Happy birthday Edward Lear!

Edward Lear was born 200 years ago this very day, in Holloway, only a stone’s throw from where I sit, the 21st of 22 children of a stockbroker. But his father’s fortunes crashed when he was four, and he was raised from then by his sister. From 6 years old he suffered frequent epileptic fits, and his depression – which he very descriptively and characteristically, I think, called ‘The Morbids’ – started around then too.

By 16 he was drawing for money. As a young man, he was employed by Lord Stanley to draw all the animals in the menagerie at Knowsley Hall. It was while he was staying there that Lear began to make up limericks to amuse the children…

But Lear was, certainly at this stage, not a nonsense poet: he was an  ornithological artist. His first publication at age 19, was a collection of his watercolours of parrots, which are extraordinarily beautiful.

I have to tell you something here. Edward Lear painted the parrot that sits on Marie Antoinette’s bonnet, at the top of this page. Eye patch by me, I’m afraid. And unlike other people, who resorted to shooting, taxidermy and museums, Lear went to the Zoo and asked a keeper to hold the parrot still so he could get its good side.

And the rest is history. Everybody, in some corner of their being, loves Edward Lear. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t always wanted to eat mince with slices of quince, or to have their dinner with a runcible spoon. The rootless optimism of the Jumblies! The patient longing of the Dong. And the unfortunate man of Peru: can you even imagine the world without limericks?

Lear’s nonsense – with its intrinsic sadness and humanity – never takes the easy way out. Look at the top limerick above. His poems are full of people who got smashed in some way for being different, in some way. His nonsense drawings practically quiver with movement and life. There is never any escape into decorum. Even without his sweeping landscape paintings, and the parrots and other watercolours, these drawings would be enough to make people love him.

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PAUSE…

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So, with all that in mind, last night I was at my second launch of the week, and it was for an exhibition at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY EDWARD LEAR is organised by Andrew Baker and Linda Hughes and hosted by the Poetry Society, and has really beautiful work by over forty artists including Glen Baxter, Peter Blegvad, and John Vernon Lord (who, as well as looking very like Lear himself, illustrated the Complete Nonsense Verse, which is due to be reissued by Cape in October). The show is quirky and wonderful and a real homage to Lear. If you’re in London, I recommend a stop in Covent Garden for coffee and to see the pictures. And if you go very soon, before it rains again, you might still be able to see a procession of Lear animals in coloured chalk, dancing up the pavement to the door of the café.

There is a small Happy Birthday Edward Lear website where you can see more images.