Mr Lear

by Jenny Uglow

Acclaimed historian Jenny Uglow brings us a fascinating and beautifully illustrated biography of Edward Lear, full of the colour of the age.

Edward Lear lived a vivid, fascinating, energetic life, but confessed, 'I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.' He was a man in a hurry, 'running about on railroads' from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India and Palestine. He is still loved for his 'nonsenses', from startling, joyous limericks to great love songs like 'The Owl and the Pussy Cat' and 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose', and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly in the age of Darwin and Dickens - he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters - his genius for the absurd and his dazzling word-play make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today.


Lear was a man of great simplicity and charm: children adored him, yet his humour masked epilepsy, depression and loneliness. Jenny Uglow's beautifully illustrated biography, full of the colour of the age, brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships and restless travels/ Above all it shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires - an exile of the heart.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Art, Poetry, History, Biography Memoir, Victorian

608 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2017

About the author

Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther, born 1947) is a British biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.

Reviews

[Michael Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only knew Edward Lear for his nonsense rhymes, which we recited to our children when they were small. They giggled constantly. But it turns out that Lear was an accomplished painter, as well. His subjects were landscapes, birds, and other animals. He traveled extensively in pursuit of his live subjects, although not in the wild but in aviaries and zoos.

Lear had many friends, as well as a large social set. He was a popular guest because of his humor and his musical talents. Paradoxically, however, he was a very lonely man. He was a bit peculiar, even beyond typical Victorian eccentricity, and a tad odd looking. He felt that he would have liked to be married and have children, but had no idea about how to make that happen. The author speculates that Lear may have been gay, although there was no direct evidence.

I had this sense while reading this book that I already knew people like Lear. Instead of being withdrawn or isolationist, they are invariably bon vivant and outgoing, although very guarded about their inner feelings. And like Lear, they are obsessive and throw themselves full tilt into their work or some special interest. I get the distinct impression they are trying to outrun loneliness.

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Lear's poem of wandering loneliness....

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

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More from the New Yorker.....

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished reading “Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense”. It is a beautiful book that has lavish illustrations and quotations. This book would make a great holiday gift.

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is best known for his nonsense rhymes, written primarily for children but with an appeal across all ages. Some of his better-known works are: “The Owl and the Pussycat”, “A Was Once an Apple Pie”.

Lear was a seeker and taxonomist, observing and recording plants and foreign vistas as he travelled widely across Europe, the Middle East and India. Lear specialized in bird illustrations and worked at the new Zoological Society of London. He produced his first illustrated book on parrots early in his career. Lear suffered from asthma, bronchitis and epilepsy which restricted his life to some extent.

The book is well written and meticulously researched. Jenny Uglow does a good job reconciling his two vocations and weaves them seamlessly together. Uglow also provides information about lithography and artistic technique. The author also provides background material about the political atmosphere in Italy in the years around unification when Lear’s outdoor sketching was often regarded as a front for spying. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned so much about Lear and the Victorian Age.

I read as a hard-cover book. The book has 608 pages. The publisher is Faber and Faber.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading a disappointing novel, it was lovely to discover a wonderful non-fiction book. It's been a long while since I read such an engrossing, enjoyable biography. Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes helped me learn to read when I was tiny; I still remember the Pobble who had no toes. Until I was recommended this biography by several people, however, I didn't realise that Lear was also a very skilled landscape painter and zoological artist. Jenny Uglow draws upon Lear's extensive letters and diaries to tell the story of his life, richly illustrated by his drawings, paintings, and a few photographs. The whole book is a delightful visual feast. The inclusion of so many illustrations undoubtedly provides greater insight into Lear's life and work, as well as being simply lovely to look at.

Lear comes across vividly as a fascinating, endearing, eccentric artist and writer. He travelled extensively at a time when this was rare and struggled for decades to make a steady living from his art. He had many friends and was clearly an excellent correspondent. Uglow is careful not to speculate too much about his sexuality, while noting that his most romantic-seeming long-term relationship was with a man and that after much thought he decided not to marry a woman. Lear wasn't really part of the art movements of his time, although he was friends with several of the pre-raphaelites. His landscapes are beautiful, but his paintings of birds and nonsense sketches are his truly distinctive and striking work. I appreciated Uglow's thoughtful examination of why his nonsense works so well and still has great appeal a good 150 years after he wrote it:

In a deep way, hard to articulate, Lear's nonsense is comprehensible as both the foolery of childhood and the foolery of carnival, turning the world upside down. [...] The key quality of the nonsense rhymes is surprise: this is what makes us laugh. They ask us to believe in peculiar people, to accept strange happenings, to inhabit a world where butter is used to cure plague, a hatchet to scratch a flea.

Lear's playful way with words seems oddly ahead of its time, as he messed around with language in a way that reminds me of how its usage alters online:

Lear also liked to play with the function of letters in building words, and with the rules of grammar in making 'sense'. Even as a boy he grasped that if the common rules of word-making are followed - like adding 'ly' for an adverb - then a word will be accepted even if it's nonsense, as in his packing 'furibondiously'. Similarly, if a sentence sticks to accepted syntax, it will 'sound' like sense, whatever words are used, as in: 'It's bright and cold & icicular as possible, and elicits the ordibble murmurs of the cantankerous Corcyreans'.

He could break the rules successfully because he knew them so well. His language is alive, protean, ever evolving. Words mutate and evolve, finding new endings and appendages, like new limbs. He delighted in children's mishearings and battles with speech and spelling, so similar to his own nonsense slippages.

This ability to create new words that have a wonderfully evident meaning from context is something Lear shares with Mervyn Peake. Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense gave me a fascinating insight into Lear's life and a new appreciation for his work. It's such an entertaining and compelling book that I read the whole thing in one evening, an experience I highly recommend.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hope my earlier notes will be saved as private, but I am at a loss when I don't have highlighting available with kindle format. I borrowed this book from my library. It is a beautiful $45 book, and if one admires Edward Lear, it would be a great reference book to own. The writer does a very thorough and excellent job without including negative viewpoints of Lear's work.
It is a happy/sad but thoroughly detailed account of Edward's young life through to the end. A restless and complex man, he lived in many places and had many famous friends.
It seemed to me he had the most stability living with his sister Ann, 20 years his senior. Edward sketched to make necessary money for his living. When he was about 20 years of age a book of his drawings of parrots was published. This can be viewed on Guttenberg along with some of his limerick or "nonsense" books and drawings. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/autho...

This book also serves as a great reference for life as lived in the 1800's.
Edward Lear was artistically talented in his drawing skills, musical skills and writing skills.
He was, however, also plagued with ill health due to epilepsy and asthma along with depression, but that did not stop him from having truly grand and brave singular adventures. Inspirational!

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a brilliant bio of my favorite Victorian writer/illustrator. The language, the images, will
make you laugh. The life story will make you cry - and applaud.

[Mervyn Whyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this hardback copy up in a secondhand book shop for a fiver. Money well spent. The first thing you notice is how beautiful the book looks. The front and back covers, the numerous pictures and sketches inside, the print. As for the writing...Concise, uncluttered and easy to read, I've always been a fan of Uglow. I didn't know that Lear was better known for his painting than his verse. Or that he was such an inveterate traveller. Truth be told, from the pictures of his sketches and paintings in this book, he doesn't appear to have been a master. Most are competently done, but he certainly wasn't a genius. Today he is better known for his rhymes. Frivolous they may seem. But Uglow's analysis shows you the darkness, the pain and the sexual tension hidden among them. Together with the joy, the playfulness and the overturning of convention. A first-class read from a first-class writer.

[Peter Tillman]

Adam Gopnik's wonderful review-essay at the New Yorker. Check out the opening illo: Lear & his cat!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

"We find, in Lear, the immersive, overstuffed feel common to all Victoriana—and here is Victoria herself, getting a drawing lesson from him. Because Lear was lodged far more securely in Victorian society than the donnish Carroll was, his art mirrors and parodies it more precisely. Carroll was making jokes about Oxford; Lear about London and the world."

Re: Dongs, Pobbles and the Jumbly Girl:
“This is the hour when forth he goes,
The Dong with a luminous Nose!”

It is significant that the luminous nose of the Dong is not biological, like Rudolph’s. It is hand-tooled, like a steampunk machine ... —an up-to-date device, like an iPhone flashlight, for finding Jumbly Girls in the dark."
.
.
.
In “The Owl and the Pussycat,” meanings rush in:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon. . . .

Not even Humpty Dumpty could explain what a runcible spoon is. We know it by its verbal vibration, by its presence, by its sheer runcibleness."

I hope the book is up to Gopnik's essay. In any case, don't miss that!

Marissa Lingen says:
"Edward Lear did a bunch of interesting things (so many poems! so many paintings of parrots!) but was not, overall, a very happy man. Very much up to Uglow’s usual high standard but rather more melancholy than I realized it would be."

Hrm.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this because of the good reviews and the absolutely gorgeous presentation. It's a beautiful book to hold and flick through with lots of illustrations and reproductions. As a biography, it's about as straightforward a history of a life as it's possible to imagine. That's not necessarily a criticism, but, as with any life, there are longueurs and repetitions. The analysis of Lear's nonsense is deft and illuminating (like the Dong's nose) and probably the best thing here. Mostly, though, I just like how the book feels in my hands.

[Sparrow .]

Edward Lear: a sweet, roly-poly man who became, you might say, the caricature he drew of himself. He was a person divided in half: a misty, romantic landscape artist by day, a pandemonium-spilling versifier by night. Lear’s epilepsy separated him from humanity, and his (apparent) homosexuality estranged him from Victorian conventions – though he was a beloved guest in the country houses of the mighty. His most profound, and perhaps sexual, relationship was with his Italian servant Giorgio.

The moral of this story is: write letters! Only then can you be silly enough to invent the limerick, which, incidentally, was quite different then. It sounded like:

There was an Old Man of Boulak,
Who sate on a crocodile’s back;
But they said, “Tow’rds the night, he may probably bite,
Which might vex you, Old Man of Boulak!”

His unsatisfying relationship with Alfred Lord Tennyson – Lear was close friends with Tennyson’s wife Emily – influenced his iconoclastic poetry.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an endearing man, what an enjoyable biography! This wonderfully written, beautifully illustrated biography tells the life history of Edward Lear, known principally to me as the author of the poem, The Owl and The Pussycat. That poem is well known and was judged to be England’s favorite poem. It is certainly one of mine.
But there was so much more: Lear’s nature illustrations, his travels and gorgeous scenic drawings and paintings, his limericks, his alphabets, his gift for friendship. All of this is marvelously well told by Jenny Uglow, and set within the context of both Lear’s time and family background. Lear was a courageous and intrepid traveler as well as an often insecure, indecisive, and needy man. He had both physical and psychological challenges, which are sympathetically told. What shines through though, and no doubt sustained his many friendships, was his humor and affection which he bestowed upon the adults and children around him. He would have been lovely to know and I highly recommend this biography.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re a fan of Edward Lear’s nonsense poems and drawings (and who isn’t?) then this biography is well worth reading even though it may be a bit too comprehensive for some. What I hadn’t realised was just how good a landscape painter Lear was, as well as being an inveterate world traveler and travel writer. Jenny Uglow covers all of this in great detail but she also shows us a conflicted Victorian man who struggled with his suppressed homosexuality and an unhappy childhood. He suffered from a form of epilepsy and frequent bouts of depression and Jenny Uglow points out how aspects of his life and his relationships were reflected in his nonsense poetry.
The book is stuffed full of Lear’s verses, drawings and paintings so do not read it on a Kindle.

[Colin Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr Lear by Jenny Uglow.
It is difficult to say much more than this is the best book that I have read this year. 5 stars.

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best of all, the book generously flows with Lear's own work, both art and nonsense. Every chapter starts with a poem and sketch and goes on to pack in his landscape paintings and more poems. Uglow's biography honors Lear's contradictions and complexities. She engagingly brings this reclusive but gregarious, driven but funny man back to life. We have him singing away at the piano, studying animals, making adventurous and arduous travels. I miss him now that I've closed the book.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stumbled across this on the New Books shelf at one of my public library's branches while there for a meeting. I knew next to nothing about Edward Lear, certainly not as an artist. Such an excellent example of biography!

Uglow traces Lear's life, mostly chronologically, from his middle-class upbringing in London fraught with family economic misfortunes and rather distant parents, to his life as a traveling artist and writer. Best known for his nonsense poetry (The Owl and the Pussycat) and limericks, he was also an accomplished if not very widely embraced artist. Although he got his start making finely details botanical and zoological pieces, he gradually moved toward landscapes. And to find them, he traveled widely and almost constantly, across Italy, Greece, Albania, the Middle East and India. His landscapes are strangely dreamlike, and I was quite taken with them. I especially liked his painting of Masada.

But in addition to his art and poetry, he had a wide circle of famous friends and acquiantances, with whom he kept up a voluminous correspondence. He was good friends with Tennyson and spent some time giving Queen Victoria drawing lessons. During the latter part of his life he settled in San Remo, Italy, drawing, writing and visiting.

Uglow uses the artists output - his drawings, poems and nonsense limericks - to illustrate Lear's passions and many insecurities. He clearly loved many of the men he traveled and corresponded with, but was a man of his time and had no idea how to handle these thoughts and feelings - I think. Many of his most personal letters to friends no longer exist. And although he was dearly loved by his friends, it seems that he was a poor promoter of his own art and writing, and much of his output seemed to have been purchased in an effort to prop him up.

A delightful human being. I'm glad I took the time to learn more about him.

[Sorrento · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr Lear is a beautiful and lavishly presented book. The hard cover is stunning with a picture of one of Lear’s parrots and the title “Mr Lear” in gold. The pages of the book contain many colour plates of Lear’s art together with reproductions of his letters and cartoons.
Jenny Uglow has written a magnificent detailed and comprehensive biography of Edward Lear drawing on his correspondence with his vast network of friends, relations and patrons. Uglow tells us of his friendships with Lord Derby, the pre- Raphaelite artists, romantic poets and of course Tennyson and his family. Until I read Mr Lear I only knew of Lear’s nonsense poems which are well represented in the book. In Mr Lear we also learn about Edward Lear the artist and travel writer and the beautiful pictures he painted whilst in places such as Greece, Italy and India reproduced in the book.
By the end of the book I felt as though I had come to know one of the most interesting characters of the Victorian age. Uglow tell us in the book of several occasions when he struggled to get his work published. If he was alive now I am sure he would be well pleased with the publication of this panorama of his life and work.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fun—lots to Edward Lear besides his limericks, as it turns out, and Uglow is such a solid biographer she really brings the times and circumstances into vivid focus. Ah, for the life of an itinerant mid-19th-century artist! Lear traveled extensively throughout Europe and Asia to paint and write and read, hung out with English peers and the likes of Alfred Tennyson, mooned over being alone but threw himself into his work with fervor, and had an enormous social circle. The book is long and not exactly a page turner—Lear's wasn't an action-packed life by a longshot—but wonderfully evocative of a time and place that just don't exist anymore, and of a restless and creative man who made the most of his gifts and his days. LJ review to follow.

[Cheryl]

From a 'note-to-self' reminding me to read a bio of the man. This is about the highest rated and is at my fave library.

"Edward Lear, the nonsense poet, had an interesting life. Normally I don't want to know about authors, only about their work, but these data seem relevant to an appreciation of his work. "He was the twentieth of twenty-one children, the son of a stockbroker who went bust. He suffered from epilepsy and depression all his life, [personifying one as]... the 'Demon' and the other the 'Morbids.'"

[V. Briceland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it's fair to say that Edward Lear—painter, close observer of avian wildlife, nonsense illustrator, limerick-ician, and author of enduring verse—lived a placid life.

Lear managed to hide his epilepsy for his many decades without ever having a seizure in public. Though he yearned for the sensual touch of handsome young men (including one he seemed to have traveled with for several years before learning that the lad had a wife and family tucked away elsewhere), he never sullied his good reputation with scandal, or lived a life unconventional...or indeed, managed to do anything with his decades that was ever more than mildly interesting at most.

It's true that Lear was something of a Woody Allen's Zelig of his time, managing to hobnob with most of the Victorian era's icons—hanging out with the Tennysons, giving Queen Victoria painting lessons, letting Wilkie Collins pick him up for a party with Millais, running into Thackeray on a ferry, sitting for photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, wandering into pre-Raphaelite parties, and suffering visits by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Somehow, however, Lear was reclusive enough, and determined to stay on the outskirts of such high-toned society, that these encounters seem more the fodder for anecdote than life story. Most of Lear's life, in fact (and many, many chapters of Jenny Uglow's biography), seems have been spent accepting yet another commission for a painting from Lady Waldegrave, traveling about aimlessly for nine months of the year, summering with society in London, and then allowing Lady Waldegrave to send him out again with his canvases.

So when I say that Edward Lear lived a placid life, what I really wish to convey is that Jenny Uglow has managed to write a detailed and exquisitely-documented tome about one of the most boring spans of existence possible. No shade against Lear—the man's verse and illustrations enlivened my childhood immeasurably. Uglow has managed liberally to lace her biography with many examples of both, in an organic manner—and I say the following gently and with no small degree of regret—that sheds more light upon Lear's inner workings than they probably deserve.

What I wish Uglow might have done, however, is place Lear more within the context of other nonsense writers of his time, as well as explain what legacy he left to generations following; for although she makes clear Lear was very much a contemporary of artists perhaps remembered better than himself, she makes very little argument for his continued relevance.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sad and lovely biography, with a couple of side characters (his manservant Giorgio and his friend and sometime sweetheart Gussie) whose lives could be O'Henry stories in and of themselves. Lear is best known for his brilliant nonsense such as "The Owl and the Pussycat" but his life as a gay man in Victorian England seems to have been lonely and frustrating. Like so many beloved creators, his life, is his own eyes, was not quite fulfilling.

The biography isn't perfectly paced -- six hundred pages is a lot for the life of a person who mostly decides not to do things -- but it did hold me until the end, and the final pages are near-perfect.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of us know Edward Lear as the writer of nonsense verse. “The Owl and the Pussycat” is the first poem I ever learned by heart and even though I learned a few more in years closer to now than then I still remember more of it than I do of any of the others. But in his lifetime Lear was known for other things first. As a teenager and young man he became England’s Audubon, doing brilliant paintings of birds and other wildlife for zoos and wealthy patrons with private zoos and from stuffed exotic animals. He published several successful books of these illustrations. He became a landscape artist and world traveler (Italy, Greece, Corfu, Albania, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, India, Ceylon), publishing travel books illustrated with prints from his sketches, watercolors, and oil paintings.

Since his travels were underwritten by subscriptions from landowning friends of the upper classes, he was a frequent guest at their estates and as a talented musician (piano and guitar) he was quick to entertain both adults and children with popular songs, spoofs of popular songs, and original songs. He was also was given to puns and word play and would entertain the children of the house with illustrated alphabets and limericks (a form that existed but hadn’t yet been named) that were decorated with fanciful cartoons. The sidelight made it into print and eventually they became popular but in his long lifetime he was Mr. Lear, the landscape painter.

His origins were not such that you would imagine him as a ten year old boy as someone who would travel much of the world, tutor Queen Victoria in drawing and painting, and be friend of the landed and political elite and the age’s cultural elite (Tennyson, Wilkie Collins, Audubon, Ruskin, among many others). He came from the large, large family of a businessman who was fortunate in his early days, before Edward, one of the youngest of the family was born, and very unfortunate thereafter, going bankrupt, spending time in debtor’s prison, and working hand to mouth thereafter.

Young Lear was raised by his much older sisters, already young women when he was a toddler, and had a non-existent relationship with his mother. But he had a loving one with his sisters who taught him to draw and write and shared his skill and love of games of wit and rhyme. He had little formal schooling and the little he had scarred him in ways he would allude to but never discuss. He also had possible instances of abuse from (likely) two male family members, a cousin and perhaps a brother (C.). He suffered severely from epileptic fits, which at a young age he learned to “manage” by going into hiding for the duration as soon as he sensed one coming on. As a boy he began earning a living as an artist, making signs with illustrations for local shopkeepers. He was diligent, a patient and insistent observer, and a lifelong walker. Through hustle he got access to the London zoo, began drawing the animals there, particularly the parrots, and parlayed that into his first career success, one that led to connections to England’s upper class that through word of mouth and weekend stays led to more connections.

Two other things led to further connections with young men of family—his travel and his homosexuality. While going on sketching walks he met folks or had them accompany him and met other folks. His sketching tours of England, Scotland, Italy and Germany expanded his circle of potential patrons and friends. On one he had an idyllic time with Frank Lushington, a young man from a staid and influential family who seemed quite as whimsical, romantic, and dreamy as the slightly older Lear. They remained friends for life and Frank was the frustrated love of Lear’s life. Later times with Frank were more complicated. In England he found Frank just as staid and formal as his family. Still Lear pined and hoped up until Frank married and had children. Then he was the great family friend and godfather to several of his children.

He also had a thirty year relationship with his travel servant that Uglow doesn’t explicitly say was partially romantic but might well have been. The servant, Giorgio, is buried in the same cemetery, with identical headstones, to Lear, side-by-side. There were also several women he considered marrying, including a woman named Gussie to whom he nearly proposed multiple times and after each shying away was melancholy with regret.

The great female love of his life was likely his friend Alfred Tennyson’s wife. He preferred her to her husband (and her husband’s poetry to the man, who was moody and self-important) but was life-long friends with both. From all this—impoverished start, inadequate training in art, gender uncertainty, chronic illness and restless journeying—he managed an impressive life very much on his terms, living abroad or traveling in fall and winter, returning to England in summer to visit family and friends and supervise book publications and sale of his art, never working in an office or business but on projects of interest to himself. Still, there was the melancholy and the failure to strike up a permanent, open, intimate relationship.

Uglow has done a superb job of telling his life, amply illustrated with drawings, watercolors, paintings, photographs, and cartoons and generous samples of the nonsense verse that goes with the cartoons. It was a pleasure to read, informative, and a reliable resource for the man, his work, and his times.

[Micebyliz]

i loved this book. It is printed on very good paper and has wonderful reproductions of his paintings. I had no idea he was so good as a landscape painter, let alone that he gave lessons to Queen Victoria.
I was not surprised by the sadness and loss in his life, as seems to be common with many artists and writers of his day. (Tennyson, e.g.)
I was caught up in the nonsense and the fun cartoons as well. Really a very enjoyable read.

[Shyamal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very gentle and beautifully illustrated and "limericked" biography. His host in India was Lord Northbrook and I was half hoping Lear would have met A.O. Hume in Simla! Lear actually meets two Hume correspondents in Poona - R.P. Le Mesurier and Henry Wenden. Anyone interested in the Indian travels will find Ray Murphy's 1953 compilation "Edward Lear's Indian Journal" far more useful.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a prodigious output Lear made in his lifetime of creating thousands of artworks: drawings, paintings, etchings; and writing poems, songs, and all manner of nonsense. He also wrote dozens of letters a day.

As a young boy, his parents left him in the care of his kind oldest sister, Anne, because they were too occupied with the other dozen or so surviving children of their brood. However, their finances were rocky, so young Edward learned to make his living in his teens, working for Gould, a taxidermist, documenting the animals in the London zoo with his accurate drawings, and later, private menageries.

Early on Lear found patrons among the richer classes he worked for, enabling him to travel and develop his art painting landscapes. He studied with the pre-Raphaelites, fell in love with Italy whose climate was kinder to him, and whose manners were easier going than those in England with its damps and Victorian restrictions on what was done and what was not.

Throughout his life, Lear had many friends, and one serious love, who because he was a man, never could become the intimate companion he craved. However, his charm and ability to amuse children resulted in the nonsense verse for which he is known and loved.

His most constant companion was Giorgio, his servant. Giorgio carried his materials where they went, and they went to some challenging albeit gorgeous places including Palestine, the Nile, India during monsoons, the Himalayas.

Wherever he traveled he created faithful paintings depicting the locations. He wrote books for fellow travelers, hoping to earn money from their sales. One of the themes of the book is how Lear was constantly grubbing for money. Sometimes his patrons grew tired of it.

Lear lived during a time of social upheaval and political revolutions but remained not neutral exactly, more distanced as an artist. Considering how extremely social he was, his disciplined practice yielded lots of gorgeous pictures, full of the awe of an Englishman in the midst of foreign beauty. He was under the influence of Turner, and for poetry, Tennyson, whose wife became a faithful correspondent.

I confess I prefer his pictures of parrots and animals. His book of parrots he sold by subscription . It was in the era of Audubon who was doing the same thing with his American birds, and who was a subscriber of Lear's Parrots.

What I love about Lear is how he worked himself out of his depressions--by gardening, traveling, and writing. He lived to be 76, and probably drank too much at the end, but he was lonely after all, with the deaths of Giorgio, and Foss, his large tail-less cat.

[Aron · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is by far the best biography I have ever read, and considering I have read many, that is high praise. I had read Levi's biography many years ago and I hardly remember anything, it left such a weak impression. What I do remember is finding it a boring book and being a bit disappointed, considering how much I love Lear.

Uglow's writing, by contrast, is like reading a good novel—e.g. you keep on hoping Lear will marry Gussie even though you know he won't in the end. Uglow brings Lear to life as an individual, while also providing insight into his art & creative process—both for his landscape painting as well as his nonsense. Her fascinating portrayal is not just of the protagonist, but the many interesting friends and acquaintances he had. She also vividly portrays the era & brings alive its artistic & cultural trends. I learned quite a bit not just about Lear and his art, but of the historical artistic milieu which influenced him.

Even if you never heard of Edward Lear, this book is highly recommended.

[Peggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this on a whim, after reading a short review in the New Yorker. My interest wasn’t intense but it is a well-written and absorbing study. What tickled my interest was that although he is best known today for his nonsense books, his main claim to fame in his own time was as a superb landscape painter and travel writer. You get a strong, sometimes intimate sense of him throughout the book. Enjoyable.

[Laura Spira · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the most beautiful book I have read for a long time, which certainly does justice to the work of the subject, wonderfully reproduced. But it is very heavy... Meticulously researched, Jenny Uglow also infuses the text with her own enthusiasm for Lear, producing an excellent and sympathetic portrait. Highly recommended to fans of Lear and anyone who relishes fine biography.

[Shelly Dennison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny Uglow really does have the knack of producing fascinating comprehensive readable biographies! This is a beautifully illustrated and produced account of Lear's life - I was aware of him as a nonsense poet so the big eye opener for me was his career as an artist from the observational work with birds and animals to landscapes in Europe and beyond.

[Flora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent treatment of an artist more renown for his limericks than his paintings. A bit slow going as Lear tries to settle on a career and a home. The strange and sad life of a man who repressed his sexuality and wandered through much of Europe, Middle East and India, painting and drawing everything. I enjoyed learning about life in Edwardian-Victorian England.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read, interesting, informative and enlightening. Lots of factoids and detail on the nonsense writers life who did more than The Owl and the Pussycat and the prose this is written allows the layperson to find out about all this extra ever easier.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is everything a biography should be:

all things fair
With such a pencil such a pen
You shadow'd forth to distant men
I read and felt that I was there