The height of nonsense

The Complete Verse

and Other Nonsense

Edward Lear

Edited by Vivien Noakes

Penguin: 624 pp., $16 paper

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In 1886, the redoubtable Victorian critic John Ruskin was invited by the Pall Mall Gazette of London to draw up a “List of the Best Hundred Authors.” His top choice wasn’t quite what the Gazette’s high-minded editors had in mind: “I really don’t know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self,” Ruskin wrote, “as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.” With a hint of impishness, Ruskin declared Lear’s 1846 “Book of Nonsense” -- a children’s book published under a pseudonym that eventually reached a whopping 19 printings during the author’s lifetime -- to be “surely the most beneficent ... of all books yet produced.” He went on to proclaim its unusual contents -- a curious verse form we now call the limerick, accompanied by Lear’s equally curious pen-and-ink drawings -- as “inimitable and refreshing.”

Lear’s vast outpouring of nonsense -- from those early limericks, which established tomfoolery as a bona fide literary genre, to his beloved masterpiece, “The Owl and the Pussycat” (about the duo that famously went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat) -- remains as Ruskin described it: instantly appealing, stunningly original, fiercely opposed to pretense and brimming with humor, melancholy and mystery. But Ruskin’s regard for Lear -- later echoed by the likes of G.K. Chesterton, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and W.H. Auden -- has rarely been reflected in anthologies or in lecture halls.

It’s an unfortunate circumstance challenged by the welcome appearance of “The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense,” an exhaustive, addictive and ridiculously entertaining anthology of Lear’s writings and drawings edited by Lear’s foremost modern champion, Vivien Noakes. It’s the first time the bulk of Lear’s nonsense has appeared in a definitive, thoroughly annotated and altogether -- to borrow Lear’s most famous neologism -- runcible edition.

The sweet-natured Father of Nonsense, it turns out, was no silly scribbler: He rubbed shoulders with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; became drawing master to Queen Victoria; climbed Mt. Etna; composed airs for the poems of his friend Alfred, Lord Tennyson; anticipated Lewis Carroll by 20 years; published several journals of his relentless travels -- from Corfu to India -- as a “dirty landscape painter”; loved cats, particularly his stubby-tailed companion, Foss; hated his nose, which was “remarkably big”; described his physique as “perfectly spherical”; was probably gay; and became a cherished confidant of assorted aristocracy and the “adopty duncle” of scads of delighted children.

Born in London in 1812, Lear was the 20th of 21 kids, and his youth was marked by Dickensian upheaval: The Lears fell on hard times when Edward’s father was jailed for his debts, and young Edward was virtually given away to his sister, Ann. Lear would recall his boyhood self as ugly (again, the nose), shortsighted, asthmatic and plagued by what he called “the Demon,” epilepsy.

Not surprisingly, the teenage Lear was introspective and sensitive. He was devastated by the death of Lord Byron (the era’s Elvis and a fellow epileptic), and he was inspired by the landscapes of J.M.W. Turner. The lyrical juvenilia included in “The Complete Verse” shows the devil-may-care Byronic cadences that would eventually mark Lear’s nonsense. But Lear, taking Turner’s example, chose to become an artist, setting forth at 15 to make his way by selling, cheerily enough, “morbid disease drawings, for hospitals and certain doctors of physic.”

By the time he was 18, the self-taught artist had found a remarkable niche: drawing the parrots in the Regent’s Park Zoo directly from life. No stuffed birds for Lear; he drew, as Noakes pointed out in her 1968 biography, “the living, moving, screaming bird.” The result of Lear’s precocity, “Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots” (1830-32), gives Audubon a run for his money and remains a landmark in art, zoology and lithography. In the wake of this audacious achievement, Lear was tapped by Lord Stanley, the president of the Zoological Society, to document the menagerie at his family’s estate, Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. Improbably enough, it was as a house guest at this stately old pile that the rising young artist with the big nose discovered that “[n]onsense is the breath of my nostrils.”

Before Lear came along, literary nonsense was something encountered intermittently, in Aristophanes’ “The Birds” or Shakespeare’s fools. But it remains unclear just what precursors Lear had in mind when he began to rattle off an alarming number of nonsensical verses at Knowsley, rhymes that kept the children in stitches and distracted Lear from his stuffy surroundings. There’s nothing stuffy about Lear’s limericks. He invested the vulgar form with an unheard-of degree of sophistication while cramming it full of energy and invention. Aside from providing an ideal venue for Lear’s genius as an illustrator and just being plain funny, his limericks are delightfully compact commentaries -- by turns affectionate and acidic -- on the human condition at large. There’s an unlimited supply of Old Persons of Tartary, Abruzzi and Cannes coping with, and overcompensating for, their all-too-recognizable insecurities. And there’s no end of incurable eccentrics, like this typical Lear oddball:

There was an Old Person of Putney,

Whose food was roast spiders and chutney,

Which he took with his tea, within sight of the sea,

That romantic Old Person of Putney.

Lear, of course, felt a strong identification with these outsiders. In his drawings, there are numerous Lear look-alikes with prodigious beards, spherical bodies and Freudian noses that cause distress among the general population. Lear, after all, was an outcast himself: He would remain a steadfast bachelor (“confirmed” or not), living in exile in San Remo, Italy, when he wasn’t traveling, and mostly avoiding his native “Anglosaxnland.” When he published “A Book of Nonsense” in 1846, he dodged immediate fame with the pseudonym Derry Down Derry. And he downplayed his impressive friendships with various great Victorians, including Tennyson and pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt: “I cannot understand how such an asinine beetle as myself could ever have made such friends as I have.”

It’s no surprise that wanderlust, exile and unrequited love (despite his ardor for younger men, Lear did attempt one marriage proposal) emerge as the melancholic themes of Lear’s later nonsense ballads, including “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy Bo,” in which the globe-headed hero is rebuffed by Lady Jingly and sails off on the back of a “large and lively Turtle,” and “The Dong with the Luminous Nose,” in which the Dong, Lear’s most saturnine creation, is left behind by a beautiful Jumbly Girl. In bereavement, the Dong transforms his nose into a portable lighthouse and roams the great Gromboolian Plain like an absurd, heartbroken version of Byron’s solitary Manfred: “Lonely and wild -- all night he goes, -- / The Dong with a luminous Nose!”

Lear would publish four volumes of nonsense in his lifetime, securing his bid for eternal affection. As Auden wrote in 1939, “children swarmed to him like settlers.” When he died in San Remo in 1888, the London Saturday Review remarked that “[f]ew names could evoke a wider expression of passing regret at their appearance in the obituary column ....”

These days, Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” is dearer to us than, say, Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” or Robert Browning’s “Count Gismond.” “Runcible” is in the dictionary. You could argue for Lear as an unlikely beacon in the fog of Victorian English verse. With his deconstructions of Byron and drawings that anticipate Thurber, perhaps he’s even the missing link between the Romantics and the moderns. And, next to William Blake, he remains the most accomplished writer-artist in the language.

In his 1983 story “The Death of Edward Lear,” Donald Barthelme offered a suitably surreal vision of Lear that had the Father of Nonsense inviting his cosmopolitan circle to attend his death. While Lear’s guests waited for the end to come, their host chatted about his love of cats, his money woes and the pros and cons of marriage. “Mr. Lear had transformed the extraordinary into its opposite,” Barthelme wrote of the imaginary gathering. “He had, in point of fact, created a gentle, genial misunderstanding.” It’s a mischievous metaphor for the work of Edward Lear. The friendly cadences and tender undercurrents of his verses -- full, as they are, of fizzgiggious fish, bong-trees and runcible spoons -- continue to make the otherworldly, the unfortunate, the tragic and the downright nonsensical somehow a little less traumatizing. In a word, all that nonsense ends up making a lot of sense.

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From ‘A Was an Area Arch’

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Papa he said, “My little Boy!

My little Boy so dear!

This Alphabet was made for you,

By Mr. Edward Lear.

And should you ever meet with him,

This is his picture here.”

Papa he said, -- “This really does

Resemble,

Edward Lear.”