He had a bad winter in 1878 at San Remo, having sold but one drawing for £7, and would have ‘come to grief’ had it not been for two friends who bought some of his smaller oil paintings. In addition to these fluctuations in turnover, he suffers from the failure of his publisher, and his troubles are increased when the tenants of his villa at San Remo abscond owing him nearly £100.

11

He broods less upon these material worries than upon the evanescence of life and of all those things, friendship and the beauty of the earth, which are his real attachments. He is capable of consoling himself for the shortage of material possessions with a quip, but his acute sense of the shortage of time is not so easily assuaged. He attempts to soothe his temporal anxieties by resort to those apologetics which are common to all who are sensitive to evanescence. ‘The fact is,’ he argues, ‘time is all nonsense,’ and he inclines to leave it at that, resolving the incomprehensible by invincible pursuit of his chosen craft. His pictures give permanence to memories and impression and thus create a desirable illusion of timelessness. Yet the possession of a keen sense of fact will not permit him to be more than temporarily soothed by such arguments. He cannot bluff himself. He knows he is walking in the ‘dusty twilight of the incomprehensible’ and instinctively seeks to escape through the door of nonsense. ‘I wish I were an egg and going to be hatched,’ he sighs, summing up his desire for Nirvana.

12

Lear’s nonsense is no mere tissue of quips and jokes. It is a thing in itself in a world of its own, with its own physiography and natural history; a world in which the nature of things has been changed, whilst retaining its own logical and consistent idiom. He expresses a nonsensical condition which is peculiar to himself and necessary to his serenity, and it may be that this fantastic world gratifies for him a desire which we all share to some extent, probably more than we are willing to admit, and which he seems to share, by anticipation, with the surrealists of our own time.

The authentic brand of nonsense is rarely absent from his letters, if no more than the fantastic spelling of a word. The art perfected in the Nonsense Books is here seen in the rough. It is not surprising, for instance, that the far-fetched hope of selling his Tennyson illustrations for the large sum of £18,000 should set him off. In that unlikely event, he will buy a ‘chocolate coloured carriage speckled with gold, driven by a coachman in green vestments and silver spectacles wherein sitting on a lofty cushion composed of muffins and volumes of the Apocrypha’, he will ‘disport himself all about the London parks to the general satisfaction of all pious people, and the particular joy of Chichester, Lord Carlingford and his affectionate friend Edward Lear’. Here we have nonsense combined with humour, and there are many similar passages in the letters. In one of them he threatens to go to Darjeeling or Para and ‘silently subsist on Parrot Pudding and Lizard Lozenges in chubbly contentment’. Lear is not a good sailor and once he writes from Folkestone that if the sea is rough he will hire, somewhat inconsistently, ‘a pussilanimouse porpoise, and cross on his bak’. He records that one of his frequent coughs shakes off one of his toes, ‘2 teeth and 3 whiskers,’ and he is so irritated by the doctor’s concern that he orders ‘a baked Barometer for dinner and 2 Thermometers stewed in treacle for supper’.

15

Lear is an adept at the game of monkeying with words. Like Rabelais and Swift and Joyce he has a genius for fantastic verbal adventures, but often they do little more than play tricks with established spelling. The more familiar the words the more he is tempted to tamper with them. The habit is ingrained, the result not alone of a natural love of the whimsical and an indomitable sense of fun, but it is also, as he himself is aware, an instinctive effort to bridge a gap between idea and expression. ‘Proper and exact “epithets” always were impossible to me,’ he says, ‘as my thoughts are ever in advance of my words.’ And here also we may discover a key to his nonsense, or ‘nonsenses’, as he calls them, which are perhaps ahead of rather than behind his senses.

In the first of his published letters to Fortescue, whom he likes to address as ‘40scue’, he recounts the names of the distinguished foreigners at Rome, in 1848, as: ‘Madame Pul-itz-neck-off and Count Bigenouf—Baron Polysuky, and Mons. Pig.’ He is afraid to stand near the door, lest the announced names should make him grin. In his letters as well as his books he rattles off strings of queer examples with familiar gusto. A projected journey to Egypt makes him ‘quite crazy about Memphis and On and Isis and crocodiles and ophthalmia and nubians and simoons and sorcerers and sphingidos’.

It is natural that Lear should have fallen, as we should now believe, into the then widespread vogue of punning. But he is no slavish imitator of Lamb and Hood. Even his puns have a style of their own which often trips over the boundaries of humour into his own rightful realm of nonsense. Here is an example from a letter of 1865:

‘This place (Nice) is so wonderfully dry that nothing can be kept moist. I never was in so dry a place in all my life.