Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Lady Waldegrave helped him in his distress by sending him to Florence to paint two views. He drew cypresses between showers of rain, and managed to get into the Villa San Firenze at San Miniato, looking down across the city, ‘the real view of Turner. It is very glorious & I shall set to work at it thoroughly.’ Still, grief pursued him and being unable to write his long letters to Ann made the time feel strange and blank. In Florence his heart bled for Browning, distraught at Elizabeth’s death. Then Sarah wrote, telling him that their sister Mary had died on her way home from New Zealand and been buried at sea: ‘The dead weary thinking of Ann, & now of Mary every now & then seems to exhaust all nature within me.’ That summer, he would hear that his brother Henry’s four boys were fighting for the North in the American Civil War, while Fred’s son had joined the Confederate army. ‘I suppose all my 5 nephews were in the last battle, a curious state of unpleasant domestic romance.’ In a June dusk full of fireflies, he scribbled lines from Shelley’s 1821 ‘Lament’: ‘Out of the day & night,/A joy hath taken flight!’

  He missed Ann badly, and his memories of her were always fond. Four years later, on her birthday, 17 January, he wrote in his diary, ‘Ever all she was to me was good, & what I should have been unless she had been my mother I dare not think. She would have been 74 today.’

  V. CIRCLING

  25: ‘OVERCONSTRAINED TO FOLLY’: NONSENSE, 1861

  There was an Old Man of the Isles

  Whose face was pervaded with smiles;

  He sung high dum diddle, and played on the fiddle,

  That amiable Man of the Isles.

  Lear liked children, their spontaneous affection, their cheerful lust for violence, their acceptance of the odd. He avoided the Victorian double-think that saw children as both innocents to be cherished and savages to be tamed: he just saw them as individuals and tried to enter their world. He was entertained by their curiosity, their language-struggles and non sequiturs. They made him laugh.

  Now that Ann’s death threw him back to his own childhood, he noticed children more than ever, but he was thin-skinned from exhaustion and shock and sometimes family life was too much. In Cheltenham Lucy Francillon’s boys were delighted with his nonsenses, and Lucy herself, whom he had known as Lucy Gale in his early days in London, was ‘always so quiet and sensible that her company exactly suits me now’. In the same town, though, staying with the Reids, he wrote:

  Jemmy – (who is supposed to be unwell,) screaming in the next room – Helen practising below – (scales,) & Mary on the other side.

  One day of this house is enough – basta I live thro’ it! – Breakfast at 8 – but hurried – & piggish: it is wonderful to me how people can live so, taking no care of the very days of boyhood & girlhood that make all their future life good or evil.

  Afterwards he saw that it was his own ragged state that made this unendurable. By contrast, visiting Archer Clive and his wife at Perry-stone near Ross on Wye, he found their small daughter Kathleen charmingly odd. In the evening, ‘Little Kathleen came & amused us all. She sang “I am a Nemesis & a Fury rolled into one” – with a queer spirit enough to kill a man outright: – I thought I should never have been able to stop laughing.’ The liking was mutual. Kathleen promised, he said, that ‘she will go to Timbuctoo with me in 20 years, “if she is not ill”’. A few weeks later, on a train at the end of May he noticed that the juddering made two children, in the care of their nurse: ‘not frightened, but half ill. So I took the boy – 4 years old, on my knee, & the girl in my arms, & told them my long name & all kinds of nonsense – till they forgot the shaking bother … I never saw 2 sweeter & more intelligent children than those 2: & I longed to keep them both.’ Entertaining them he turned easily into the clown, the singer of songs, the maker of nonsense. Later in the year, calling in at some friends, and finding ‘no one in but the baby’, he asked, ‘I wonder why I love children so?’

  Gradually, as he came to terms with Ann’s death, Lear’s sense of being alive came back. On 1 September, at St Leonards, he wrote:

  Assuredly one of the purestly loveliest days it is possible to see on earth. From sunrise all day & evening & night hardly a breath of air, & the sky pure blue – a few bright clouds at sunset: the sea a perfect mirror, – hardly rippled, & almost noiseless. – Rose at 7 – after a sleepless night. No letters. Placed outlines of Mt. Athos, Schloss Elz, & Matterhorn on canvass, & then wrote – absurdly & continually all day long – till 6. Posted 24 letters. During the day, the bathers, walkers, churchgoers, sprawlers on the sand, sitters on the shingles, loiterers on the benches, – were all happy to see.

  At this point he was working on the proofs of a new Book of Nonsense. Despite his offhand attitude to his nonsense, he was proud of it, and took great care with the limericks and his later songs. Ten years hence he would admit that ‘bosh requires a good deal of care, for it is a sine qua non in writing for children to keep what they have to read perfectly clear & bright, & incapable of any meaning but one of sheer nonsense’. But he was aware that the book was not only for children. A week after he smiled at the sprawlers on the sand, he went to stay in Kent with the Goldsmids, who had become good friends. He was smitten by Sir Francis’s sister Julia, a clever woman of thirty-eight, in the Helena Cortazzi mode: ‘Such a distracting Miss G. with such a face, like Mary Queen of Cotts!’ After dinner he showed his nonsense drawings: ‘– gt. Laughter –. Sang a good deal: & Lady G played. Altogether happier than for many a day.’

  Nonsense and the Goldsmids gave him heart. Instead of making his own lithographs he took his 1846 book to the Dalziel brothers, engravers who worked with the Pre-Raphaelite artists as well as for Punch and the Illustrated London News (and, in a few years’ time, for the Alice books), explaining that he wanted to produce a new, cheaper edition. They found him ‘a landscape painter of great distinction, a naturalist, a man of high culture, and a most kind and courteous gentleman’, and agreed to cut the blocks, print and produce the book, and offered to buy his rights for £100. Lear declined, but asked if they could find a publisher. He had persuaded McLean to give up his rights in return for a promised book on Corfu, and had already approached Smith & Elder, who said no. The Dalziels now approached Routledge, Warne & Routledge, who would not publish, but agreed to sell a thousand copies on commission at three shillings and sixpence, a shilling higher than Lear suggested (‘A wary Scotsman is Routledge’).

  Lear copied all his drawings afresh, so that the skilled wood engravers could get to work – sometimes shadowy pencilled lines showed second thoughts, later erased. There were small disputes with the Dalziels about the cutting and printing – he was very particular about the detail – but on the whole he was extremely pleased. On 16 December he wrote in amazement, ‘Book of Nonsense is published & 500 sold already.’

  For the new book Lear dropped three limericks – including the Old Man of New York, who murdered himself with a fork – and added forty-two. Some seemed to show himself over the years as he grew his beard, put on weight and became more obsessed with his nose – a lasting invitation to phallic readings. His restless travels were there in the Old Man on a Hill, who seldom if ever stood still and the man fleeing the cow recalling his sitting on one by mistake in Greece with Frank. He was there, too, in the ‘scroobious’, wily palm-climber of Philae and in the struggling scholar of Greek:

  There was an Old Person of Cromer,

  Who stood on one leg to read Homer;

  When he found he grew stiff, he jumped over the cliff,

  Which concluded that Person of Cromer.

  ‘Concluded’ is nice. But is he dead, or skipping on the sand beneath, having finished reading and hopped down?

  In the rhymes that Lear added to his book people balance, swing, teeter on their toes, or fall. The drawings show even more unnatural poses than the first book, people with their legs in the air, upside down, stretching, pointing, swinging on a bell-rope. They are like actors performing before a critical ‘they’, and yet they also reflect bac
k, in exaggerated form, the ‘normal’ oddities Lear saw around him. He was very aware of dress and found that looking hard at fashions made them powerfully strange. Writing to Fortescue about a photograph of Lady Waldegrave, he noted that ‘the large dresses of the day never look well photographed, for in themselves they are so monstrous that only the movement of a live woman can make them approximate to a figure at all … the portrait of a sitting lady in a crinoline always looks as if she were a dwarf walking’. Later he was amused by the new fashion for dresses narrowing at the ankle, so that now women could ‘postulate theirselves upside down with impunity, and no fear of petticoatical derangement’.

  There was an Old Man of Melrose,

  Who walked on the tips of his toes;

  But they said, ‘It ain’t pleasant, to see you at present,

  You stupid Old Man of Melrose.’

  ‘They’ are more confrontational, more violent in 1861 than in the earlier limericks. They smash the man from Whitehaven with his raven, and the old man with the gong (‘But they called out, “O law! You’re a horrid old Bore!”’). He seems not to mind, being ecstatically involved in his playing, and nor does the Old Man of Melrose, dancing on despite the abuse. But although many characters are defiant, like the girl with the birds on her bonnet, shouting back, ‘I don’t care’ – many do care. There are dark encounters: the man who shuts his wife in a box; the women who swap barbarities:

  There was a Young Person of Smyrna,

  Whose Grandmother threatened to burn her;

  But she seized on the Cat, and said, ‘Granny, burn that!

  You incongruous Old Woman of Smyrna!’

  That last adjective makes one pause. ‘Incongruous’ is hardly apt for a woman who wants to burn her granddaughter: yet it means exactly that, not fitting, out of place.

  The drawings, feeding off slips of sound, like visual puns, are as slippery as the words. Looking at the Old Person of Ewell, we can see that ‘mice’ won’t make his soup ‘nice’, but does the word on the bowl read ‘Gruel’, or ‘cruel’?

  There was an Old Person of Ewell,

  Who chiefly subsisted on gruel;

  But to make it more nice, he inserted some mice,

  Which refreshed that Old Person of Ewell.

  Some limericks and drawings flirt openly with uncertainty, like the man in a boat, a rhyme that critics often return to with furrowed brow.

  There was an Old Man in a boat,

  Who said, ‘I’m afloat! I’m afloat!’

  When they said, ‘No! you ain’t!’ he was ready to faint,

  That unhappy Old Man in a boat.

  Is he ready to faint from despair or relief? Is he ‘unhappy’ in general, or just in this dilemma? His boat seems both on the water and the land. Perhaps ‘they’ are teasing, and he is floating after all? And why does he look as though he has just fallen into the boat? Why are they leaping with their feet in the air? Boundaries between land, water, air disappear. Lear leaves us afloat on riddles, while the mechanics of the poem, the accelerating rhythm and slow return, work to prevent a capsize.

  *

  In early March 1861 Lear told Emily Tennyson how he waited for people to come and see his pictures but sometimes no one came for three hours or more: ‘so then I partly sleep, & partly draw pages of a new Nonsense book. If I sleep, I wake savagely at some newcomer’s entrance, & they go away abashed. If I write nonsense I am pervaded with smiles, & please the visitors.’ Like the amiable Old Man of the Isles, playing his fiddle, ‘pervaded with smiles’, Lear was a skilled performer. But a licensed fool tells truth: his nonsense is serious. Some years on, raging at a doctrinaire sermon, he exploded, ‘Perhaps it is better that I should altogether stay away, since one day, if I am so overconstrained to folly, I may get up and snort & dance & fling my hat at the abomination of sermon preaching where sermons are simply rot.’ His nonsense verse was an anti-sermon, the explosive expression of an outsider who had to smile and sing for lords and ladies, bishops and bankers. Fortescue once ticked him off for being easily bored by people, and in London in 1862 after a dull posh lunch, he admitted, ‘I am come to a point of life when the restraint of aristocratic society is a fearful bore, & one not at all wants entertaining.’ In Corfu he scrawled on the corner of a letter to Emily, ‘I have decided to go to the Palace in dirty boots: to eat my fish with my fingers: & to spit in the tumbler: – on wh. I shall never be asked again.’ Nonsense let him snort and fling his hat, make faces in church, fulfil his old urge to jig down the stately corridors of Knowsley. It defied gravity, in all senses, even if it risked a fall.

  There was an Old Man at a casement,

  Who held up his hands in amazement;

  When they said, ‘Sir, you’ll fall!’ he replied, ‘Not at all!’

  That incipient Old Man at a casement.

  The Book of Nonsense sold fast and its readers now spread far beyond Lear’s circle of friends. His purchasers were still a well-heeled bunch: three shillings and sixpence was a lot to pay for a children’s book. But why did this semi-private pleasure become such a public hit? Perhaps George Routledge, that canny Scotsman, was just a better publisher than McLean, more adept at marketing. But perhaps, too, the time was ready for nonsense: Lear, the man of feeling, and then in 1865 Lewis Carroll, the man of mind. Lear read Alice in Wonderland without comment. He did not have Carroll’s logical genius, but both writers created an escape into time-free imaginary worlds. Both were shrewd about contemporary modes, conventions and beliefs, sharing a parodic brilliance, an eye for the absurd and an inspired verbal liberty, rousing simultaneous surprise and recognition. Looking back on Lear’s 1861 book, the writer of a long Spectator article noted in 1870 that he had ‘seen an eminent statesman, great in finance, unequalled on the Bank Act, laugh over it the whole of a summer morning (when out of office)’. More seriously, he worked out that although Lear’s rhymes and pictures ‘defied sense – which is just what nonsense ought to do … the defiance was in itself at once acknowledgment and rebellion. What we want from Nonsense is exactly this – a gay rebellion against sense. But there is no relief to the mind unless there be enough sense in the nonsense to make the nonsense visible.’ All nonsense, the review concluded, ‘should be audacious and capricious defiance of sense, but never go far enough from sense to lose the feeling of delightful freedom which is implied in the rebellion’.

  Lear’s limericks, which he had been writing now for twenty-five years, both recognised and defied social rules. This was a concern that fitted these uneasy decades. Notions of British superiority and empire had been shaken by the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny, and the queen herself would soon be sunk in mourning after Albert’s death in December 1861. Fantasy and irreverent nonsense were a relief, a way of reading a world out of joint. Charles Kingsley turned to an underwater world in 1863 for his fable of reform and his moral ‘Do as you would be done by’. (Lear read Kingsley’s Christian Socialist essays and The Water-Babies, and wrote to express his appreciation for all his works ‘perhaps above all – “Water Babies”, which I firmly believe to be all true’.)

  Lear was not alone in worrying that the rules ‘they’ imposed to maintain order could throttle individuals, or in his concern with society’s failure to absorb the ‘different’, the foreign, the odd and disruptive. In On Liberty, in 1859, John Stuart Mill despaired at the way people always looked first to see what others were doing, instead of thinking like individuals. ‘Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done; peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes.’ Mill linked this to the Puritan heritage, where the one great offence was ‘Self Will’, and all human good was comprised in ‘Obedience’. Such narrow conformity led, he was sure, to a withering and starving of human capacity.

  In art and literature, this generation, poised between the defiance of the Romantics and the counter-cultures of the fin de siècle, had littl
e time for oddity. The past decade had seen outbursts against the Pre-Raphaelites in 1850, and against Tennyson’s Maud in 1855, when one critic exploded, ‘If an author pipe of adultery, fornication, murder and suicide, set him down as practiser of those crimes.’ How dare the Poet Laureate offer such a picture of decline into madness and self-loathing?

  Till a morbid hate and horror have grown

  Of a world in which I have hardly mixt,

  And a morbid eating lichen fixt

  On a heart half-turned to stone.

  Maud was a disturbing picture of the fragmentation of self, full of social as well as personal anger against the rottenness of politics, the poisonous gases of the mines, the adulteration of bread for the poor so that ‘the spirit of murder works in the very means of life’. Yet just as upsetting to many readers, the cure that Tennyson offered was to plunge his tortured individual back into the mass, marching off to the Crimean war. Lear never offered such a parable of reintegration: his inventive, free-spirited outsiders, facing hostility and loneliness, remain outside.

  Arguments about the individual and the species also coloured the debates about evolution that Lear had followed over the last thirty years. Fifteen years before, in April 1845, Lear and his friends were caught up in the excitement following Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which posited the development of the whole natural world from earlier forms, from stars and planets to plants, fish, animals and humans. In the same year, the revised edition of Darwin’s researches on the Beagle, especially on the Galapagos finches, a single species ‘modified for different ends’, had given glimmerings of a theory of natural selection. Lear’s limericks had always been taxonomic, a gallery of odd types, and his people were curiously fluid, morphing into animals and birds, with elongated limbs, arms turning into wings, noses into beaks. His nonsense people, ill-fitting folk pushed out by the herd, also evoked the ruthless process that made Tennyson long to believe ‘that nothing walks with aimless feet,/ That not one life shall be destroy’d,/ Or cast as rubbish to the void’.