Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

  ‘perfectly frozen’. EL to GC, 24 June 1835.

  ‘Earl of Wilton’. LL Introduction, xix–xx, note of 1871 to CF.

  ‘the uniform apathetic tone’. Davidson 17.

  ‘Another!’ EL to GC, 20 July 1835.

  ‘the noise of children’. EL to CG, 20 July 1835.

  ‘beyond all glorious’. EL to GC, 24 July 1835.

  ‘the Stanleys of Alderley’. Revd Edward Stanley (1779–1849), Bishop of Norwich 1837; his sons were Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–81), later Dean of Westminster, and Charles Edward Stanley, Royal Engineers, artist, d. Tasmania (1819–49). Edward Leycester Penrhyn (c.1790–1861) married Derby’s daughter Charlotte in 1823.

  ‘to give a stronger impulse’. Proceedings of the British Association 5. See Nugent 61–4.

  ‘Dickens lampooned the BAAS’. The Mudfog Papers, Bentley’s Magazine (1837–8) The presiding genius was Professor Woodensconce.

  ‘We found there’. De Tocqueville, Journey to Ireland July–August 1835, ed. Emmet J. Larkin (1990), 14. Letter to his mother, 10 August 1835.

  ‘chimpanzee clad in a little girl’s dress’. ‘Pan Troglodytes – chimpanzee with clothes on’, Anthopithecus Troglodytes (African ape). The full-length portrait is at Knowsley. The close-up is on a mixed page of sketches, Houghton MS Typ 55.12, f. 14, 17 October 1835.

  ‘to Thomas Hood … and to George Cruikshank’. See Hood, ‘A Strange Bird’ (1831) and Cruikshank, ‘Fellows of the Zoological Society’ (1834) in Lodge, Thomas Hood, 120–5.

  ‘Pythagorean Fancies’. In Whims and Oddities: Lodge, Thomas Hood, 120.

  ‘scientific writing’. See Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (2015).

  ‘Must go & draw a kangaroo’. EL to GC, 24 July 1835.

  7. Make ’Em Laugh

  ‘I think my stay here’. EL to GC, 24 June 1835.

  ‘I feel like 5 nutmeg-graters’. EL to CF, 3 January 1858, L 76.

  ‘Lady de T. and I’. EL to GC, 20 July 1835.

  ‘The only way to be comfortable’. 12 August 1843, Excursions vol. 1, 57.

  ‘The Bride’s Farewell’. One of many songs by John Barnett (1802–90); see The Musical World (1844), 237–8: ‘Fashionable ballads, like fashionable novels, are nowadays legion … the admirers of John Barnett will most likely purchase the ballads of John Barnett, be they good, bad, or indifferent.’

  ‘Shall I tell what fetters’. John Lawson, ‘The Maniac’ with Other Poems (1810). Other examples include Ann Taylor’s ‘The Maniac’s Song’ and Mary Robinson’s ‘The Maniac’, written, after taking a ‘considerable amount of laudanum’, Memoirs of the Late Mrs Robinson (1801), vol. 2.

  ‘Selina’. The Lady’s Magazine (1804), 146; see also ‘The Lament of Chatterton’ (1846), New Monthly Belle Assemblee, 272.

  ‘My mother did not speak’. Original 25, 146.

  ‘a poem … by George Fenton’. ‘A Dream’, in The Dublin University Magazine: A Literary and Political Journal (February 1833), 145. I am indebted to ‘Lear’s Irish Sources’ and ‘Retrospection’ in Bosh, 14 September 2008, 5 November 2014. George Livingstone Fenton became a chaplain in Bombay, returning in 1866, and was chaplain in San Remo 1869–85. A revised version of the poem appeared as ‘Retrospection’ in The Mahabuleshwar Hills, and Other Poems. By an Indian Chaplain (1876).

  ‘folk tales’. ‘Daniel O’Rourke’ and ‘Legend of Bottle Hill’ in Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825, 1834).

  ‘at the top of his voice’. Rowland E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Late Dean of Westminster (1884), vol. 1, 146–7. ‘By the Lake’, Thomas Moore, Irish Melodies, vol. 4 (1811).

  ‘St Kiven and the Gentle Kathleen’, published in five hundred copies, 1973. See Donald C. Gallup, ‘Collecting Edward Lear’, Yale University Library Gazette 61, no. 3/4 (1987), 125–42. Lear illustrated other songs from Irish Melodies, vol. 2 (1807), e.g. ‘Go Where Glory Awaits Thee’, ‘Rich and Rare Were the Gems She Wore’ and ‘Eveleen’s Bower’.

  ‘trailing clouds of glory’. William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1804). For a contrasting view of Lear and Romantic childhood, see Michael Heyman, ‘Isles of Boshen: Edward Lear’s Literary Nonsense in Context’, PhD, Liverpool, 1999.

  ‘Their innocent unconsciousness’. Lewis Carroll, Letters, 381.

  ‘Never was there a man’. Mrs Hugh Fraser, A Diplomat’s Wife in Many Lands, (1911), vol. 2, 25–7.

  ‘I treasured it’. Robert Francillon, Mid-Victorian Memories (1914), 31.

  ‘as Auden put it’. W. H. Auden, ‘Edward Lear’, Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57, (1966), 127.

  ‘so much more amusing’. Davidson 15.

  ‘Nonsense’. ‘Rachel Revel’, Winter Evenings Pastimes (1825), 50–2.

  ‘Mr Abebika’. In full, this particular list, found on the reverse of the canvas of The Temple of Rome (1840), runs: ‘Mr Abebika, Kratoponoko, Prizzikalo, Kattefello, Ablegorabalus, Ableborinto Phashyph, or Chakonoton the Cozovex, Dossi, Fossi, Sini, Tomentilla, Cornonilla, Polentilla, Battledore & Shuttlecock, Derry down Derry, Dumps, Otherwise –Edward Lear’. The long name varies, but Noakes 277 n. 18 says it is based on R. Stennett, Aldiborontiphoskyphorniostikos: A Round Game for Merry Parties (1822). This surely derives from Henry Carey’s Chrononhotonthologos (1734), with its ridiculous names: (‘Aldiborontiphoscophornio!/Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?’), described in Noel Malcolm, The Origins of English Nonsense (1997).

  ‘Long years ago’. Preface to More Nonsense (1871).

  ‘Hey diddle diddle’. ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ are in ‘Mrs C.

  Beadon Edward Lear scrapbook’, 1852–8, Houghton MS Typ 55.23.

  ‘pasted into an album’. See Original 23–4 and Appendix 227. The large album (17 ½ by 11 ½ inches) has leaves for inserting swatches of material, and chintz for the back cover, inscribed ‘R. Reynolds 10 King Street Manchester’.

  ‘There was an Old Woman of Norwich’. The Hockliffe Project, http://hockliffe.dmu.ac.uk/ reproduces the book in full, and also the Fifteen Young Ladies. See Marco Graziosi, ‘Limerick Books of the 1820s’, www.nonsenselit.org, which also credits Jean Harrowven, The Limerick Makers (1976) and Iona and Peter Opie, A Nursery Companion (1980).

  ‘our harsh Northern whistling’. Byron, Beppo, XLIV.

  ‘to stuff the memory’. Catherine Sinclair, Holiday House (1839), Preface, iv.

  8. Mountains

  ‘My eyes are so sadly worse’. EL to John Gould, 31 October 1836, SL 23. For Gould’s impatience and sense of Lear as a hired assistant, see letters between Gould and Jardine, late 1835 to 1836, Sauer vol. 1, 91–5, and EL to Jardine, 11 March 1836, Sauer vol. 1, 118.

  ‘James Duffield Harding’. Harding (1797–1863), a pupil of Paul Sandby and Samuel Prout, was illustrator for Landscape Annuals, 1832 and 1833. See Wilcox 21–5.

  ‘followed Harding’s style’. See Nugent cat. 2, 6–9.

  ‘Harding’s pupils’. Fowler 15. Fowler and Gale emigrated to Amherst Island, Canada in 1843.

  ‘almost brotherly’. Robert Edward Francillon, Mid-Victorian Memories (1914), 30–1. In 1838 Lucy Gale married James Francillon, later a judge in Gloucestershire, and Lear visited them often in Cheltenham.

  ‘without exception’. EL to FC, [19 or 20 June 1835].

  ‘red hot from Rome’. EL to FC, 19 June 1835.

  ‘must have then been about twenty’. Frances K. Smith, Daniel Fowler of Amherst Island, 1810–1894, 18, 103. Fowler wrote, ‘He was truly a remarkable man. He was painter, musician, traveller, author, linguist and humorist, not exactly the greatest in any of these departments, but an excellent second in all.’

  ‘with Audubon’. Fisher 171. Lear enjoyed a lifetime friendship with Victor Audubon (1809–60).

  ‘I never imagined any thing’. EL to Derby, 2 June 1836, SL 21.

  ‘I never remember’. EL to FC, 24 August 1836.

  ‘Edmund Hornby
’. Edmund George Hornby (1799–1865), son of Edmund Hornby (1773–1857) and Derby’s sister Charlotte. See Nugent 85.

  ‘Mrs Hornby’. EL to FC, 24 August 1836. For this tour and Lear’s sketches see Nugent.

  ‘I have now been a month’. EL to GC, 6 September 1836.

  ‘Mary Greville Howard’. See EL to Derby, 2 June 1836, SL 21. In 1874 she left Lear £100.

  ‘where ghosts are as common as mice’. EL to FC, 24 August 1836.

  ‘Conishead Priory’. EL to GC, 6 September 1836.

  ‘I know every corner’. Nugent 115.

  ‘he zig-zagged’. Judging from the numbering and dating of sketches, carefully examined by Nugent, Lear’s route took him from Borrowdale up to Watendlath, Thirlmere and Dunmail Raise, and via Grisedale Tarn to Patterdale.

  ‘Really it is impossible’. EL to John Gould, 31 October 1836, SL 24.

  ‘Wastwater’. Painter 42–3. The lithograph is in the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings: View of Wastwater and the Screes from Wasdale Head (1836–7).

  ‘invited to stay on’. EL to FC, 3 January 1837.

  ‘snow walls’: EL to FC, 3 January 1837.

  ‘unhinged & miserable’. EL to FC, 11 February 1837, on mourning paper.

  ‘he had moved again’. EL to FC, 3 March 1837. In April Lear moved briefly to 21 Sherrard Street, Golden Square.

  ‘executed in Rome’. EL to FC, 3 March 1837.

  ‘in a chariot’. EL to FC, 19 May 1837.

  ‘Phipps Hornby and his large family’. Captain (later Admiral) Sir Phipps Hornby (1785–1867), son of Revd Geoffrey Hornby of Winwick and Lucy Stanley. Superintendent of Plymouth Naval Hospital then of Woolwich Dockyard 1838, Commander of Pacific fleet, 1847, admiral 1858. Eldest son John (b. 1820) cricketer, captain in the Royal Engineers, killed in Montreal, 8 April 1848, aged twenty-seven. His brother Geoffrey (1825–95) also became an admiral. The youngest brother, James (1826–1909) became headmaster of Eton. See the album, V&A E.752-788-1939, ‘The Book of Bovisand/from Edward Lear/To Capn. & Mrs Hornby/& their family’. For this trip see EL to FC, 8 July 1837.

  ‘I sail next Sunday’. EL to FC, 8 July 1837.

  9. ‘Rome Is Rome’

  ‘drifted through Germany’. Houghton MS Typ 55.26 includes sketches of Luxembourg, 20 July 1837; Moselle 26, 29 July; Eltz 8 August; Frankfurt 25 August.

  ‘praises of the Beer’. EL to Ann, 3 November 1837, SL 24–30.

  ‘Anna Jameson’. Julia Markus, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (1995).

  ‘the Academy’. After the Napoleonic wars the Royal Academy revived ‘Rome Scholarships’ and Severn galvanised British artists into founding a ‘life Academy’. Thomas Lawrence, then President of the RA, hoped it ‘might yet vie in usefulness and dignity with other foreign institutions’, particularly the French. Lawrence to Severn, 23 December 1822, in Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760–1840 (2003).

  ‘Richard Wilson … William Pars … John Robert Cozens’. See Wilcox 25–7. Richard Wilson, in Italy 1750–7, provided sixty-eight drawings for the Earl of Dartmouth; Pars was sponsored by the Society of Dilettanti 1775–82; Cozens was in Italy 1776–79, 1782–3.

  ‘The sculptors’. See Alison Yarrington, ‘Anglo-Italian attitudes: Chantrey and Canova’ in The Lustrous Trade: Material Culture and the History of Sculpture in England and Italy, c.1700–c.1860 (2001). Thorwaldsen (1770–1844) lived in the Via Sistina: for his return, see Hans Christian Andersen, The Story of My Life (1852), 80–1.

  ‘Gibby’. Lady Eastlake (ed.), Life of John Gibson, RA. Sculptor (1870), 107.

  ‘I thank God’. Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors (1968), 171. For Theed, Gibson (1790–1866) and Wyatt (1795–1850) see ODNB, and Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1650–1851, website of the Henry Moore Foundation.

  ‘extraordinary slovenliness’. William Dean Howells, Italian Journeys (1867), 151.

  ‘five hundred foreign artists’. Jytte W. Keldborg, Danish Artists in Olevano Romano, from the Golden Age to the 21st Century, digital publication, 2011.

  ‘“Ponte Molle” Society’. Founded in the 1820s.

  ‘the country of my longing’. Andersen, My Life, 50–3.

  ‘an unfortunate class of females’. Metropolitan Magazine (1834), 91.

  ‘even & quiet man’. Penry Williams (c.1800–85). D 30 August 1863: ‘always truthful & lovely’. Noakes 47, EL to Aberdare, 19 September 1884, Glamorgan DBR/ 153/20. Also D 29 January 1879.

  ‘quiet, good-tempered’. EL to Ann, 29 March 1838. See Sarah Uwins, A Memoir of Thomas Uwins, 2 vols (1858).

  ‘For improvement’. EL to Derby, 14 February 1838. SL 37–41.

  ‘English Club’. Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, 1850.

  ‘whispering and eating biscuits’. Murray’s Handbook, 42.

  ‘English tradespeople’. C. T. McIntire, England against the Papacy, 1858–61 (1983), 41.

  ‘At last, dearest Louisa’. Arthur Clough, Amours de Voyage, 1849.

  ‘All strangers’. EL to Ann, 29 March 1838.

  ‘having disguised ourselves’. EL to Ann, 29 March 1838.

  ‘One may be very gay’. EL to Ann, 27 January 1838.

  ‘coming here’. EL to Ann, March 1838.

  ‘Last Friday’. EL to FC and GC, 18, 26 March 1840.

  ‘drawings and watercolours’. EL to Lord Derby, 5 June 1839, sending chalk drawings of Tivoli and Licenza, via Lady Susan Percy. For Lear’s work for the Stanley and Hornby families see Edward Morris, ‘Edward Lear in Italy 1837–1848’ in Fisher 175–93.

  ‘Joseph Lucien Bonaparte’. (1803–57), son of Napoleon’s brother Giuseppe, King of Spain. Author of several zoological and ornithological works.

  ‘staying with them at their villa’. EL to Gould, 17 October 1839, SL 49.

  ‘thousands were shot’. EL to Derby, 14 February 1838, SL 37–41.

  ‘Tivoli’. EL to Henry Catt, 11 April 1851, Houghton BMS Eng 707. For paintings see, for example, William Collins, Villa d’Este, Tivoli (1837), and Samuel Palmer, The Villa d’Este from the Cypress Avenue (1838).

  ‘horribly fierce dogs’. EL to Ann, 27 January 1838.

  ‘You have little notion’. EL to Ann, 29 October 1838.

  10. Happy as a Hedgehog

  ‘fleas’. EL to Ann, 12 May 1838.

  ‘rollypoly babies’. EL to Ann, 28 May 1838.

  ‘all noise, horror’. EL to Gould, 17 October 1839, SL 47.

  ‘They yell and shout’. EL to Ann, 28 May 1838.

  ‘Italy – especially Rome’. Samuel Palmer to Elizabeth Linnell, 22 December 1837, The Letters of Samuel Palmer (1974), vol. 1, 99. They shared lodgings with Lear and Uwins in the Hotel de la Ville de Rome, Naples (3 June 1838, Letters, vol. 1, 138).

  ‘Much as I love England’. Samuel Palmer to Elizabeth Linnell, 14 July 1838. Letters, vol. I, 155.

  ‘the sea at night’. Hannah Palmer to John, Mary and Elizabeth Linnell, 7 June 1838.

  ‘filthy old mountain’. EL to Gould, 17 October 1839, SL 47.

  ‘in high admiration’. Richard Colt Hoare, A Classical Tour through Italy and Sicily (1819), 149.

  ‘crisper pencil’. Sketches: Corpo di Cava, 28 June, 19, 20 July 1838; Sorrento, 23 July; Houghton MS Typ 55.6. Two Corpo di Cava drawings dated 13 June 1838, are in the ‘Italian Sketches’, seven albums collected by Lord Northbrook, Hornby Library, Liverpool Central Library.

  ‘sempre contentissimi’. Marco Graziosi, Bosh, 4 September 2016. Albergo Cappucini guest book, 18 July 1838, page shown in exhibition catalogue, Alla ricerca del Sud: Tre secoli di viaggi ad Amalfinell’immaginario europeo, ed. Dieter Richter (1989), 132.

  ‘just as you see them now’. EL to Ann, 26 September 1838. He also advised Ann to read Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834).

  ‘Rumours reached England’. Edwin Prince to Gould, 18 August 1838, Sauer vol. I, 271.

  ‘R
ome continues to fill’. EL to Ann, 29 October, 22 November 1838.

  ‘sent money home’. EL to Gould, 17 October 1839, SL 48.

  ‘a fooly Scotchwoman’. D 1885, SL 189. Sir William Knighton (1812–75).

  ‘never very much alone’. EL to Ann, 26 September 1838.

  ‘ancient stone walls’. EL to Ann, 11 May 1838.

  ‘long been a favourite retreat’. The first devotees were Germans, Austrians and Scandinavians, following Thorwaldsen’s friend Josef van Koch, who stayed here in 1804 and married a local girl.

  ‘grandeur and mountain solitude’ EL to Ann, 4 October 1838. Houghton MS Typ 55.6.130

  ‘different nations’. Hannah Palmer to John and Mary Linnell, 30 June 1839, Letters, vol. 1, 350.

  ‘The scenery here’. Hannah Palmer, 30 June 1839, Letters, vol. 1, 352.

  ‘a quiet Sunday’. Hannah Palmer to John and Mary Linnell, 10 July 1839, Letters, vol. 1, 356.

  ‘It takes a long while’. EL to Gould, 17 October 1839, SL 48.

  ‘to put together a book’. The market had been established by Prout and Harding. David Roberts and John Frederick Lewis had published sketches of Spain in the mid-1830s, and would soon work in Egypt and the Middle East. See Wilcox 22, 160–1. Lear later particularly admired Lewis’s ‘oriental sketches’: EL to Mrs Lewis, 22 June 1875, SL 247–8.

  ‘annotated with jottings’. Piperno 5 February 1840, Houghton MS Typ 55.26.180; Roccagorga 6 February 1840, MS Typ 55.26.182.

  ‘Olive’. Pitman 21.

  ‘all the English artists’. EL to Gould, 17 October 1839, SL 48.

  ‘Wilhelm Marstrand’. D 18 October 1873. For Marstrand see Hans Edvard Norregard-Nielsen, The Golden Age of Danish Art (exhibition catalogue, Copenhagen, 1995); Kaspar Monrad (ed.), The Golden Age of Danish Painting (1993).