A Blog of Bosh

No feature of Edward Lear’s limericks has attracted greater criticism than the repetitive last lines; sooner or later someone was bound to try to ‘improve’ them by providing a more satisfying ending to Lear’s “nonsenses,” as he generally refferred to his limericks. Over the years I have been sent several rewritings of the Book of Nonsense, usually steering Lear’s compositions towards the bawdy form approved by Legman and his modern followers.

One thing distinguishes the latest attempt, John Crombie’s The Old Man of Corfu, Who Fancied a Loo with a View. Putting the Limerick Back into Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes.With incidental drawings by Sheila Bourne (Kickshaws, 2011; only 26 copies lettered A-Z printed): the awareness, emphasized by the subtitle, that Lear’s micro-epics are being transformed into something different, they are being translated from “pure” nonsense into conventional humorous narratives. Compare for example the following

There was a young lady in blue,
Who said, ‘Is it you, Is it you?’
When they said, ‘Yes, it is,’ —
She replied only, ‘Whizz!’
So they rented her out to the Zoo.

with Lear’s original

There was a young lady in blue,
Who said, ‘Is it you, Is it you?’
When they said, ‘Yes, it is,’ —
She replied only, ‘Whizz!’
That ungracious young lady in blue.

The point of both is that the young lady is not behaving according to expectations, but while Lear simply comments on this with a slightly euphemistic adjective and avoids closing the situation, Mr. Crombie feels compelled to provide narrative closure; in this particular case, by the way, it is not without its merits and has the advantage of avoiding the obvious; the lady is not locked away in the rhyme-necessitated zoo, but rather “rented out.”

Mr. Crombie seems to feel a peculiar hate for Lear’s adjectives, sometimes obvious, sometimes totally unexpected, and sometimes only a little out of register, but this does not prevent him from trying to obtain the same effect by different means. With the help of a nice illustration, the rewritten ending makes the story funny within the narrative convention which requires the characters’ actions to have consequences.

Lear did write limericks of this sort, witness the unfortunate fate of the old man with a gong, who was smashed for disturbing the neighbourhood (the nonsense effect in this particular case is mainly provided by the illustration), but in his “nonsenses” he was not interested in telling stories: avoiding making sense for most of the time was more than enough for him, and a superfluous adjective, as in the case of the lady in blue, or a  totally inappropriate one in other cases, was clearly a good way to stop our innate ability to bring everything within the confines of the already-seen.

Mr. Crombie is perfectly aware of this and in his well-documented introduction writes:

Despite prosodic affinities, the limerick and the nonsense rhyme do of course operate at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. The former teases optimally ingenious — and, ideally, bawdy — tales from any available set of rhymes; nonsense on the  other hand uses their  chance affinities precisely to subvert all logical connections, to set at naught their narrative or sense-making capacity.

Some copies may still be available from jmcdc at mail dot com, so if you are interested in this nice booklet hurry, my copy was marked “G.”

Houghton Library has published several more manuscript facsimiles of Edward Lear material, mostly early zoological and botanical drawings:

Houghton Library, MS Typ 55.27

Edward Lear album of drawings, [ca. 1830]. MS Typ 55.27 contains a large number of early animal and plant drawings and a few landscapes. Some might actually be by his sister Ann.

Houghton Library, MS Typ 55.12

A number of the animal watercolours Lear did while at Knowsley in the early 1830s can be seen in Edward Lear drawings of animals and birds. MS Typ 55.12.

Houghton Library, MS Typ 55.8

Sketches of the psittacidae,1832. MS Typ 55.8 offers nine drawings that were published in Lear’s parrots book as well as two unpublished ones.

Houghton Library, MS Typ 55.4

Depictions of birds, plants, and insects. 1828-1836. MS Typ 55.4  is a scrapbook containing 80 drawings and watercolours by Edward Lear and his sister Ann.

W.M. Rossetti portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Edward Lear, besides being a universal benefactor as author of The Book of Nonsense (dear to Dante Rossetti), was a very agreeable and efficient landscape designer who had been rather far afield in his quest of the picturesque — Albania, Calabria, Syria, etc. He was moreover an entertaining and judicious writer of travelling adventure, as evidenced in his book A Landscape-painter in Calabria. There is in this volume a deal of genuine Italian character-sketching: Christina was very fond of it. I met Lear in 1852 in company with Holman Hunt, and passed a week or so in their society. They were at Fairlight, near Hastings ; Hunt painting his admirable sheep-picture Our English Coasts, and Lear, who had resolved to put himself under severe discipline as a quasi-Praeraphaelite executant, producing one of his larger oil-paintings, The Quarries of Syracuse. This was quite a new start on his part, as hitherto he had aimed chiefly at telling composition and facile handling. Lear was a rather tall man, spectacled, with a rounded nose and ordinary features. He was a sprightly, easy, unpretentious talker, having knocked about in the world more than sufficiently to acquire aplomb and suppress affectation, and being accustomed to move in “good society.” At Fairlight we had vile spring weather of recurring rain varied with sea mists; and Lear was much given to declaiming against the English climate, which, as he said (and I more than once noticed it to be true), even if tolerably fine before and after his sojourns in his native land, was constantly detestable during those intervals. Another object of his denunciation—but this was in a later year—was the oriental camel, in his view an unmannerly and unmanageable beast, affording material for little save human exasperation. His verdict on the “ship of the desert” anticipated that which has been versified in Rudyard Kipling’s stanzas on The Oont. Lear, in his later years, settled in San Remo. His sight had never been strong, and he became blind. At the beginning of 1887 I was at San Remo with my wife and two children, and I noticed the Villa Tennyson, at which Lear resided. I blameably neglected to call at once; and then an earthquake (much talked of all over Europe) occurred, and my family decamped from the place, and I along with them. Thus, to my permanent regret, I failed to see good old Lear in his darkened retirement. He lies buried in the San Remo cemetery.

Rossetti, William Michael. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906, 156-7.