Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense By Jenny Uglow
In 1886, when Ruskin was asked by an evening newspaper to list his favourite writers, he replied, ‘I really don’t know any author to whom I am half so grateful, for my idle self, as Edward Lear. I shall place him first of my hundred authors.’ The 74-year-old Lear, living in rather lonely retirement on the Italian Riviera, was thrilled at this endorsement from the leading art critic of the age, even as he savoured its slightly bitter irony. He had come to recognise, and accept, that his enduring legacy would be, not as the great artist he had hoped to become, but as a writer of ‘Nonsense’. This disparity between Lear’s early artistic hopes and his later literary achievements was just one among many tensions that dotted his life – without ever obliterating his sense of fun, or his relish for the absurd. Jenny Uglow elegantly and perceptively weaves...
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