Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  Nothing could exceed the genteel & intelligent expression of their countenances, except the urbanity of their deportment and the melancholy and oblivious sweetness of their voices. They informed me that they were the parents of nine and forty tadpoles of various ages and talents some of whom were expecting shortly to emigrate to Malvern and Mesopotamia.

  Amused by his obliviously sweet-voiced Frogs, Lear spun out the story in another letter, in which they brought their offspring to see him: the tadpoles admired his new lamps but declined cold lamb and Marsala, saying that watercress or beetles would be pleasant, but they were not hungry. The jest became a comment on living abroad:

  I did not quite know at first how to be civil to the tadpoles, as I found that owing to their long tails they could not sit on chairs as their parents did: I therefore put them into a wash hand basin, & they seemed happy enough.

  Such kind attentions from foreign persons quite of a different race, & I may say nature from our own, are certainly most delightful: and none the less so for being unexpected. The Frogs were as good as to add that had I had any oil paintings they would have been glad to purchase one – but the damp of their abode would quite efface watercolour art.

  He signed both letters, ‘Believe me, Yours sincerely’.

  Believe me. From now on, in Lear’s poems and songs and stories, human traits would migrate more and more into the realm of animals, reptiles and birds. The frog story was about reproduction and nurture, but also about the sheer oddity of natural life, the mutations that meant tadpoles had tails while their frog parents had legs, the difficulties of living in a particular element, the clashes of instinct and culture. Darwin had shown Nature to be ruthless, pitilessly discarding the feeble and odd. He had written of the branching tree of nature, of ‘strange and rare deviations of structure’, and of variation, change and mutation across continents and ages. The phrases ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ described a world that was mutable and exceedingly strange. Darwin’s own books and letters contained innumerable Lear-like oddities, and some good portrayals of ‘they’, very human and home-bred. Writing to T. H. Huxley he described pigeon fanciers in a gin palace in the Borough, where ‘it was hinted that Mr Bult had crossed his Pouters with Runts to gain size’: ‘and if you could have seen the solemn, the mysterious, and awful shakes of the head which all the fanciers gave at this scandalous proceeding, you would have recognised how little crossing has had to do with improving breeds, and how dangerous for endless generations the process was.’ How Victorian the head-shakers seem in their concern for the purity of species: Mr Bult deserves a limerick.

  Lear’s own nonsense was open to the protean, changing Darwinian world. In the stories that he wrote at this time, he engaged playfully, but with a heartfelt subtext, with extinction and exploration. Beyond this, the lonely figures of his limericks and later poems raised a troubling question: if human as well as animal society was driven by a hunt for perfection in choosing a mate, what of the ‘unfit’? Was there hope for the man with the very long nose? And were men and women any wiser than the beasts and the birds?

  *

  A month after the frog letters to the Duncans, Lear wrote a longer animal story – a black comedy, or comic tragedy, for Charlotte, Hugh and Reginald Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the ‘jolly, cheerful children’ of Lord and Lady Fitzwilliam, generous purchasers of his pictures. (The family name jolted him, reminding him of Mrs Wentworth who had set him on his way with his first introductions to naturalists and to the zoo: ‘Dear old Mrs Wentworth of Woolley would have rejoiced’, he thought.) One day when he called on the family in Nice, no one was home, so he ‘drew some birds & made some nonsenses for the children & came away’. Next he made them an alphabet, and then, taking a break from Tyrants, he spent a morning writing ‘a most absurd lot of stories for the little Fs’.

  The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple gave him new freedoms. His narrative gifts stretched and capered; his dialogue flowed beyond the brusque limerick speech; he overturned the geography books and created his own lands and seas. ‘In olden days’, he began, ‘that is to say, once upon a time, there lived in the Land of Gramblamble, Seven Families.’ They lived by the Lake Pipple-popple, near to the City of Tosh – ‘The names of all these places you have probably heard of and you have only not to look in your Geography books to find out all about them’ – and each family, Parrots, Storks, Geese, Owls, Guinea-pigs, Cats and Fishes, had seven children. Mixing folk-tale and natural history writing, Lear logged habitat, habit and diet, ballasting all this with solemn nonsensical detail. A long parenthesis on the ‘dangerous and delusive’ Clangle-Wangle, for example, was a masterly imitation of ‘scientific’ description: ‘Their speed is extreme, but their habits of life are domestic and pellucid. On summer evenings they may sometime be observed near the Lake Pipple-Popple, standing on their heads and humming their national melodies; they subsist entirely on vegetables, excepting when they eat veal, or mutton, or pork, or beef, or fish, or saltpetre.’ He was nothing if not precise. The parrots from the blue-leaved Soffsky-Possky trees eat fruit, artichokes and striped beetles; the Storks eat buttered toast, the Owls make mice into sago pudding, the Cats like sponge biscuits. The author draws punningly logical conclusions: ‘The Geese, having webs for their feet, caught quantities of flies, which they ate for dinner.’

  Like a good family of the empire, or rich parents funding the Grand Tour, the parents decided that their children should see the world, ‘gave them each eight shillings and some good advice, some chocolate drops, and a small green morocco pocket book to set down their expenses in’, and enjoined them not to quarrel. Injunctions, as fairy tales teach, are made to be disobeyed. Disasters follow with the speed of ‘Ribands and Pigs’. The parrots immediately squabble over a single cherry, in a cascade of invented verbs:

  On which all the Seven began to fight, and they scuffled,

  and huffled,

  and ruffled,

  and shuffled,

  and puffled,

  and muffled,

  and buffled,

  and duffled,

  and fluffled,

  and guffled,

  and bruffled, and

  screamed, and shrieked and squealed, and squeaked, and clawed, and snapped, and bit, and bumped, and thumped, and dumped, and flumped each till they were all torn into little bits, and at last there was nothing left to record this painful incident, except the Cherry and seven small green feathers.

  Each of the seven species has its fatal flaw, and while other threatened creatures, like the Clangle-Wangle and Plum-pudding flea, delight in the ‘calamitous extinction’, when the parents learn of their children’s deaths, they buy pickling materials, make their wills and jump in. Like the countries that are not in the geography books, their remains are not displayed (with a picture) in the grand museum of Tosh.

  In comic form, Lear told the story of the Fall, the defiance of the injunction not to eat the fruit, and the world of death to come. The joke was a playful answer to Tennyson’s ‘anomaly of high souls & philosophic writings’ and his tirade about squashing the planet flat. But it was also a throwaway riposte to Darwin, a light-hearted ‘On the Termination of Species’.

  *

  The Seven Families killed themselves through silliness. ‘Very happily for me’, Lear told Fortescue, somewhat unconvincingly, ‘my queer natural elasticity of temperament does not at all lead me to the morbids – “suicide” or what not.’ Yet there are plenty of suicides in his limericks, and in early August 1866, embarrassed about a book he thought he had left at a friend’s house but then found in his pocket, he concocted a spoof news report of the ‘sukycide’ of the well-known author and landscape painter Edward Lear, who had thrown himself out of a fifth-storey window, ‘to the extreme surprise & delight of some children playing on the pavement’.

  Later that month he drew ‘The Adventures of Mr Lear & the Polly & the Puseybite on their way to the Ritertite Mountains’
for Emma Parkyns’s children. In this short cartoon story, a mild satire on religious rows, with Lear the moderate squeezed between an evangelical parrot, mindlessly repeating prayers, and a High Church Puseyite, a weary Lear buys an umbrella for the rain. But when he sets out with his two companions, they meet disaster, indeed wholesale disassembly: ‘Mr L & the P. & the P.B. incidentally fall over an unexpected Cataract & are all dashed to atoms.’

  Two good-natured helpers, the Jebusites (biblical outsiders, driven from the promised land in Exodus), try hard, but cannot reconstruct the body parts ‘perfectly as 3 individuals’. In this game of visual consequences – at once religious disarray and evolution gone wrong – the parrot has Mr Lear’s head, the cat has the parrot’s head and Lear’s legs, and Lear’s rotund torso is topped by a wobbly feline head.

  In the end the friends tumble into a deep hole and vanish. Like the story of the parrots reduced to single feathers, this saga of fragmentation was another tale of extinction, the opposite of successful adaptation or magical metamorphosis.

  *

  In his youth Lear had drawn birds and beasts discovered on many expeditions, including Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle. Recently, he had been reading about more journeys of exploration, including that of Bates in the Amazon and the two expeditions of John Hanning Speke and Richard Burton to search for the source of the Nile. When the first expedition in the late 1850s collapsed Speke went on alone to Lake Victoria, which he named after the queen, and was convinced that this must be the river’s source. He returned to Africa in 1860 to confirm his theory. This was another dangerous, romantic journey: Speke fell in love with an African woman in Uganda, beat off Somalis armed with spears, and saved the life of a Buganda king’s wife. This time, he found the outlet from the lake, the starting point of the great river that ran for 1200 miles through the desert.

  Lear devoured the stories of mapping ‘unexplored’ areas, and the accounts of plant and animal collectors. Behind these, as he knew from his Knowsley days, ran a lust for possession, labelling, conquest and commerce. Bates, for example, had come back from the rain forest with thousands of specimens, most of them previously unknown insects and butterflies. In his book he wrote of the jungle and the river, the tribes and the animals, the insects and the birds, especially the toucan, flying heavily from the lower branches of the trees, a Lear-like curiosity, ‘No one, on seeing a Toucan, can help asking what is the use of the enormous bill …’ Was it once a web-footed bird, with a beak adapted to catch fish? It was hard to keep up with the new species. The Zoological Society was swamped by skins, specimens and pickled fish. In 1860 the founders of the London Acclimatisation Society argued that foreign species could be introduced and adapted to European conditions, improving local breeds. To prove that these strange creatures tasted good, the society’s dinner at Almack’s Assembly Rooms in 1862 included Bird’s Nest Soup, Chinese sea-slugs (chopped into mush), ‘Kangaroo steamer’, spiced meat from the West Indies, Syrian pig, Canadian goose, the South American birds the guan and curassow, followed by ‘Seaweed jelly’. The following year their sister society in Paris opened a Jardin d’Acclimatation, to display not only animals and plants but people from other lands.

  Lear’s disquiet about the raids of the botanists and zoologists, and the assumption of superiority over other races, found a voice in another story, ‘absurd, but good fun’, that he wrote before he left Hinton for the children of Gussie’s brother Slingsby. In The Four Little Children Who Went Round the World, the children, Violet, Slingsby, Guy and Lionel, sail off in a boat painted blue with green spots. They sleep in a large tea-kettle and have a small cat to steer and an old Quangle Wangle to cook dinner and make the tea.

  Their voyage is full of possible impossibilities, including churning sea-water to make butter, and their first landfall is an island with a single tree, 503 feet high. Having read so many travel books Lear had a sure grasp of their elaborate syntax, which he combined with the long sentences, persuasive detail and deceptive simplicity of his favourite childhood adventure, Robinson Crusoe. Here is Defoe:

  All the Remedy that offer’d to my Thoughts at that Time, was, to get up into a thick bush Tree like a Firr, but thorny, which grew near me, and where I resolv’d to sit all Night, and consider the next Day what Death I should Dye, for as yet I saw no Prospect of Life; I walked about a Furlong from the Shore, to see if I could find any fresh Water to drink, which I did, to my great Joy; and having drank, and put a little Tobacco in my Mouth to prevent Hunger, I went to the Tree, and getting up into it, endeavour’d to place my self so, as that if I should sleep I might not fall …

  And that is only half of the long sentence. Here is Lear, replacing the spiritual with the material – banishing death with ‘the prospect of life’:

  When they had landed, they walked about, but found to their great surprise, that the island was quite full of veal-cutlets and chocolate-drops, and nothing else. So they all climbed up the single high tree to discover, if possible, if there were any people; but having remained on the top of the tree for a week, and not seeing anybody, they naturally concluded that there were no inhabitants, and accordingly when they came down, they loaded the boat with two thousand veal-cutlets and a million of chocolate-drops, and these afforded them sustenance for more than a month, during which time they pursued their voyage with the utmost delight and apathy.

  The children find new species like the ‘Co-operative Cauliflower’, get stuck in narrow straits, join in feasts and give gifts of ‘Black pins, Dried Figs, and Epsom Salts’ to the natives. There are unfortunate incidents: the Cat and the Quangle Wangle bite off the tails of sixty-five red parrots, which Violet makes into an elaborate headdress with ‘a lovely and glittering appearance, highly prepossessing and efficacious’.

  Plumage interested Darwin. What were the shimmering crests and brilliant feathers for? Why were there specific forms for different species? Did a special fleck or dazzling spot make a difference? Lear, a wry observer of current London fashions, had often wondered what the point was of wearing elaborate plumes, much lampooned in Punch.

  Lear now looked back to the eager, unthinking collecting of those at Knowsley with a colder eye. That summer he had tenderly visited old Colonel Hornby, who was slowly dying. The Hornbys were on his mind, and his story recalled the events in the journal that Elizabeth ‘Pussy’ Hornby had kept when she sailed in the Pacific on HMS Asia with her father Phipps in the 1840s, collecting specimens for Knowsley as they went. His tale also satirised the arrogance of empire, where the demands of outsiders prompt quick resentment, but his young imperialists survive their many crises and are finally rescued from a ferocious sea-monster by an elderly rhinoceros, who carries them home on his back. The four children return accompanied by the tokens of Knowsley, ‘a crowd of Kangaroos and Gigantic Cranes’ (all the smaller birds are cooked and eaten). But like all triumphant Victorian hunters and travellers, they need a trophy, something to stuff, something to show: ‘As for the Rhinoceros, in token of their grateful adherence, they had him killed and stuffed directly, and then set him up outside the door of their father’s house as a Diaphanous Doorscraper.’

  The fate of the rhino is nonsensical but not comic: it casts a shadow backwards over the whole adventure. The great and generous rhino, reduced to a menial object on the doorstep (like the popular fashion for elephants’ feet turned into holders for spirits and cigars), reproaches animal-hunter and colonist and collector all at once – all of whom, perhaps, should be ‘gradually extinguified’. Like this surreal beast with its see-through skin, Lear’s nonsense is both diaphanous and tough.

  In his later limericks, Lear played, as he always had, with the borderlines between the animal and human world, sometimes with great tenderness and charm.

  There was an Old Person of Bree,

  Who frequented the depths of the sea;

  She nurs’d the small fishes, and washed all the dishes,

  And swam back again into Bree.

  She is almo
st a shrimp-like mermaid but she has feet, in neat little shoes. An amphibian creature, she inhabits two elements at once. And in sliding between them she looks far from ‘old’.

  The shifting between realms marks many rhymes, and although people often fail in their efforts at instructing wild creatures and grow increasingly like their pupils, this closeness is healing and absorbing.

  There was an Old Man in a Marsh,

  Whose manners were futile and harsh;

  He sate on a log, and sang songs to a frog,

  That instructive Old Man in a Marsh.

  Sometimes indeed, as the people don animal or insect shape, the effect is wholly enchanting.

  There was an old Person of Skye,

  Who waltz’d with a Bluebottle fly;

  They buzz’d a sweet tune, to the light of the moon,

  And entranced all the people of Skye.

  But elsewhere, this inversion of size is more alarming.

  There was an Old Person in black,

  A Grasshopper jumped on his back;

  When it chirped in his ear, he was smitten with fear,

  That helpless Old Person in black.

  Years later, thanking Fortescue for a New Year letter, Lear said what a pleasure it was; ‘for the grasshopper has become a burden, and the quick-pace downhill transit to indifference and final apathy is more and more discernible as month follows month’. A man-sized insect chirruping in Lear’s ear could be the voice of poetry, a perpetual pleasure – but it could also be a tinnitus-like distraction, a thing of nightmare, a warning that men too are mortal, and may face extinction, and that humans are far from the most important creatures in the world.