How pleasant to know Mr Lear

Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women who were reading aloud to children from his Book of Nonsense. When a male passenger confidently asserted that ‘There is no such person as Edward Lear’, the writer was obliged to prove his own existence as ‘the painter & author’ (in that order) by showing the passengers his name on his hat, handkerchief and visiting card. In an extraordinary drawing of this event, Lear depicted himself and the two women realistically, but the doubting man is a cartoonish figure straight out of one of his limericks.

Lear’s two worlds of ‘art and nonsense’ wonderfully collide in this anecdote and its illustration. To be told that one does not exist nods at Lear’s feeling that his paintings were admired only by a select audience and places him in the absurdist position of the limericks’ protagonists. The sceptical gentleman is a representative of the poems’ ‘they’, that anonymous chorus of people who frequently question or challenge those whose eccentric behaviour makes them outsiders. As Angus Davidson eloquently put it in his 1938 biography of Lear:

‘They’ are the force of public opinion, the dreary voice of human mediocrity: ‘they’ are perpetually interfering with the liberty of the individual; ‘they’ gossip, ‘they’ condemn, ‘they’ are inquisitive and conventional and almost always uncharitable.

Lear’s life and work offer an invigorating rebuff to that banal majority.

He was born into a huge family in Holloway in 1812, programmed from birth to feel an outsider. His father was a sugar refiner turned financially unstable City broker, while his mother appears to have been more or less continuously pregnant. Of the 14 children who survived infancy, the sickly and myopic Edward was number 13. He never had any real bond with his mother, and was brought up instead by his eldest sister, Ann, who was 21 years his senior.

He suffered from asthma and developed a form of epilepsy at the age of five, which meant that apart from a brief, unsuccessful and unrecorded spell at school, he was educated at home in a predominantly female household, learning such traditionally ‘feminine’ accomplishments as drawing birds and flowers, writing verse and composing and performing songs.