Brian Sibley discovers the funny, sad world of Edward Lear Edward Lear suffered from a chronic case of low self-image. When he described himself (in a humorous verse, ironically entitled “How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear”), he listed such characteristics as a nose that was remarkably big, a visage that was more or less hideous and a beard that resembled a wig. His body, he went on to confess, was “perfectly spherical”, while his personality was such that some people thought him “ill-tempered and queer”. In hesitant mitigation, however, he added that a few thought him pleasant enough . . .

And indeed we have. For well over a century, “that crazy old Englishman” (to use another of his self-applied epithets) has delighted generations of youngsters with his “learical lyrics and puffles of prose”. Edward Lear created a pantheon of outlandish beings such as the Quangle Wangle, the Pobble Who Has No Toes and all those bizarre Old Men and Young Women who inhabit every corner of the globe - from Cromer and Tring to more exotic locations like Smyrna and Tyre - and who were blessed (or cursed) with huge noses, long legs, square heads or pointed chins - all of them oddballs, among whom Mr Lear could feel at ease, even less ugly and misbegotten.

Peter Levi’s study of Edward Lear is only the latest of a long line of such books. It is not really surprising that the creator of such fabulously eccentric characters should have attracted biographies, analysts and interpreters in almost as great a number as have jumped on that other genius of nonsense, Lewis Carroll. After all, there is much about Mr Lear to be discussed: the youngest of 21 children, raised by a spinster sister, he was an asthmatic and an epileptic who, as a child, experienced some unspecified abuse (possibly sexual) that was so terrible that the date on which it occurred remained burned into his memory for the rest of his life. Or, again, there is Lear’s contemplation of a proposal of marriage to one of his child-friends, now grown up - but still 46 years his junior; or his obsessive affection for a much younger man with whom he journeyed through Greece - all of which has provided the Freudians and the Jungians with fruit ripe for the picking.

Peter Levi’s book grew out of research for a study of Lear’s poetry, but developed into a full-scale biography, in which the author is at pains to show Lear in a less gloomily introspective light. He is, however, repeatedly overruled in this by the Professor of Poetical Topography himself. Levi speaks of Lear’s childhood as being happy, while the child himself whimpers nervously about his attacks of depression (or “The Morbids” as he called them); Levi does his best to show the adult Lear as being lonely but far from maladjusted, whereas - between the lines - the man himself screams aloud his anxieties, fears and phobias.

The best parts of this book are, undoubtedly, those tracing what Lear called his stereopyptic and sophisticle wanderings while pursuing his true profession of being (in the words of another derogatory phrase) a “damn dirty landscape painter”. Levi is at his most assured when writing about this lesser-known Mr Lear, showing us the young boy being taught to paint by his sister; the meticulousness with which he approached his early zoological studies that were to result in paintings and engravings of birds - and, in particular, parrots - which, at their best, rival the great Audubon; and the stunning luminescent beauty which he gave to his landscape paintings of Italy, Greece, India and Egypt, and which place Lear among the finest of Victorian artists.

Levi’s passionate appreciation of Lear as an artist leads him to express regret at the way in which the painter’s reputation has been overshadowed by his fame as the writer of “The Jumblies”, “The Owl and the Pussycat” and other slobacious filrumble-come-tumble. After which, the reader can’t help but feel that Levi almost resents having to write about such stuff and nonsense. And when he does, he demonstrates that irritating habit, common among so many academics, of rooting about for the source of a writer’s ideas with the assiduousness of a pig snuffling out truffles but without any of the gourmet’s appreciation of the delicacy itself.

It is, for example, interesting to discover that Lear’s large-headed sufferer of unrequited love, the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, owes something to the Fool in the traditional mummers’ play, and that when Lear’s character declares all his worldly goods to be “two old chairs and half a candle, one old jug without a handle”, those possessions were probably inspired by the Fool’s inventory of “a teapot without a spout, a cup without a handle, a tobacco pipe without a lid and half a farthing candle”. But Peter Levi ignores the way in which Lear then reworks that material in his poem and, by so doing, makes it forever his own.

And does so astute a writer really need to ask why it was that Lear wrote most of his nonsense verse quite late on in life? The answer, surely,is because it tells, in coded form, the story of that life.

How else can we explain the frustrations of the Dong with the Luminous Nose, wandering the Great Gromboolian Plain in search of his lost love; or those comic misalliances of an Owl and a Pussycat, a Duck and a Kangaroo or, significantly perhaps, Mr Daddy Long-Legs and Mr Floppy Fly; or, more than anything, those endless accounts of journeys and quests in search of something (or to escape from something) in pea-green boats or altogether more perilous craft, such as that used by the Jumblies who went to sea in a sieve?

We undoubtedly owe Mr Levi a debt for broadening our understanding and appreciation of Mr Lear but, inevitably, we will go on remembering the Bosh-producing Luminary as the man who wrote about runcible spoons, co-operative cauliflowers and superincumbant confidential cucumbers and who showed us a funny, sad world that might go under some such whimsical name as Jumpsibojigglequack, but which is actually a territory of every human heart.

Brian Sibley wrote and performed in the play To Sea in a Sieve: The Life and Dreams of Edward Lear.