In the English literary tradition, to have a name like “Lear” is to embody profound, pre-modern connotations of madness. But Edward Lear, who was born in 1812 in Holloway, north London, one of 21 children, to middle-class parents, was not mad. Nonetheless, he would come to represent almost singlehandedly a tradition of literary dementia that stretches back to Merrie England. According to Noel Malcolm, in The Origins of English Nonsense, this important genre braids the oral “Mother Goose” tradition with the verbal games of court poets and playful scholars. For Lear, his identity as “the laureate of nonsense” was also shaped by his experience as a sufferer of epilepsy, as well as asthma and bronchitis, and afflicted by many querulous aversions: noise, crowds, hustle, gaiety, fools and bores…
“Mister Lear” was certainly eccentric. A nomadic artist, a lifelong solitary of homosexual inclinations, the one-time art master to Queen Victoria, he burst on to the literary scene in 1846 with A Book of Nonsense, a collection of some 115 limericks, beginning with:
“There was an old man with a beard
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!–
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard.”
A Book of Nonsense was an overnight bestseller, and made Lear famous, but it did not make him happy. He spent the next several years travelling and painting, doodling odd verses, and perfecting his mature persona as a lovable but dotty “old cove”, who countered boredom with globetrotting, and sketching. Of his art, a bizarre marriage of strange words and stranger cartoons, he liked to say that he was walking in the “dusty twilight of the incomprehensible…”
Lear’s nonsense, an antidote to discomfort and irritation, opened up a whole new world of infectious wordplay, childish fantasy and surreal adventure. Like several later Victorian writers, notably JM Barrie, RL Stevenson and Kenneth Grahame, he was, according to one critic, “invincibly boyish, and almost childlike”, a Peter Pan who did not want to grow up. An innovative versifier, the last thing he wanted was to remain like Swift’s fantasy creatures, the Struldbrugs, “cut and dried for life...”
When it came to life itself, both Lear and his contemporary Lewis Carroll enjoyed their alter egos – the latter as an Oxford don, the former as an itinerant artist. For both, “nonsense” was an escape into a more vivid, imaginative reality. Their most sublime nonsense is simultaneously age-old and childish. No catalogue of English and American prose is complete without Nonsense. This sub-genre flourishes in the nonfiction tradition like a wild and multicoloured weed in a knot garden.
As a younger man, in mid-century, Lear freely admitted he was “a queer beast” who was always sketching, and who lived to draw and paint. His watercolours remain highly collectable to this day, but nonsense was his forte – the self-expression of a wanderer, a whimsical humorist, a grumbler and an eternal child. In 1863, he described himself as wanting to be a “Lord High Bosh and Nonsense Producer”, and tried through contacts to become a “Grand Peripatetic Ass and Bosh-producing Luminary” to the Greek Court, a scheme that came to nothing.
Instead, he found the freedom to complete his masterpiece, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, first published in 1871, a potent compendium of verbal delirium and lexicographical fantasy. It’s one of the extraordinary coincidences of our literature that this title, with its Quangle-Wangle, “runcible spoon” and the “Dong with a Luminous Nose” should appear in the same year as Carroll’s nonsense masterpiece Jabberwocky (from Alice’s Adventures Through The Looking-Glass).
The Victorians loved wordplay. Dickens revels in the language of the city streets, with Sam Weller’s “viddy” for “widow”, and “wurbl” for “verbal”. Carroll delighted in puns (“taught us” for “tortoise”), and nonsense riddles. In addition to puns and tongue-twisters, Edward Lear had his own, eccentric vocabulary: “rox” for rocks; “toppix” for topics; “buzzim” for bosom; “omejutly”for immediately; “pollygise” for apologise; “spongetaneous” for spontaneous; “mewtshool” for mutual; “fizzicle” for physical; and “phibs” for fibs. In one letter, Lear expressed his delight at a dinner party as “splendidophoropherostiphongious”, a word one might find in Terry Pratchett or JK Rowling.
In this vein, it’s a short step from the Lear of Nonsense Songs to the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake. It was Lear not Joyce who wrote “sufficient unto the day is the weevil thereof”. Long before some of the experiments of modernism, Nonsense Songs contains such poems as The Owl and the Pussycat and The Jumblies, nonsense classics that express a haunting and melancholy obsession with finding happiness in faraway lands where a lonely pig will marry an unlikely couple in an offbeat ceremony, or where a bunch of intrepid blue-fingered travellers in a leaky vessel could find comfort and joy by whistling and warbling “a moony song/To the echoing sound of a coppery gong.”
The Jumblies (for it is they) cry “Timballo!” and, improbably, “live in a Sieve and a crockery-jar”. They have not a care in the world, and drink a home brew called “Ring-Bo-Ree”. Lear’s vision of the Jumblies is a hypnotic, even enchanting, mash-up of schoolboy truancy, piratical gallivanting, and imperial fantasy:
“They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,
To a land all covered with trees,
And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,
And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,
And a hive of silvery Bees.
And they bought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws,
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws,
And 40 bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree,
And no end of Stilton Cheese.”
In Lear’s imagination, the Jumblies’ overseas adventures are benign: they are enriched and matured by their travels. When they return home, the voyagers are widely admired for their courage and determination in the exploration of the exotic. Their tale is magical, and nonsense in the English (and American) tradition is magical, hovering in the margins of many, much more sober, texts to provide a frisson of imaginative transgression. It probably does not do to analyse this genre too closely, but without this “laureate of nonsense”, we would not have: Pink Floyd, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Dr Seuss, John Lennon, Woody Allen, JRR Tolkien, Spike Milligan, Norton Juster, Terry Pratchett, Carl Sandburg, Bob Dylan, David Byrne, Julia Donaldson or even the incomparably unhinged Glen Baxter.
A Signature Sentence
“They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!”
Three to Compare
Lewis Carroll: The Hunting of the Snark (1876)
Harry Graham: Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (1898)
Julia Donaldson: The Gruffalo (1999)
• Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets is published by British Library (£14.95). To order a copy for £11.96 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
