Edward Lear, the author of ‘The Owl and the
Pussy-cat’ and ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,’ is rightly beloved as a nonsense
poet. But few people know that he was also a brilliant musician, who sang and
played the piano, the flute, the accordion and the small guitar, and a composer,
who published twelve beautiful settings of his friend Tennyson’s poetry. Lear
was also a naturalist, whose vivid lithographs of new species of animals and
birds were consulted by Charles Darwin, and a landscape painter of surpassing skill,
who taught Queen Victoria to draw. My book is the first study to examine Lear
fully – as a musician, a visual artist, a naturalist, and a religious dissenter
– relating all of these endeavours and identities to his writing. It places
Lear firmly within the social, cultural, and intellectual life of his time.
Inventing Edward Lear crystallizes insights gained over six years of research, during
which I transcribed over 10,000 pages of unpublished manuscript. It contains
many pictures and writings by Lear that have not been seen before. Probably my
most exciting realisation was that all of Lear’s poems are really songs.
I recovered music for some of his re-settings of comic words to existing tunes
by Thomas Haynes Bayly and Thomas Arne. I traced songs that we know from his
diaries Lear regularly performed. And I began the process of recording, with
the help of pianist David Owen Norris and various singers, the music that Lear
wrote, parodied, sang and listened to throughout his long life. Readers of my
book (and even those who don’t read it) can listen to these recordings at my
website: edwardlearsmusic.com
Lear performed all of his nonsense poems,
and many other poems by Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, to music. He also had
a lively repertoire of contemporary comic songs, such as ‘Tea in the Arbour’,
in which a town-bred visitor takes tea with country friends and is bothered by
caterpillars in his tea and spiders in the butter, gets tar on his trousers, is
peppered by birdshot, and is finally caught in a man-trap! Lear must have
played this Harold Lloyd-style comic role to perfection, as friends forty years
on still recalled him singing it. Lear was adept at transitioning, on
improvised piano, from high tragedy to breathless comedy. Once we know that
songs like ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’ are designed to sit uneasily
– but brilliantly – between the sentimental yearning of drawing-room ballad and
the cockney wordplay of Victorian musical-hall songs about foolish suitors,
then it becomes easier to appreciate their genius. Lear creates a feedback loop
between pathos and absurdity, where sentiment always threatens to be silly, yet
the absurd frequently becomes moving. He makes us laugh and cry simultaneously.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Edward Lear, the author of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat,’ is rightly beloved as a nonsense poet. But few people know that he was also a brilliant musician, who sang and played the piano, the flute, the accordion and the small guitar, and a composer, who published twelve beautiful settings of his friend Tennyson’s poetry. Lear was also a naturalist, whose vivid lithographs of new species of animals and birds were consulted by Charles Darwin, and a landscape painter of surpassing skill, who taught Queen Victoria to draw. My book is the first study to examine Lear fully – as a musician, a visual artist, a naturalist, and a religious dissenter – relating all of these endeavours and identities to his writing. It places Lear firmly within the social, cultural, and intellectual life of his time.
Inventing Edward Lear crystallizes insights gained over six years of research, during which I transcribed over 10,000 pages of unpublished manuscript. It contains many pictures and writings by Lear that have not been seen before. Probably my most exciting realisation was that all of Lear’s poems are really songs. I recovered music for some of his re-settings of comic words to existing tunes by Thomas Haynes Bayly and Thomas Arne. I traced songs that we know from his diaries Lear regularly performed. And I began the process of recording, with the help of pianist David Owen Norris and various singers, the music that Lear wrote, parodied, sang and listened to throughout his long life. Readers of my book (and even those who don’t read it) can listen to these recordings at my website: edwardlearsmusic.com
Lear performed all of his nonsense poems, and many other poems by Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, to music. He also had a lively repertoire of contemporary comic songs, such as ‘Tea in the Arbour’, in which a town-bred visitor takes tea with country friends and is bothered by caterpillars in his tea and spiders in the butter, gets tar on his trousers, is peppered by birdshot, and is finally caught in a man-trap! Lear must have played this Harold Lloyd-style comic role to perfection, as friends forty years on still recalled him singing it. Lear was adept at transitioning, on improvised piano, from high tragedy to breathless comedy. Once we know that songs like ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’ are designed to sit uneasily – but brilliantly – between the sentimental yearning of drawing-room ballad and the cockney wordplay of Victorian musical-hall songs about foolish suitors, then it becomes easier to appreciate their genius. Lear creates a feedback loop between pathos and absurdity, where sentiment always threatens to be silly, yet the absurd frequently becomes moving. He makes us laugh and cry simultaneously.