Edward Lear, was the “wildly imaginative man” who famously wrote The Owl and the Pussycat, and who loved “animals, music, travel, chocolate shrimps, pancakes, and his cat, Foss. And… children who sometimes misbehave.”
Born in London in 1812, Edward grew up with older sisters who taught him to paint and draw, provided books about “plants and animals, mythology and adventure,” and allowed him to “dream of faraway places, both real and imagined.” Teenage Edward sold his artwork on street corners and, before long, his talent was noticed by “important people.” He was hired to work in London Zoo, where he drew and painted all manner of “remarkable creatures.” His watercolors were praised for displaying “a feeling for the fast beat of a heart, the wetness of a twitching nose, the stress of animals far from their familiar habitat.”
Soon regarded as “one of England’s foremost natural history artists,” Edward was invited to draw the Earl of Derby’s private menagerie. It was here he also began entertaining the “jumble-bumble of England’s finest” children, the “sons and daughters of British nobility” who gathered at the estate, and where he revealed “his most enduring gift—the ability to make people laugh.”
He drew the Manypeeplia Upsidownia plant to show the kids where children really came from, introduced them to the Scroobious Pip from the Humbly Islands, wrote limericks “with shocks of suspense and humor,” and in 1846 published “A Book of Nonsense,” which he wrote and illustrated himself.
Feeling stifled by English society, when Lear left the Duke’s estate, he began “traveling the world and inventing his own.” He had adventures and was awarded commissions, and he eventually adopted a cat, drawing himself and Foss over and over again in poems and letters. When Foss died in 1887, Lear himself died six months later.
This exquisite biography unfurls in page upon page of Hill’s whimsy-filled text that’s stuffed with drawings by Carlin—with some of Lear’s thrown in, too—and the whole package manages to convey a lovely sense of the man. It’s a tale of excellence and creativity unleashed, and is full of the wonder of the genius that was Edward Lear.
--Lynn
