The Times Literary Supplement for 3 February has not one, not two, but three articles on Edward Lear:

Adam Kendon’s “Edward Lear Painting Parrots” is a review of Robert McCracken Peck’s recent The Natural History of Edward Lear;

Ben Westwood’s “Lear and the Fool” reviews Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry, and

Barbara Everett’s “Better than Great: Good” is the text of a December 2016 “address given at the Institute of Advanced Study, University of London, at an event to mark the publication of Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry.”

This last concludes:

Edward Lear is surely better than great: he is good. He makes a brilliance or a radiance out of those who inhabit a kind of nonsensical underside of society, the defeated from birth, still capable of flight…, the lonely who can write, all the loving-unloved, the cats with half a tail.

Unfortunately all these essays are available only to subscribers.

Edward Lear 1857 by William Holman Hunt © Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool