since he composed his first ‘Old Persons’ at Knowsley a decade before, Lear had occasionally put together a book for friends, giving one manuscript to the Phipps Hornby family and another to Lady Duncan in Rome. He played with the detail of illustrations and tinkered with his verses: in Lady Duncan’s draft, for instance, the Old Lady of Prague, whose language was horribly vague (suggesting an interesting contemporary pronunciation of ‘Prague’, which Lear rhymes elsewhere with ‘plague’), appeared as an ‘ambiguous old creature’, not as ‘an oracular Lady’ as in the published book:

  There was an Old Lady of Prague,

  Whose language was horribly vague;

  When they said, ‘Are these caps?’ she answered, ‘Perhaps!’

  That oracular Lady of Prague.

  But with publication the text was relatively fixed, and the nonsense was open to a wider audience. What would they make of it? With ‘Derry down Derry’, an old ballad refrain, Lear placed himself in a line of performers descending from the mummers’ plays at medieval Christmas feasts and the later versions that toured England and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were popular, democratic entertainments, like the acrobats’ show that Lear saw as a child on Highgate Hill: class and snobbery, his mummer’s name implied, will be banished. The players – like Lear at this point – were anonymous and masked, and their songs were a call to fun:

  With hey dum dum, with hey dum dum,

  With hey dum dum dee derry,

  For we be come this Christmas time

  A purpose to be merry.

  In a deep way, hard to articulate, Lear’s nonsense is comprehensible as both the foolery of childhood and the foolery of carnival, turning the world upside down. Adult readers in a serious mood can trace a tradition of nonsense from the Greeks, finding it in ancient riddles, in Renaissance poems, in the word-play of Elizabethan verse, in the fools of Shakespeare’s plays. But Lear, though he sometimes refers to Shakespeare’s fools, never talked of past tradition in relation to his work. He had learnt from the parodies, comic poems and drawings of Hood and others that were popular in his youth, and had loved word-play and absurdity since his early teens. The discovery of Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen at Knowsley gave him a form, but his invention was his own.

  *

  The key quality of the nonsense rhymes is surprise: this is what makes us laugh. They ask us to believe in peculiar people, to accept strange happenings, to inhabit a world where butter is used to cure plague, a hatchet to scratch a flea.

  In his landscapes Lear’s people are small and rather formal, partly because he found it hard to draw them properly, but also to show how often they were dwarfed by the grandeur of their surroundings. But in his nonsense drawings, caricatured though they are, his strange people become touchingly real, alarming, intriguing. They step forward without awkwardness. Place names bestride the world; all borders can be easily crossed, including those between humans and animals. Lear’s drawings are full of movement, bursting across the white space, free of perspective, while the verse with its bounding rhythm is mobile and unconfined.

  The verses worked quite simply, at least on the surface. The bald, storytelling openings like ‘There was a Young Lady of Russia’, with their implied ‘Once upon a time’, seem to promise a connection between person and place. Yet the link is purely arbitrary. Of all literary forms, nonsense demands the strongest suspension of disbelief; but while we read, we do ‘believe’, entering a land where anything can happen. Lear’s wonderland, however, is always tied to the real, like a kite whirling on a string, held down by those precisely named places. In this first book a cluster of Scottish and Italian names were playful mementoes of recent tours: Gretna, Bute and Dundee; Leghorn and Vesuvius, Ischia, Apulia and Parma. And while children enjoy the odd names without question, adults (and critics) can read them for local and historical references or for the sexual innuendo of large noses and pointing limbs. Lear must have searched hard for a rhyme for Abruzzi, before landing on something so daftly and deftly suggestive:

  There was an Old Man of th’ Abruzzi,

  So blind that he couldn’t his foot see;

  When they said, ‘That’s your toe,’ he replied, ‘Is it so?’

  That doubtful Old Man of th’ Abruzzi.

  We wouldn’t read it as suggestive, however, if it weren’t for the picture. Constantly, in these rhymes, the interpretation ripples like this, between image and text.

  In the limericks there is no logic of cause and effect, merely a story to follow, contained in a rolling circle where the last line returns to the first. But something has always happened in between, so that we read the final line differently to the first. In terms of action, the limericks teach us to live with the unlikely. Things happen fast in these short poems and consequence is briskly suggested by a final verb: ‘which cured’, ‘which grieved’, ‘which displeased’, ‘which saved’, ‘which drowned’, ‘which astonished’.

  And what of the odd people? How responsible are they for their fate? The nonsense people rage against conformity. But although there are many confrontations, the scornful or oppressive ‘they’ are as much puzzled and frightened as they are shocked and disapproving. True, they can be violent, but sometimes they run away, and sometimes they behave rather kindly, in a baffled way. They feed cake to the Old Person of Rheims, who is troubled by terrible dreams; they cure the Old Man of the West. They ask curious, concerned questions: ‘Does it fit?’ they ask the man in the plum-coloured vest; ‘Is it hot?’ they ask the Old Person of Gretna who tumbles down Etna. The replies they get are often angry, or mendacious, or both. The dangers, the verses suggest, come as much from the nonsense persons themselves as from the chorus of ‘they’.

  Sometimes the characters simply embody their situation. They may just be unfortunate, like the tiny Old Man of Leghorn (‘quickly snapped up he, was once by a puppy’). But while some nonsense persons are victims of accident or chance, others are given a dominant trait, obscurely responsible for their actions and dilemmas. They may be small and thin or stout and ‘globular’, possess a huge mouth or waving arms or spindly legs – but more often they are identified by feelings or behaviour. Some sit on chairs or columns and stay there (they like to be up high), but many, like the Old Man of Coblenz, striding with his long legs from Turkey to
France, are diagrams of movement. They point at each other with arms, feet, legs or paws or look out into space, off the blank page, like the Old Man of the Hague, riding in his balloon, gazing through his telescope at the moon.

  The nonsense people’s gestures imply things we cannot see, and their expressions can suggest a story or mood subtly at odds with the words. But several of them shrug off their fate, like the heavy drinker of Hurst – ‘When they said, “You’ll grow fatter,” he replied, “Does it matter?”’ – or this blithe Scandinavian heroine:

  There was a Young Lady of Norway,

  Who casually sat in a doorway;

  When the door squeezed her flat, she exclaimed, ‘What of that?’

  This courageous Young Lady of Norway.

  Lear often grants courage to women, like the cheery Young Lady of Hull who cries out ‘Who’s afraid?’ waving her spade at the bull, or the laudable cook who springs to the rescue.

  There was an Old Man of the North,

  Who fell into a basin of broth;

  But a laudable cook, fished him out with a hook,

  Which saved that Old Man of the North.

  Other women are alarming, frivolous or boring – they bake men in ovens, wear oversized bonnets and weep at the weather. But several, often rather mermaid-like in their appearance, are artistic or musical, sweeping a lyre with a broom, playing the harp with their chin. The feminine Lear, nurturing and murdering, is alive in variety and oddness.