G. for the appointment of Painter Laureate, and Grand Peripatetic Ass and Boshproducing Luminary’ to the Greek Court.

The problem of finance was a constant irritant, and his wish to stabilise his income, though couched in the Learian nonsense idiom, was none the less a reality. But although he was chronically short of cash, he was never actually destitute or even poor. It was the lack of regular income rather than poverty which gave him a permanent feeling of insecurity. He was thus forced by circumstances to think unduly about money. Such a condition might have made him thrifty, which is often the first step to miserliness; but he was as generous as he was poor and continually helped the still poorer members of his family and others less closely related. ‘I only wish for money to give it away,’ is no idle boast, as we know from the records of many generous acts. His books contribute little to his variable income and it is to his landscapes that he turns for subsistence. He becomes a travelling showman of his own works, for at Corfu or Valetta or San Remo, he holds exhibitions, and in his later years there was a small permanent show of his pictures at Foord’s Gallery in Wardour Street. But customers are shy and they do not always pay promptly. The position would have been still worse but for the support of regular patrons. His old friends are ever ready to help and to enlist the help of their friends, but even then there are lean periods, for, alas, ‘private patronage must end in the natural course of things, but eating and drinking and clothing go on disagreeably continually.’ Like William Blake he began his career as an illustrator of the works of others, and it was as a delineator of birds for the ornithologist John Gould that he attracted the attention of Edward Stanley, thirteenth Earl of Derby, the Whig statesman and scholar, known to literature as Bulwer Lytton’s ‘Rupert of debate’. Lord Derby engaged him to illustrate a book on the menagerie which was then a show-piece of the Stanley demesne at Knowsley near Liverpool. This commission was momentous, for it earned him the lifelong patronage of the noble family which has done many more serviceable things than lend its name to the most famous horse race in the world, not least the befriending of the quaint ‘cove’ whose work has already outlived the fame of his first kindly and illustrious patron. Edward Lear worked for no less than four successive Earls of Derby—but, more important still, he worked or rather played for the children in the household of his first patron, and by so doing achieved immortality. The first Book of Nonsense was composed to amuse the grandchildren, nephews and nieces of the thirteenth earl, to whose ‘great-grandchildren, grand-nephews and grand-nieces’, it is dedicated.

7

If ever a gifted man worked for a living it was Edward Lear, and, although he joked about his journeys, they were not jaunts but professional expeditions in search of the picturesque, with the object of turning it into marketable landscapes. He is in fact a pictorial merchant: a later Dr. Syntax—in search of a living. Scenery is the raw material of his trade. When trekking across Albania he is glad to leave the district of Peupli for Akhrida, where he hopes the scenery will be ‘more valuable’. He is, as he declares in his Corsican Journal, a ‘wandering painter—whose life’s occupation is travelling for pictorial and topographic purposes’. But although he always makes a virtue of necessity, work is life to him. He fears idleness because it exposes him to boredom, and if he is capable of enduring the prophylactic of drudgery, he has no liking for the sedentary side of painting: ‘No life is more shocking to me than sitting motionless like a petrified gorilla as to my body and limbs hour after hour—my hand meanwhile, peck peck pecking at billions of little dots and lines, while my mind is fretting and fuming through every moment of the weary day’s work.’

He craves for movement as though his curiously active mind needed the companionship of an active body, for ‘after all one isn’t a potato’, so perhaps it is better ‘to run about continually like an ant’. It was nothing for him even when past his prime to walk fifteen and twenty miles a day, and to do an amount of sketching as well. The trade of landscape-painter was perhaps, after all, only the excuse for those laborious journeys in Albania, Greece, Corsica, Malta, Crete, Egypt, Corfu, Switzerland, Calabria and other parts of Italy, the French Riviera, and India. There are indications that he relished travel for its own sake and was always planning jaunts to ever more distant lands. It is probable, also, that he found in travel a means of relief from that mental stress which, as we shall see, was an underlying cause of his jocularity. The craving for movement is like a chronic desire to run away from himself. ‘The more I read travels the more I want to move,’ and he playfully invited his friend Fortescue to go with him to ‘New Zealand, Tasmania and Lake Tchad’. As he grew older he believed that a sedentary life, after moving about as he had done for more than half a century, would ‘infallibly finish’ him ‘off suddenly’.