Inventing Edward Lear
Sara Lodge
Harvard University Press, £23.95
Review by Nick Major
>
>
>
> I don’t have much time for surveys of the most or least popular books,
> but it says something about Edward Lear’s enduring appeal that in 2014
> The Owl and the Pussy-Cat was voted Britain’s best-loved children’s
> poem. Only this morning, my son threw into my lap an illustrated
> edition of Lear’s verse and started yelling his daily refrain, “read
> it, read it!” All children love nonsense. Lear’s nonsense, however, is
> superlative.
>
> In this heavy but insightful critical study of his work, Sara Lodge, a
> lecturer at St. Andrew’s University, considers some intriguing reasons
> why this might the case. In order to appreciate Lear, Lodge argues, it
> is essential to understand his life-long interest in music and art. It
> should come as no surprise to most readers that Lear was a consummate
> performer and musician. As his name suggests, he had a finely-tuned
> inner ear.
>
> From an early age he played a variety of instruments, including the
> piano, the accordion and - like “the elegant fowl” in his famous poem
> - the small guitar. As a boy, he sang at artists’ parties. He set
> Tennyson’s poems to music. In his twenties, one of his patrons, Lord
> Derby, invited him to live at Knowsley Hall in Liverpool. His job was
> to paint the animals and birds in Derby’s menagerie - drawing and
> painting were how Lear earned his keep - and during the evenings he
> regaled his hosts with drawing room ballads and comic songs. It all
> explains why, even if his words don’t mean anything, they make the
> most delightful music.
>
> Lodge also presents a convincing case for a textual analysis of Lear’s
> poems and limericks. I confess, initially I scoffed at the idea that
> The Quangle Wangle’s Hat, for instance, could be subject to much
> reason. Lodge is aware of this kind of scepticism. She notes GK
> Chesterton’s writing about nonsense verse, in which he argued against
> a utilitarian approach to life and art: “So long as we regard a tree
> as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to
> eat, we cannot properly wonder at it.” Lear’s verse, says Lodge, has a
> “purity that wit and logic lack, because unreason is closer to the
> state necessary to ‘draw out the soul of things.’ ”
>
> Nevertheless, looking at Lear’s work in the light of the 19th
> century’s great philosophical debate between religion and science does
> reveal some method behind the linguistic madness. Lear refused to
> worship “the greatest of English gods, conventionality”. He was a
> liberal and religious non-conformist. For him, a “Christianity that
> didn’t reflect a broad, tolerant and progressive view of morality and
> which insisted that those whose beliefs lay outside Anglicanism were
> ‘damned’ was, in his inventive coinage, ‘Christinanity.’” His famous
> Book of Nonsense, published in 1846, with its wealth of spoonerisms,
> limericks and portmanteau words, can be understood as a joyous riposte
> to literal interpretations of The Bible.
>
> Lear was a devotee of natural history. He was a member of the British
> Association for the Advancement of Science. His main contribution was
> in “communicating science” through his zoological and ornithological
> paintings and drawings. Among many other projects, he illustrated John
> Gould’s well-known study, The Birds of Europe.
> Lear’s surreal polymorph inventions, like the Scroobius Pip, “are no
> more inherently strange than many of the real species he was
> depicting.” Moreover, the development of theories of evolution
> demonstrated to Lear that language is like a living organism, always
> changing and adapting to its times.
>
> In observations like these, Lodge shows herself a brilliant researcher
> with a synthesising imagination. Although this book is definitely not
> a biography, Lear emerges from it as an elusive figure of fun, despite
> his unhappy upbringing and afflictions: epilepsy and “dishpear,” as he
> put it. He rarely took himself too seriously (he sketched countless
> self-caricatures), a sign of good character. Yet he was more than a
> court jester. He was a vigorous intellectual. On his bookshelves, The
> Origin of the Species sat comfortably next to Plato’s Republic.
> Reflecting on this latter work, “Lear considered his own chances of
> metempsychosis; he might return after death as ‘a tree – a cloud – a
> cabbage – or silence in the next world: but most probably an ass.’”
> Hee-haw!
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