Surely one of the best known and best loved poems in English, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ tells a charming tale of two creatures, usually sworn enemies, much in love and dancing in the moonlight, but as Jenny Uglow writes in her biography of Edward Lear, ‘Slivers of darkness float within the nonsense and the pictures’. The master of limericks and fantasies which have made generations of children laugh and grown-ups smile, was himself afflicted with loneliness and melancholy....
The twentieth of Jeremiah Lear’s twenty-one children, young Edward was brought up by Ann, his eldest sister – his mother was otherwise engaged – and educated at home. Jeremiah was a London stockbroker who was ruined financially by the 1816 slump and young Edward had to work from the age of fifteen, drawing ‘for bread and cheese’. As an ornithologist’s draughtsman at the British Museum, he came to the attention of the Earl of Derby, who owned a menagerie at Knowsley. As well as drawing the animals, Lear wrote verses for the earl’s grandchildren which were collected and published as A Book of Nonsense Verse in 1845.
Although the book was a success, Lear had decided to embark on a life of travel and landscape painting. A lonely and rather timid figure who suffered from epileptic fits and bouts of depression which he called ‘the Morbids’, Lear was nevertheless an intrepid traveller. He visited many parts of Europe, the Middle East and India, keeping journals and publishing accounts of his experiences in Italy, Albania, Calabria and Corsica, as well writing ‘nonsense’ along the way.
It was in a hotel in Cannes that Lear met with old friends, the poet John Addington Symonds and his wife Catherine, and wrote ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ for their daughter Janet. The poem was later published in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets in 1871, the year that Lear finally settled down in San Remo, on the Italian coast.
From his base in Italy, several more books of verses and pictures were created, among them the fantastical creatures that astonish young and old to this day, most famously the Jumblies, Dong with a Luminous Nose, the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo and the Pobble who has no toes.
In his house in San Remo, removing himself from ‘publicity’ as had been his habit throughout a lifetime troubled by epilepsy, Edward Lear died, peacefully, on 29 January 1888.
