THE COMPLETE NONSENSE AND OTHER VERSE

EDWARD LEAR was born in 1812, the twentieth of twenty-one children. Rejected by his mother, he was brought up by his oldest sister. At the age of fifteen he began to earn his living as a painter, colouring screens and fans, and selling small drawings to passengers in inn yards. After an introduction to the ornithologist Prideaux Selby he turned to natural history illustration, and at the age of nineteen produced one of the finest books of bird drawings ever published, Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidœ, or Parrots. This work was seen by the President of the newly formed Zoological Society of London, Lord Stanley, who invited him to Knowsley to make drawings of the birds and animals in his private menagerie. Here, as well as meeting ‘half the fine people of the day’, he amused the children with his nonsense verses and drawings, limericks that he would later publish as A Book of Nonsense. In 1837 he abandoned natural history work to become a landscape painter, travelling first to Rome, where he lived for eleven years, then exploring remote and often dramatic countryside around the Mediterranean. In 1850 he became a student at the Royal Academy Schools in London, and his reputation as a painter began to grow. But his large landscape paintings were not in the fashion of the day, and from the early 1860s his reputation declined. From boyhood he wrote and drew nonsense, but it was only after he had failed to become a successful painter that the great nonsense songs were written. From the time of their publication they have never been out of print, delighting generations of children. He spent his last years alone, with his faithful cat Foss, in San Remo on the Italian Riviera. He died in 1888.

DR VIVIEN NOAKES is the author of a number of works on Edward Lear, including the standard biography, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, first published in 1968. She was curator of the major exhibition ‘Edward Lear: 1812–1888’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the National Academy of Design, New York. Formerly a lecturer at Somerville College, Oxford, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

EDWARD LEAR

The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse

Compiled and edited with an Introduction and Notes by

VIVIEN NOAKES

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published as The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense by Allen Lane 2001
Published under the present title, with a new introduction and omitting other editorial
matter, in Penguin Books 2002
Published in Penguin Classics with restored Introduction and editorial matter 2006
1

Introduction, Table of Dates, Notes and previously unpublished works by Lear
copyright © Vivien Noakes, 2001

The Acknowledgements on pp xi-xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-192139-6

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

‘Edward Lear’ by W. H. Auden

Introduction

Table of Dates

Futher Reading

A Note on the Texts

The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse

Eclogue: Vide Collins ‘Hassan – or the Camel Driver’

To Miss Lear on her Birthday

The Shady Side of Sunnyside

Journal

Turkey Discipline

‘When the light dies away on a calm summer’s eve’

‘From the pale and the deep’

Peppering Roads

Miss Fraser’s Album

Ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Aegina, Greece

The Bride’s Farewell

Ruby

Miss Maniac

‘I slept, and back to my early days’

Resignation

‘I’ve just seen Mrs Hopkins – and read her the lines’

Ode to the little China Man

Peppering Bell

Letter to Harry Hinde

Scrawl

Letter to Fanny Jane Dolly Coombe

‘Oh! Pan!’

Letter to George Coombe

The Nervous Family

The Nervous Family: Alternative version

‘The gloom that winter casts’

‘My dear Mrs Gale – from my leaving the cradle’

Portraites of the inditchenous beestes of New Olland

‘My Sweet Home is no longer mine’

[Illustrations for ‘Kathleen O’More’]

Scene in the Campagna of Rome

[Lear’s adventures on horseback]

Limericks for the 1846 and 1855 editions of A Book of Nonsense

Other early limericks

The Hens of Oripò

‘A was an Ant’

‘Ribands and pigs’

Ye poppular author & traveller in Albania & Calabrià, keepinge his feete warme

[Lear at the Royal Academy Schools]

‘There was an old person of Ramleh’

‘O! Mimber for the County Louth’

‘Washing my rose-coloured flesh and brushing my beard with a hairbrush’

From a letter to George Grove

‘But ah! (the Landscape painter said,)’

Additional limericks for the 1861 edition of A Book of Nonsense

‘General appearance of a distinguished Landscapepainter’

Eggstracts from the Roehampton Chronicle

Letter to Ruth Decie

‘There was an old person of Páxo’

‘She sits upon her Bulbul’

‘O Digby my dear’

‘There was an old man with a Book’

Letters to Evelyn Baring

Letter to Nora Decie

[Lear’s adventures in Crete]

Letters to Anna Duncan and Lady Duncan

The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple

The Duck and the Kangaroo

‘Gozo my child is the isle of Calypso’

Stratford Place Gazette

Three miscellaneous limericks

The Adventures of Mr Lear & the Polly [& the] Pusseybite on their way to the Ritertitle Mountains

‘O Thuthan Thmith! Thweet Thuthan Thmith!’

The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World

Growling Eclogue

The Owl and the Pussy-cat

[Mrs Blue Dickey-bird]

‘Some people their attention Fixes’

The Broom, the Shovel, the Poker, and the Tongs

‘There was an old man who said – “Hum!’

Calico Pie

The Daddy Long-legs and the Fly

Nonsense Cookery

Nonsense Botany – 1

The Jumblies

‘The Absolutely Abstemious Ass’

‘The Uncareful Cow, who walked about’

[Creatures playing chequers]

The Nutcrackers and the Sugar-tongs

Mr and Mrs Spikky Sparrow

The Table and the Chair

‘A was once an apple-pie’

‘A was an Area Arch’

[Mr Lear receives a letter from Marianne North]

Mr and Mrs Discobbolos

The Courtship of the Younghy-Bonghy-Bò

Limericks published in More Nonsense

Extra limericks prepared for More Nonsense

Nonsense Botany – 2

‘Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hill’

The Scroobious Pip

The Quangle Wangle’s Hat

[Receipt for George Scrivens, Esq.]

‘Papa once went to Greece’

The Story of the Pobble, who has no toes, and the Princess Bink

The Pobble who has no Toes

The Akond of Swat

‘The Attalik Ghazee’

Indian limericks

‘O! Chichester, my Carlingford!’

The Cummerbund

Letter to Lady Wyatt

Poona Observer

The New Vestments

The Pelican Chorus

The Two Old Bachelors

Nonsense Botany – 3

‘A tumbled down, and hurt his Arm’

The Dong with a Luminous Nose

‘Finale Marina! If ever you’d seen her!’

In medio Tutorissimus ibis

‘O dear! how disgusting is life!’

‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’

Mr and Mrs Discobbolos: Second Part

‘O Brother Chicken! Sister Chick!’

‘Dear Sir, Though many checks prevent’

Remminissenciz of Orgust 14 Aitnundrednaity

‘I am awfull aged in apierance lately’

‘There was an old man with a ribbon’

Letter to Mrs Stuart Wortley [The Moon Journey]

[Chichester Fortescue is appointed Lord Privy Seal]

Nonsense Trees

‘The Octopods and Reptiles’

[The Heraldic Blazons of Foss the Cat]

‘Mrs Jaypher found a wafer’

From a letter to the Hon. Mrs Augusta Parker

[The Later History of the Owl and the Pussy-cat]

‘When “grand old men” persist in folly’

‘He lived at Dingle Bank – he did’

‘And this is certain; if so be’

Eggstrax from The Maloja Gazette

‘When leaving this beautiful blessed Briánza’

Some Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly

‘He only said, “I’m very weary’

‘I must stop now’

‘I think human nature is pretty much the same all along’

‘There was a young lady of Harwich’

‘There was an old man, whose approach’

‘There was an old lady of Joppa’

‘There was an old person of Oude’

‘There was an old man of the Rhine’

‘There was an old person of Skye’

‘There was an old man of Algiers’

‘There was an old person whose wish’

Examples of Lear’s Nonsense Similies

Work Erroneously Atrributed to Lear

Notes

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

Subject Index

Acknowledgements

I owe a great debt to earlier editors of Lear’s nonsense, who not only made his work available to readers in their own time, but have, in some cases, preserved in their editions nonsense that has subsequently disappeared. Of special importance is Lady Strachey, the niece of Frances, Lady Waldegrave who was married to one of Lear’s closest friends, Chichester Fortescue. At a time when Lear’s reputation was at its lowest, she edited two volumes of correspondence between Lear and her aunt and Fortescue, as well as Queery Leary Nonsense (1911) and The Complete Nonsense Book (1912). Where some other families disposed of Lear material, she preserved theirs so that it would be available to later scholars. Holbrook Jackson’s The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear (1947) has delighted generations of children. My most vivid memory of this book is seeing it tucked under the arm of our Latin mistress as she came in for the last Latin lesson of each term. My joy in what she read was as great as my dislike of the subject she normally taught, and, although I had known his nonsense from earliest childhood, this was my real introduction to the delights of Edward Lear.

Work on this edition has been under way, as a background to other research into Lear’s life and work, since 1963. Those years have seen the death of a number of people without whom it could not have been achieved. Foremost among these is Philip Hofer, whose collection of Lear manuscripts – together with those of William B. Osgood Field – was deposited at the Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Harvard University, in 1942, making possible much of the Lear scholarship that has followed; my debt to him, as a scholar and a friend, is incalculable. I would also like to record my deep gratitude to George Buday, Herbert Cahoon, Arnold Clark, Donald Gallup, William Hornby, Sheila Kerr, Herman Liebert, Mr and Mrs Robert Gillies Michell, Colonel William Prescott, Edward Selwyn and Susan, Lady Tweedsmuir. I am sad that they cannot see the ways in which their generous help contributed to the finished edition.

I would like to extend my warm thanks to W. H. Bond and Eleanor Garvey who, as successive Curators of Printing and Graphic Arts at the Houghton Library, offered me every facility for research in their incomparable collection of manuscripts. I have shared much hospitality and conversation with Justin Schiller in New York and London, and his willingness to make material available to me meant that I knew of manuscripts I might otherwise have missed. It is with gratitude that I dedicate this book to him. Frederick Koch graciously allowed me free access to his collection of Leariana, much of which is now on deposit in the Beinecke Library. Sir Thomas Barlow, Bt, the Hon. Mrs A. Buchan, Dr David Michell and James Farquharson were most generous in allowing me to use material which has come down through their families. To Charles Lewsen I am grateful for the hours and the ideas we shared. For help in many ways I would like to thank George Ainscow, Sir David Attenborough, Malcolm Brown, Maldwin Drummond, Stephen Guy, Maureen Lambourne, Iona Opie, Gordon Sauer and Derek Wise.

The staff of a number of libraries and museums have been both patient and helpful. For this, and for permission to reproduce material in their collections, I would like to thank the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, Brigham Young University, the British Library, the Butler Library at Columbia University, Christie’s International, the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Mrs Arthur A. Houghton, Jr, the Houghton Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Harvard University, the Henry Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the National Library of Scotland, Penguin Books (the archives of Frederick Warne), the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University, the Pier-pont Morgan Library, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Representative Church Body Library in Dublin, the University of Rochester Library, the Somerset Record Office, the Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford, the Robert Manning Strozier Library at Florida State University, Robert H. Taylor Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, the Tennyson Research Centre at Lincoln, the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Library of Westminster School. For permission to quote copyright material I would like to thank: the Trustees of Mrs C. H. A. Anstruther-Duncan for ‘There was an old person whose legs’, ‘There was an old man whose delight’, ‘There was an old man who said, “See!” ’, ‘There was an old man of Lodore’, ‘There was an old person so silly’, ‘There was an old man whose repose’, ‘There was an old man whose despair’, ‘There was an old person of Sidon’, ‘There was an old person whose mirth’, ‘There was an old lady of Leeds’, ‘There was an old man in a boat’, ‘There was an old man whose desire’, ‘There was an old person of Calais’, ‘There was an old man with a light’, ‘There was an old man who said “O! –’ and ‘There was an old man who made bold’; and Letters to Anna Duncan and Lady Duncan in Bosh and Nonsense; Faber and Faber Ltd for W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Edward Lear’; Fondation Martin Bodmer for ‘Remminissenciz of Orgust 14 Aitnundrednaity’ in English and American Autographs in the Bodmeriana; the Trustees of Lady Charnwood for ‘Eggstrax from The-Maloja Gazette’ in Call Back Yesterday; James and Rosemary Farquharson for ‘Eggstracts from the Roehampton Chronicle’ in Edward Lear: A New Nonsense Alphabet; the late Denise Harvey for [Lear’s adventures in Crete], plate 3, in Edward Lear: The Cretan Journal; H. P. Kraus, New York, for ‘Oh! Pan!’, second illustration to ‘There was an Old Man of Nepaul’, ‘There was an old man who forgot’, ‘There was an old man of Orleans’, ‘There was an old man of the Dee’ and ‘There was an old person of Leith’ in Lear in the Original; John Murray (Publishers) Ltd for drafts for a poem describing the later history of the Owl and the Pussy-cat in Angus Davidson, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet, for ‘Ribands and pigs’, ‘The Adventures of Mr Lear & the Polly [& the] Pusseybite on their way to the Ritertitle Mountains’, ‘Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hill’ and [Nonsense Trees] in Teapots and Quails, and for [Lear’s adventures on horseback], nos. 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 14, 21, 25, 33, and ‘The Hens of Oripò’ in Susan Hyman Edward Lear in the Levant; Poetry Review for ‘When the light dies away on a calm summer’s eve’ and ‘From the pale and the deep’; the Royal Academy of Arts for ‘I slept, and back to my early days’, ‘Portraites of the inditchenous beestes of New Olland’, [Lear’s adventures on horseback], nos. 2, 8, 26, 27, ‘Object discovered in Beta’ and ‘O Digby my dear’ in Edward Lear 1812–1888: The Catalogue of the Royal Acade my of Arts Exhibition; the Trustees of Hugh Sharp for ‘The Pobble and Princess Bink’; and Sussex County Magazine for ‘Peppering Roads’; the Victoria and Albert Museum for six coloured birds. I have established copyright for previously unpublished material in Selected Letters, and for the illustrations, ‘Scene in the Campagna of Rome’, ‘Ye poppular author & traveller in Albania & Calabrià, keepinge his feete warme’, ‘There was an old man with a Book’, ‘O dear! how disgusting is life!’, Letter to Mrs Stuart Wortley [The Moon Journey] and illustration from a letter to Hallam Tennyson of 16 June 1884 in Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer; and ‘Miss Fraser’s Album’ in The Painter Edward Lear.

I would like to thank Professor Christopher Ricks, whose enthusiasm for Lear led to the proposal for this edition. Copy-editing is always an exacting discipline, but with Lear the problems are exaggerated and I am grateful to Lindeth Vasey for her punctilious attention to detail. My thanks go also to my editor, Margaret Bartley, and to the designer, Peter Stratton.

Finally, I am grateful to the Society of Authors whose grant enabled me to open Windows on the world.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright owners, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Abbreviations

NB Place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated.

Edward Lear

by W. H. AUDEN

Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white

Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose

Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,

A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.

The legions of cruel inquisitive They

Were so many and big like dogs; he was upset

By Germans and boats; affection was miles away:

But guided by tears he successfully reached his Regret.

How prodigious the welcome was. Flowers took his hat

And bore him off to introduce him to the tongs;

The demon’s false nose made the table laugh; a cat

Soon had him waltzing madly, let him squeeze her hand;

Words pushed him to the piano to sing comic songs;

And children swarmed to him like settlers. He became a

                                                                             land.

                                                                       January 1939

Introduction

Edward Lear was born in Highgate, ¹ then a pleasant rural village a few miles north of London, on 12 May 1812. ² He was the twentieth of twenty-one children. His father, Jeremiah, was a successful London stockbroker, Past Master of the Fruiterers’ Company and a Freeman of the City of London. At the time of Edward’s birth, the family was living in quiet, middle-class comfort, but when he was about four his father’s business collapsed. Lear later wrote that Jeremiah served a short prison sentence for fraud and debt, ³ but the evidence for this is conflicting. Certainly the family left Highgate, though they were to return, settling for a while in dingy lodgings in ‘thrice odious New Street’ ⁴ on the borders of the City.

Edward had little to do with his mother, and was brought up instead by his eldest sister, Ann. She was twenty-one years older than he, and after her death he wrote: ‘Ever all she was to me was good, & what I should have been unless she had been my mother I dare not think.’ ⁵ ‘Do you remember dear Fred’, she wrote to one of her brothers, ‘what I used to call you many years ago? Your constant increase in circumference reminds me again of the Norfolk Biffin – what a fine specimen of this rounded fruit you must present!! I think I see you now how you used to run round the room after me when I compar’d you to the flat spreading Norfolk apple.’ ⁶ This merriment, and her loving warmth and goodness, did much to balance the distress of Edward’s childhood, and the importance of her influence on the future nonsense writer cannot be overemphasized. Already short-sighted and suffering from asthma and bronchitis, at the age of about five or six he developed epilepsy, an illness that affected his life profoundly. ‘I suppose the ever=presence of the Demon since I was 7 years old would have prevented happiness under any sort of circumstance’, he wrote in his seventieth year. ‘It is a most merciful blessing that I have kept up as I have, & have not gone utterly to the bad mad sad.’ ⁷ His use of the word Demon is significant, for at this time epilepsy was still associated with demoniac possession, making it a shameful, lonely disease. ‘Alas! Alas! how fearful a birthright was mine!’ he wrote less than a year before his death. ‘I wonder if others suffer similarly? Yet I dare not ask or endeavour to know.’ ⁸ In his adult life none of his many friends ever realized that he was epileptic, but privately he knew himself to be an oddity, a social outcast, even though the society that cast him out was not aware of it.

When he was about seven, the strange turbulence of his childhood began to show itself in swings of mood and bouts of acute depression which he called ‘the Morbids’. Much later he recalled that ‘the earliest of all the morbidnesses I can recollect must have been somewhere about 1819 – when my Father took me to a field near Highgate, where was a rural performance of gymnastic clowns &c., – & a band. The music was good, – at least it attracted me: – & the sunset & twilight I remember as if yesterday. And I can recollect crying half the night after all the small gaiety broke up – & also suffering for days at the memory of the past scene.’ ⁹ His realization that happiness and beauty are transitory and that their going leaves an aching happiness was a theme to which he returned in his nonsense.

Ann, and his second sister, Sarah, taught him to read and write, to play the piano and, most importantly of all, to draw and paint. He was briefly, and unhappily, at school, and had little to do with boys of his own age, but though he would always regret his lack of formal education, he felt that it left him poised ‘on the threshold of knowledge’, ¹⁰ eager to discover more.

In 1822 Sarah married and went to live in Arundel in Sussex, a small country town set between the rolling beauty of the South Downs and the bracing air of the English Channel. As a boy and young man Edward went frequently to stay with her, building a circle of young friends and discovering there the gentle beauty of downland countryside. From Bury Hill above Arundel the land falls away into the wide valley of the river Arun, spreading out towards the distant North Downs. ‘… [T]he vast – for it is really – vast – plain was wondrous to see’, he wrote of another view in 1869. ‘Doubtless there is something in SPACE by which the mind (leastways my mind,) can work & expand.’ ¹¹ All his life he sought wide horizons – both the real width of the landscape he explored in his travel and his drawings, and the symbolic width of tolerance expressed in the landscape of his nonsense, the great Gromboolian plain and the hills of the Chankly Bore.

It is from this time that his earliest writing has survived. Reading it we see in the youthful Lear a joyful ebullience and spontaneous sense of the ridiculous combined with quiet sensibility and a wistful sadness. One family – the Drewitts, for whom most of the surviving early work was written – was particularly important to him. ‘I owe a great deal to you’, he later told them, ‘for had I not then known you – my school companions would have led me into a very different way of life.’ ¹² He had found an audience with whom he could share his sense of fun, and for them he played the role of clown. ‘My Sussex friends always say that I can do nothing like other people’, ¹³ he wrote, with a touch of pride, describing himself as ‘3 parts crazy – & wholly affectionate’. ¹⁴

When Lear was about fifteen his family broke up. He would later speak melodramatically of being thrown out into the world without a penny, but Ann had a small inherited income and they set up house together in Gray’s Inn Road. The childhood years were over, but their legacy remained. ‘Considering all I remember to have passed through from 6 years old to 15 – is it not wonderful to be alive? – far more to be able to feel and write’, he wrote forty years later. ¹⁵