Mr. Lear
A Life of Art and Nonsense
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A sparkling biography of the poet and artist Edward Lear by the award-winning biographer Jenny Uglow
Edward Lear, the renowned English artist, musician, author, and poet, lived a vivid, fascinating life, but confessed, “I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.” He was a man in a hurry, “running about on railroads” from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India, and Palestine. He is still loved for his “nonsenses,” from startling, joyous limericks to great love poems like “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes, and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly to the age of Darwin and Dickens—he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters—his genius for the absurd and his dazzling wordplay make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today.
Lear was a man of great simplicity and charm—children adored him—yet his humor masked epilepsy, depression, and loneliness. Jenny Uglow’s beautifully illustrated biography, full of the color of the age, brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships, and restless travels. Above all, Mr. Lear shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires—an exile of the heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The beauty of this hefty and hearty book is that Uglow (In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793 1815), armed with her prodigious knowledge of 19th-century England, places her subject at center stage as she follows the wandering life of Edward Lear (1812 1888) from birth to death. Lear's reputation rests primarily on his fame as a writer of whimsical nonsense verse, especially "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "The Jumblies." Uglow puts just as much effort and detail into chronicling Lear's lesser-known life as a skilled draftsman and painter, illustrated with multiple examples of his work, and as a tireless traveler in Greece, India, Italy, and Palestine, among other places, as shown in numerous passages from his journals and letters. Encyclopedic in content, Uglow's bountiful book illuminates numerous facets of Lear's life and work, touching on, among other subjects, his relationship with Alfred, Lord Tennyson as both friend and creative collaborator, and his reading of Charles Darwin's revolutionary theories (Uglow notes Lear's human characters are "curiously fluid, morphing into animals and birds, with elongated limbs, arms turning into wings, noses into beaks"). Definitive and accessible, Uglow's rich book about a richer life is thoroughly captivating fare for leisurely, curled-up reading.
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