Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  ‘Mrs D.’ D 9 Jan 1865.

  ‘How you used to swear!’ EL to Ann, 17 January 1838.

  ‘for bread and cheese’. ‘By way of a Preface’, NSS (1879, 9th edn 1894), xiv.

  ‘passengers in the inn-yards’. Fowler 18.

  ‘teaching well-off girls’. EL to FC, 15 April 1837. ‘2 mornings in the week, I have had a class of pupils in Grosvenor Square of 6 or 8 – & it has been quite delightful.’

  ‘Every teacher’. Fowler 122–3.

  ‘What is an album?’. By ‘E.C.’, 17 January 1824. See Samantha Matthews, ‘“O all pervading Album!”’, in Christopher Bode (ed.), Romantic Localities: Europe Writes Place (2015).

  ‘Albumean Persecution’. Lamb to Brian Waller Procter, 19 January 1828, Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, VII: Letters, ed. E. V. Lucas, 794–5.

  ‘A Shabby Genteel Story’. W. M. Thackeray, Fraser’s Magazine 22 (1840), 237, 402.

  ‘several detailed studies suggest’. Houghton MS Typ 55.4, f.11, 16.

  ‘Sarah … was the finest painter’. Album belonging to the Gillies family.

  ‘gladly would I supply’. Sarah to Frederick, 12 September 1849, Michell.

  ‘Drawn from nature’. Houghton MS Typ 55.4, f. 56, 58, 119; see also MS Typ 55.27.

  ‘Eleanor’s Geranium’. RA 78, Cat. 5b. Dated ‘18 June 1828’.

  ‘This curious vegetable production’. Houghton MS Typ 55.4, loose image 9, verso.

  ‘You are interested in Botany?’ 1805, in Theresa M. Kelley, Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (2012), 52; see also Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (1996).

  ‘Hexandria Monogynia’. Houghton MS Typ 55.4, loose image 9. ‘Album of Drawings’ c.1830, MS Typ 55.27, also contains over sixty images and seventeen pasted-in engravings.

  ‘why should there not be a Bong Tree’. Richard Mabey, The Cabaret of Plants (2015), 1.

  ‘There was an old person so silly’. B&N, 44; CN 112.

  ‘A different, smaller notebook’. Notebook 1829, NLS Hugh Sharp Collection 594, MS 3321.

  ‘other elegant, delicately careful paintings from the late 1820s’. See Houghton MS Typ 55.4. Lear paintings sold in 2012 included A Greater Bird of Paradise and A Citron-crested Cockatoo and a Snake: see Guy Peppiatt Fine Art Summer Catalogue 2012, cat. 40, 41.

  ‘The Moral Zoologist’. The Lady’s Magazine, 1800–5. University of Kent Special Collections.

  3. ‘O Sussex!’

  ‘the curving loop of the Arun’. The river was diverted by the railway company in 1860, and the Burpham loop became a backwater, with the village wharf closing in 1887.

  ‘involved in the town’s finances’. Royal Bank of Scotland Archives. Reports of Cases … in the House of Lords on Appeals and Writs of Error (1839) IV, 101.

  ‘William Jones’. (1745–1818), painter of the 1500 watercolours known as Jones’ Icones. The cabinet was left to John Drewitt, and eventually donated in 1931 to the Hope Entomological Collection, Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

  ‘How clearly just at the moment’. EL to FC, 27 November 1841.

  ‘A drawing of Peppering House’. 1829; Private Collection, Nugent 3.

  ‘the voice of the rooks’. D 13 May 1864.

  ‘the bones, and several grinders’. Gideon Mantell, The Fossils of the South Downs (1822), 283–4.

  ‘a rare coin’. The Monthly Magazine, 1826, 558; the reverse was inscribed ‘E. Dux’.

  ‘I was taken ill’. EL to Fanny Jane Dolly Coombe, 15 July 1832, CN 50.

  ‘Ye who have hearts’. October 1826. Private collection.

  ‘that insolent and rapacious oligarchy’. A collection of Addresses, Squibs, Songs, &c. together with The political mountebank shewing the changeable opinions of Mr Cobbett, published during the contested election for the borough of Preston (1826), 8. See also the editorial in The Examiner, 23 April 1826 on Parliament serving ‘a proud and venal Oligarchy’.

  ‘Methodist or Universalist/Unitarian hymns’. My thanks to Nicholas Roe.

  ‘reading a Bible’. EL to CF, 25 July 1885, LL 336–7.

  ‘Robert Curzon’. (1810–73), eventually the fourteenth Baron Zouche, a diplomat who brought back manuscripts from Orthodox monasteries, including Mount Athos.

  ‘attacked the proposals for law reform’. ‘Bentham, Brougham and Law Reform’, Westminster Review XI (October 1829), 447–71.

  ‘watercolours by Turner’. Cecilia Powell, ‘Turner’s Vignettes and the Making of Rogers’ “Italy”’, Turner Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (1983).

  ‘Nothing will persuade me’. James Hamilton, Turner: a Life (2007), 115.

  ‘A very long day’. Hamilton, Turner, 274: manuscript diary at Farnley Hall. Fawkes/Wentworth marriages: Godfrey (Armytge) Wentworth (1773–1834) m. Amelia Fawkes 1794, 3s 5d; d. 1842; eldest son, Godfrey (d. 1865) m. Anne Fawkes 1822.

  ‘a famous menagerie’. Caroline Grigson, Menagerie: the History of Exotic Animals in Britain (2016), 232.

  ‘a grateful inscription’. ‘To Mr and Mrs Wentworth,/and their family,/In acknowledgement of their kindness towards him/These drawings are respectfully and gratefully presented/by E. Lear/24th April 1830/35 Upper North Place/Gray’s Inn Road’. RA 80.

  ‘The Fudge Family in Paris’. Published 1818. See Ronan Kelly, Bard of Erin: the Life of Thomas Moore (2009).

  ‘Peppering Roads’. 12 December 1829; Sussex County Magazine, January 1936; CN 16–17.

  ‘their King Charles spaniel’. ‘Ruby: Accidentally shot, November 23rd 1829’, CN 22.

  ‘turkeys attacking gulls’. ‘Turkey Discipline’, late autumn 1829, CN 14.

  ‘3 parts crazy’. EL to Fanny Jane Dolly Coombe, 15 July 1832, CN 51.

  ‘In a verse letter to Eliza’. ‘I’ve just seen Mrs Hopkins’, c.1830, CN 44.

  ‘Troubadour’. This describes the singer’s burial by an olive tree: ‘The place was a thrice hallowed spot,/There he had drawn his golden lot/Of immortality; ’twas blest,/ A green and holy place of rest’ (1825).

  ‘little fat Person’. EL to FC, September 1830.

  ‘cracked church bell’. The bell was replaced in 1922 with four bells bearing the names of Drewitt family members. ‘Peppering Bell’, CN 45–6 and n.

  ‘O Sussex!’ D 20 September 1862.

  4. To the Zoo

  ‘Siberian rubythroat’. McCracken Peck, 31. The paper for the drawing is watermarked 1829: see Guy Peppiatt Fine Art Winter Catalogue, 2012–13, cat. 42 43, 44.

  ‘For all day I’ve been a-’. ‘Letter to Harry Hinde’, December 1830, CN 46–7.

  ‘Zoological Society of London’. Members included aristocratic patrons and animal collectors. It soon merged with the Zoological Club of the Linnean Society led by Nicholas Vigors. For the early history, see Takashi Ito, London Zoo and The Victorians, 1828–1859 (2014); Isobel Charman, The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo (2016); Sofia Akerberg, Knowledge and Pleasure at Regent’s Park (2001).

  ‘guide for children’. The Zoological Keepsake (1830), in Diana Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain (2007), 181.

  ‘The Gardens and Menagerie’. Vols I: Quadrupeds (1830), II: Birds (1831). Hyman 15–16.

  ‘proof title page’. Zoological Society archives: see McCracken Peck, 42–4. The wrapper, for Sketches of Animals in the Zoological Gardens Drawn from the Life by E. Lear, to be published by ‘R. Ackermann, 96 The Strand’, can be dated between 1828 and 1832, when the form ‘R. Ackermann’ was dropped. Preliminary sketches: polar bear: album, NLS 594, Houghton MS Typ 55.27 f 21; ‘peaceable kingdom’, Houghton MS Typ 55.27 f. 47.

  ‘cheap as dirt’. Audubon to Revd Bachmann, 1832, Sauer vol. 1, 88.

  ‘a single species’. The only book on parrots was François Levaillant, Histoire Nouvelle des Perroquets (1768–1809), with 145 engravings based on paintings by Jacques Barraband, who had worked on designs for Gobelins tapestries and Sèvres porcelain: see McCracken Peck, 64
.

  ‘countless rough drawings’. See Hyman 20, 24, 25, 28–30.

  ‘A huge Maccaw’. EL to Charles Empson, 1 October 1831, SL 14

  ‘his own lithographic plates’. Michael Twyman, ‘Lear and Lithography’, in Nugent, 15.

  ‘Hullmandel kept the blocks’. Michael Twyman, Lasting Impressions – Lithography as Art (1988), 62.

  ‘a handful of natural history books’. These included William Swainson, Zoological Illustrations (1820–3) and Thomas Horsfield, Zoological Researches in Java (1824).

  ‘Lear had to learn’. His ‘first lithographic failure’ was a drawing of a black-capped lory drawn from a model at Bruton Street. Houghton proof.

  ‘He liked the freedom’. Lear later mastered tinted lithography and pen-and-ink sketches on transfer paper. Twyman, ‘Lear and Lithography’; Nugent 11.

  ‘Linnean Society’. Proposed as ‘an Artist devoted to subjects of Natural History, and now employed in illustrating the Family of Parrots, and in other Zoological Works.’

  ‘will then be framed’. W. Swainson to EL, 26 November 1831, on receipt of Part IX, Noakes 19: MS inserted in Ann’s copy of Parrots, Houghton MS Typ 805L.32[A]. See EL to Arthur Aikin, Society of Arts, 1833: RSA B6/22 Lear.

  ‘beautifully coloured’. Selby to William Jardine, 10 January 1831, CUL; Fisher, 165.

  ‘pretty great difficulty’. EL to Charles Empson, 1 October 1831, SL 14–16.

  ‘Their publication’. EL to Sir William Jardine, 23 January 1834, SL 19.

  ‘giving little self-complacent stops’. Leigh Hunt, ‘A Visit to the Zoological Gardens’, New Monthly Magazine, 1836.

  ‘curious, peering faces’. ‘Visitors to the Parrot House’, Houghton MS Typ 55.9 f. 60.

  ‘when – lo!’. D 19 October 1848; Albania 295.

  ‘4 black storks’. D 9 January 1867.

  ‘your paternal beard’. EL to HH, 14 January 1860, HRC MS-2415.

  ‘a man who without any prospects’. EL to GC, 19 April 1833.

  ‘Birds of Europe’. Lear made sixty-eight plates. See Gould letters, Houghton MS Eng 797.

  ‘exceedingly pleasant’. EL to Charles Empson, 1 October 1831, SL 15. ‘Mrs Gould’s Pet’ was a short-tailed field vole: Houghton MS Typ 55.27 f. 12.

  ‘esteemed & respected’. EL to John Gould, 28 August 1841, SL 53.

  ‘they were always before me’. EL to GC, 19 April 1833. For sale of rights to Gould, EL to Jardine, 23 January 1834, SL 19. For dating of these visits see Sauer vol. I, Appendix C, 309–13.

  ‘Exceedingly careful’. ‘Scrawl’, 5 April 1833, CN 48–9.

  ‘Gould’s book on toucans’. A Monograph of the Ramphastidae, or Family of Toucans (1833–5): Lear made ten of the thirty-four plates.

  ‘While Lear felt disgruntled’. EL to FC, 17 March 1836, Nugent 214.

  ‘Darwin’s bird specimens’. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (1991), 209, 222.

  ‘always a hog’. D 27 November 1863.

  ‘one I never liked’. D 7 February 1881.

  ‘great expeditions’. Including drawings for the Society’s Transactions (1835, 1841: vols I and V, ZSL) and fourteen watercolours (twelve birds and two mammals) for The Zoology of Captain Beechey’s Voyage (1839).

  ‘Selby’s collaborator, Jardine’. Christine Jackson, Prideaux John Selby: A Gentleman Naturalist (1992), and Sir William Jardine: A Life in Natural History (2001). RA Cat. 80 notes a watercolour sketch for the Great Auk, signed by both Lear and Selby; Martin Bradley Collection, McGill University. Lear produced twenty plates for Illustrations of Ornithology, vols 2 and 4, and three for Jardine’s Illustrations of the Duck Tribe (1840), as well as six plates in Thomas Campbell Eyton’s A Monograph of the Anatidae, or Duck Tribe (1838).

  ‘Parrots are my favourites’. EL to Jardine, 23 January 1834. Correspondence, 1833–6, William Jardine Papers, RSM: 3/64. Lear contributed plates to Felinae (1834), Pigeons (1835) and Parrots (1836. He dissuaded Jardine from copying the parrots in his own volume, as all rights now belonged to Gould.

  ‘remembered their kindness’. For Selby, see EL to CF, 21 January 1862, L 222; for Jardine, EL to Sir Joseph Hooker, 3 June 1878, SL 252.

  ‘only because I feel more pleasure’. EL to Fanny Jane Dolly Coombe, 15 July 1832 SL 18.

  ‘A Monograph of the Testudinata’. 8 parts, 1833–6; the publisher failed before the final third of the plates were published, and unsold stock was bought by Henry Sotheran, published as Tortoises, Terrapins and Turtles (1872).

  ‘drawn from nature’. Lear contributed seven drawings to Bell’s History of British Quadrupeds (1837); Lear’s copy, Houghton MS Typ 805L.37c, Hyrax Capensis, inscribed ‘Drew Broad St. April 13th 1832’. In Houghton MS Typ 55.12 f. 4; several pages are labelled ‘Zoo’. See McCracken Peck, 91–2, for correction of previous errors in dating. He also provided drawings of fossils and ammonites for William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1836).

  ‘I am up to my neck’. EL to GC, 19 April 1833.

  ‘Bernard Senior’. (1811–94). In 1844, he took the name Husey Hunt to inherit the Husey estate at Compton Pauncefoot, Somerset; m. cousin Jane Blackmore 28 April 1840.

  ‘What days, (& what nights)’. D 8 August 1881.

  ‘some circumstances’. EL to GC, 19 April 1833.

  ‘syphilitic disease’. D 20 February 1885.

  ‘a very thin man’. EL to FC, 17 March 1836.

  ‘decidedly caustic’. Fowler 102.

  ‘A series of conversazioni’. [W. P. Frith], A Victorian Canvas, The Memoirs of W. P. Frith, ed. Neville Wallis (1957), 33.

  ‘George Barnard’. M. Twyman, ‘Charles Joseph Hullmandel: Lithographic Printer Extraordinary’ in P. Gilmour, Lasting Impressions – Lithography as Art (1988), 46.

  ‘Turner singing’. D 28 April 1871, and Henry Strachey, in Introduction, NSS x.

  5. Knowsley

  ‘the rain is coming down’. EL to GC, 24 June 1835.

  ‘a lively rattling sportsman’. Amanda Askari, ‘The 13th Earl of Derby’s Equestrian Interests’ in Fisher 30. Stanley was MP for Preston, then for Lancashire.

  ‘spent a million’. Askari, ‘The 13th Earl’, 30.

  ‘sent collectors’. Collectors included Thomas Bridges in South America, Joseph Burke in South Africa and North America, John MacGillivray in Australia and Indonesia, Thomas Whitfield in West Africa, and Derby’s nephew, Vice-Admiral Phipps Hornby, helped by his daughter Elizabeth in the Pacific and South America. See Colley, chs. 2 and 3 for Elizabeth Phipps-Hornby’s diary; letter to Lord Derby, Liverpool 920 DER [13] 1/85/12.

  ‘by shipping them.’ Fisher 90.

  ‘his museum’. A huge resource for nineteenth-century naturalists, still used today for identifying ‘types’. See Clemency Fisher and Christine E. Jackson, ‘The 13th Earl of Derby as a Scientist’, and Clemency Fisher, ‘The Knowsley Aviary and Menagerie’ in Fisher 45–51, 85–95. See also essays by Sir David Attenborough and Clemency Fisher in Stephen Lloyd (ed.), Art, Animals and Politics: Knowsley and the Earls of Derby (2016).

  ‘golden parakeet’. September 1831 (skin LM D. 735); Lord Derby’s Parakeet, 1831 (skin LM D. &93); Fisher 55, 126, 164. The skins are still in the Liverpool Museum.

  ‘such as at the Gardens’. EL to FC, 19/20 June 1835.

  ‘novelties’. EL to Jardine, 14 October 1835. NMS, GD 472 NRA 2475 Jardine.

  ‘pencil studies’. See detailed sketches in album Houghton MS Typ 55.12.

  ‘their cabinet skins’. I am immensely grateful to Clemency Fisher for showing me the drawers full of parrots. The ‘types’ are in a special cabinet with a red tag attached, and an orange tag outside, showing they must be the first to be saved in the event of fire.

  ‘crowned crane’. September 1835, (skin LM.D.250); ‘Orinoco goose’. July 1836, Gleanings (skin, LM D. 198d); Fisher 98.

  ‘woodchuck’. Gleanings Plate VII (skin LM.D.42a); ‘Woolly Opossum’, March 1834, (skin LM D.194); ‘black giant squirrel’. 1836,
Gleanings Plate VI (alive in July 1836, but d. 27 December); ‘Eastern quoll’. (skin LM D. 257), 1835; Fisher 111, 112, 130, 108.

  ‘paying close attention’. See Colley, 110–12.

  ‘I took the sketches very carefully’. EL to Derby, 2 June 1836, SL 22. The wildcat and turtle both appear in Gleanings, Plates IV and XVII.

  ‘to imitate the fur more nearly’. EL to Lord Derby, 17 December 1834, Knowsley.

  ‘Portraites of the inditchenous beestes of New Ollond’. c.1838, MS Pierpont Morgan, CN 57.

  ‘the Goulds set off to work there’. The Goulds’ Australian works included The Birds of Australia, 7 vols (1840–8), A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos, 2 vols (1841–2) and The Mammals of Australia, 3 vols (1845–63).

  ‘strict rules’. My thanks to Clemency Fisher for explaining this process.

  ‘to establish a “type”’. Checking was often left to professionals like Gould, whose notorious speed and carelessness in recording which specimens he was using led to elaborate tangles.

  ‘Three birds were named after him’. The macaw, in Regent’s Park Zoo, was identified as the ‘Hyacinthine macaw’: Charles Lucien Bonaparte named it after Lear in 1856, when he recognised Lear’s accurate drawing as a new species; Bonaparte also named the cockatoo after him. The parakeet is now named Platycercus tabuensis.

  ‘whiskered yarke’. The connection with nonsense names has been suggested by McCracken Peck and Fisher. The whiskered yarke, a monkey, is now called the white-faced saki; the eyebrowed rollulus is the Himalayan quail; the purplish guan is the crested guan; the aequitoon a Gambian antelope; the ging-e-jonga an eland, ‘Oreas Derbianus’, and the jungli-bukra is the South Indian ‘rib-faced deer’.

  6. Tribes and Species

  ‘Elizabeth Farren’. See Gill Perry, ‘A Lady on the Stage and an Actress off It’ in Lloyd 61–79. Derby, Charlotte and family shared the house with the 12th earl’s younger children: Lucy (1799–1809), James (1800–1817) and Mary (1801–1858).

  ‘linked through marriages’. The twelfth earl’s sister Lucy m. Geoffrey Hornby 1772, given the Stanley living of Winwick: they had thirteen children. Stanley’s sister Charlotte m. their oldest son Edmund Hornby, 1796, while Stanley m. his cousin Charlotte Margaret Hornby: their children were Edward (1799–1869), Charlotte (1801–53), Henry (1803–75), Emily (b. May 1804, d. November 1804), Louisa (1805–25), Eleanor Mary (1807–87), and Charles (1808–84).