If you thought the runcible spoon (below left: a Victorian example by the renowned manufacturer Elkington & Co. Birmingham, ca 1880; right: George III Silver Runcible Spoon/Fork, John Hutson, London, 1800) was a strange object…
Take a look at this modern gadget, the Pizzafork:
Michael Montgomery, Lear’s Italy. In the Footsteps of Edward Lear. London: Cadogan Guides, 2005.
When I ordered the book I expected a travelogue comparing present-day Italian places with what Edward Lear saw in his extensive travels (endless migrations) across the country, similar to Michael Booth’s Just As Well I’m Leaving. To the Orient with Hans Christian Andersen, whose author follows the Danish writer on a tour of Italy and the East (Reviews in The Observer, New Statesman, and The Independent).
After a few pages, however, it is obvious that this is not the case; Michael Montgomery, who is writing a screenplay about the “tragic story of Lear’s lengthy and ultimately unfullfilled love affair with Gussie Bethell”, is only interested in Lear’s life and does not know, or care about Italy. In the whole book I spotted no more that three personal remarks about the country, and their quality does not inspire one to wish for more, Mr. Montgomery clearly only has stereotyped opinions of Italy (which also transpires in the very short Independent review), so after quoting Lear’s first impressions of Naples and the asssault on his senses, he writes:
Barring only the advent of cars and cigarettes, and the brooding presence of the Camorra, it seems that little has changed in Naples over the past 150 years (42).
Apart from this, the book is not a disappointment. It strings together passages from Lear’s travel books, letters and diary, providing a lot of new material. In particular the chapters on Lear’s early travels in Florence, Rome and Naples are in great part extracted from never-before-printed letters to his sister Ann and later chapters include long extracts from his equally unpublished diary.
The book is stricly focused on voyage impressions so for the most part it only includes Lear’s observations on landscape, hotels and sometimes the general character of the people, and relates some of his, usually already famous, adventures. Readers interested in Edward Lear, and I do not see who else would buy the book, would probably have preferred to get more about his feelings and personal relationships (Lushington, Fortescue and Baring are mentioned only in passing, though they were probably the most important people in Lear’s life) as well as of his funny letters and drawings.
Someone made curious by the announcement in the inside front cover of the January 1870 issue of Our Young Folks (number 61) that “another new contributor, a distinguished English artist, will furnish some laughable verses” would have been happy to find more details in the last page (72):
We shall give, in the February number, a capital specimen of nonsense-poetry, by Edward Lear, an English artist. It will be followed by others from the same hand. The author is one of Tennyson’s intimate friends, and the fact that these verses have been read and laughed over by the poet and his children, adds to their interest.
It takes a genius to write real nonsense. Few besides the immortal “Mother Goose” have ever had the gift of doing so, in a manner acceptable to children. These will be acknowledged genuine by all who can appreciate the ludicrous.
Lear had agreed to let Fields, Osgood, & Co. print some of his as-yet-unpublished nonsense songs in November 1869, after sending copies of his poems to the publisher’s wife, Mrs. Fields, on 14 October 1868 (The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense, edited by V. Noakes, London, Penguin, 2001, pp. 500, 506 and 510). The time of the anonymous publication of the Book of Nonsense was long gone:
You will I know kindly print my name in full “Edward Lear,” wh. will, when I get the Magazine, delight my feeble mind, & console me for remaining in this cold foggy place. After all, small as it may be, one does some good by contributing to the laughter of little children, if it is a harmless laughter.
(Edward Lear to James Fields, 18 November 1869; Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, revised edition,Stroud, Sutton, 2004, p. 203.)
Our Young Folks would publish three of Lear’s most famous songs, with nice original illustrations by J.H. Howard. The first to appear was The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (number 62, February 1870, pp. 111-2):
The March issue (number 63, pp. 146-7) presented The Duck and the Kangaroo:
The sad tale of The Daddy-Long-Legs and the Fly would close the series in April (number 64, pp. 209-12):
Lear received his copies of the magazine in May 1870 and in August he wrote to Fields: “I thought the 3 poems very nicely printed, and capitally illustrated.” (The Complete Nonsense, p. 501.)
One of the most common statements to be found in the frquent comparisons between Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll is that there is no proof that they knew each other’s work; for example John Lehman, in Edward Lear and His Work (1977, p. 50), writes:
One of the most interesting unanswered questions of literary history is whether Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll read one another’s works or were in any way influenced by one another. There is no mention of either in the other’s diaries or letters, as far as we have them.
Many, starting with the anonymous reviewer in the Spectator of 9 April 1887, have identified some sort of Carroll influence in Lear’s later production of songs. Lehman goes on:
Nevertheless it is perhaps not too fanciful to see a certain, possibly distant consanguinity between Lear’s songs and such poems by Carroll as “’Tis the Voice of the Lobster”, “Beautiful Soup” (though both were of course parodies) and “Jabberwocky”.
The mystery, at least in what concerns Lear’s knowledge of Alice’s Adventures in Woderland, is now solved; in the latest edition of her biography, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (2004, p. 203), Vivien Noakes writes:
At the end of August [1869, the letter is dated 25 Aug.] he received a letter from Fortescue. “Have you read ‘Alice in Wonderland’?” it asked. “It is very pretty nonsense.”
And in the footnote to this passage she laconically states that “Lear’s own copy of Alice in Wonderland is now in the USA” (p. 287, chapter 17 note 23). Nothing is said of this copy (are there any annotations?) and Lear’s reply to Fortescue’s letter has not been published, as far as I know, and it might even be lost. So we do not yet know what Lear thought of his “rival” in the field of Nonsense, but we can be sure that he knew the Oxford don’s most important book and that among his friends it was considered to belong to the same genre he had created more than twenty years before with the Book of Nonsense.
I am late on this, as I read about Hu Wenliang’s “novel without words” only today; but I live in Italy and receive the TLS very late… so others have already discussed it: from the dismissing attitude of CHINAdaily
which concludes the article by “doubting Hu’s novel as hype” to the balanced report of BoingBoing, which notes that Hu “claimed that he spent one year to write the novel”.
Anyway, the whole novel, entitled , reads (?) as follows:
： ？
: ！
“ ‘……’ ”
（、）·《，》
；——
The TLS, whose text is slightly different from the one above, taken from CHINAdaily, justly observes that this is a translation of the original, so I’m afraid we do not have a chance of winning the US$16,900 that Hu promised as a reward for the first correct interpretation (don’t ask me where he is going to get that money, not from this novel, which has been pirated all over the Internet and will probably not sell much). You want to try anyway and need a hint? It is “a special touching love story.”
After an admittedly superficial analysis I am inclined to exclude from the canon of Nonsense literature, though its five-line structure somehow reminds me of the limerick. It is difficult to gather the details (or I would claim the prize), but it is obvious that it starts with a question/problem, immediately followed by a strong statement, then a hiatus/suspension, a quest and a happy conclusion.
If you prefer a more detailed interpretation Jon @ Rogue Semiotics offers the best one I know, though I’m not sure his reading of “touching” was what the author meant.
Kim Dyer has written to let me know that a new album by Al Stewart, called A Beach Full of Shells (Appleseed Records, 2005), has just been released and it includes a tribute to “Mr Lear”.
You can listen to a passage on Amazon.com; the reviews are very favourable.
Edward Lear has always been a favourite with song writers, as the sadly incomplete Edward Lear and Music page demonstrates, and appeared as a character in the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer”:
Paul wrote “Paperback Writer” as another of his “letter songs.” It is about a novelist who is begging a publisher to publish his thousand page book. In its literal sense, it’s about a paperback writer who has written a novel based on another novel, about a paperback writer. Lennon’s contribution to this song was the phrase “a man named Lear,” and the reference to “The Daily Mail.” The name Lear came from the Victorian painter Edward Lear, who wrote nonsense poems that Lennon loved, and the Daily Mail was the regular newspaper Lennon received. It was recorded on April 13 and 14, 1966.
Oh Look Out! Part 16, 1962-1966 – The Red Album by John T. Marck
BTW, you can listen to two very early recordings of The Owl and the Pussy-cat (Columbia Quartet, 1902, and Haydn Quartet, 1904) in the Sounds section of the site.
Starting on 6 June 2005 BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a series of programmes in which contemporary writers give a twist to Alice in Wonderland. You will be able to listen to them on the web for a week from the Programme Info page.
Still available for the next two days the broadcast for Tuesday, 31 May:
Writer and historian Jenny Uglow, author of A Little History of British Gardening, introduces an extract in which Alice encounters The Garden of Live Flowers from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Read by Patience Tomlinson.
Thanks to A Wasp in a Wig.
I have just received Justin G. Schiller Ltd.’s Spring Miscellany catalogue (no. 53) and among the many interesting items listed is an “original ink Manuscript lesson for teaching Logic, conceived in diagram format and dated by Dodgson in the upper right corner ‘5/3/94.'”
On 5 March 1894 Dodgson wrote in his diary:
Gave two Lectures in Logic, one at the High School, to the girls, at 2: the other to Miss Soulsby and four mistresses as well as Edith Lucy and Miss Scott, at 8 p.m.
More from the catalogue entry written with Edward Wakeling’s assistance:
Dodgson here is explaining in a simple way the logic terms “mutually exclusive” and “exhaustive”, as well as their converses. He uses a visual example of books on shelves to get his points across… The term “Universe” in this lesson means every known book that exists…
The MS was once part of the inventory of Blackwells of Oxford, who attended the dispersal auction sale of Dodgson’s library and effects in 1898, and they might have acquired it at this time, perhaps inside one of Dodgson’s books as a page-marker.
The Norman and Cynthia Armour Collection of Fine Children’s Books is to be auctioned by Christie’s in New York on 27 April 2005. Among the items there will be the manuscript of a nonsense alphabet. Here is the description for lot 94:
LEAR, Edward (1812-1888). Autograph manuscript for a pictorial nonsense alphabet, ca 1857. 26 separate leaves for each letter of the alphabet, each with large letter in ink at head, a pen-and-ink drawing at center and a quatrain with envoi at foot. Folio, written on blue paper with watermarks “Joynson” or crowned oval with Poseidon at center, each sheet with contemporary linen backing. With added sheets at end to form an album, containing three ink-wash sketches on two leaves of a duck and her young, a rabbit, and a goat and her young; and six hand-colored oval portrait etchings of children, these last sheets watermarked “Smith & Meynier Fiume.” Contemporary half roan, marbled boards (spine mostly perished); modern red quarter morocco folding case. Provenance: Ida Nea Shakespear (signature on flyleaf); sold Sotheby’s London, 20 April 1971, lot 543.
Lear wrote the manuscript during his stay in Corfu and presented it to Ida Nea Shakespear. The drawings and verses are similar to others which have appeared at auction and which Lear published. The most recent appearance at auction for a similar alphabet was at Sotheby’s London, 22 July 1980; this example was prepared for the Tennyson family circa 1855. Two printed examples can be found in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets.
The well-traveled Lear is known to have visited Corfu on numerous occasions, first in 1848, having left Italy when the political situation there became unstable. He next went there in 1855 with Franklin Lushington, whom he’d met in Malta in 1848, though he spent most of this trip there alone and became depressed. His third trip to Corfu was over the winter of 1857. Other trips there were made in 1861, 1862, 1864 and 1877. According to Vivien Noakes, Lear made a number of these delightful alphabets for children up to 1870 (see Noakes, Edward Lear 1812-1888, London, 1985, p. 173).
Other Lear items of interest: William B. Osgood Field’s Edward Lear on My Shelves. Privately Printed [by the Bremer Press, Munich], 1933 (lot 96, $1,500-2,500) and two lots (95 and 97) of Lear or Lear-related books.
Also up for sale will be the (still controversial?) galley proofs for the Wasp in a Wig episode:
When they came to light at auction in 1974, after missing for over a century, the “discovery” of the present set of proof sent shock waves throughout the world of Carroll scholars and admirers alike. After fruitless attempts of finding any trace of the suppressed material, the draft was presumed lost, and some Carroll scholars even doubted it ever had ever existed. In 1977, the episode was published, with Mr. Armour’s generous permission, by the Lewis Carroll Society of America. The publication prompted an enormous amount of attention, and numerous articles surrounding the publication of the lost episode appeared in the U.K. and America press at the time…
They are expected to fetch between $50,000 and 70,000.
The Telegraph of Calcutta reports that one of Edward Lear’s most famous paintings, “Kinchinjunga” (1873), is to be auctioned by Bonhams and is expected to go for a sum between £400,000 and £600,000:
The painting makes the cover of a Bonham’s catalogue, with an article on “Lear’s Indian Summer” by his biographer, Vivien Noakes, who curated a major exhibition, Edward Lear: 1812-1888, at the Royal Academy in London 20 years ago.
Lear went to India in 1873 at the invitation of his friend, Thomas Baring, the first Earl of Northbrook, who had become Viceroy of India the previous year. The painting was bought by another of Lear’s friends, Henry Bruce, who had become Lord Aberdare in 1873.
A Blog of Bosh 