Children still love his silly rhymes such as ‘The Jumblies’, but the father of nonsense verse was also a brilliant illustrator and landscape painter, and an accomplished composer

Children still love his silly rhymes such as ‘The Jumblies’, but the father of nonsense verse was also a brilliant illustrator and landscape painter, and an accomplished composer

Reading “The Owl and the Pussy-cat” makes us well disposed towards its author, and many Victorians found that it was pleasant to “know” Mr Lear. To be Edward Lear, however, was not always pleasant. In 1816, when Lear was four years old, his father ran out of money. This also happened to the fathers of John Henry Newman and of Charles Dickens, but they did not have 21 children: Edward Lear was the twentieth.

Lear suffered from epilepsy, an ill-understood and alarming condition, which he kept secret. He knew from infancy that life can fail to make sense. Yet he made the best of it, turning his natural acuteness of ear and of eye to accomplishment and profit. He was to make unique and beneficial contributions in several fields.

In childhood, Lear endeared himself by amusing people, playing for them and with them. He was social: a singer of drawing-room ballads, a parodist and performer of comical and sentimental songs, accompanying himself on piano, flute, accordion and “small guitar”. He was a composer. He could draw and paint. An intrepid traveller, he became an accomplished and original artist.

Educated at home by older sisters, he developed wide intellectual interests, and became a good linguist. He was well connected, and, thanks to the Earl of Derby, became better connected. He played the amusing uncle and family pet in the lives of many families, retiring eventually to a villa above San Remo on the Italian Riviera. This villa he called the “Villa Emily”, after his friend Emily Tennyson, wife of the Laureate.

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