Volume 24, Number 16 · October 13, 1977
Lear's Inner Landscape
By V.S. Pritchett
Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear
by Thomas Byrom
Dutton, 256 pp., $12.95
In the course of his ingenious book on the nonsense poems and cartoons of Edward Lear, Mr. Byrom remarks on the number of distinguished Victorian Englishmen who were manic depressives and who put on a childish mask. There is an extraordinary amount of childish and even cruel or boisterous fantasy in the period, in Carroll, in Gilbert, and in other unremorseful satirical ballad writers, and I feared that Mr. Byrom would be drawn into an academic study of the influences of the German grotesque, the social' pressures of the bourgeois public, the class system, and on to Freudian speculations which the literature of Nonsense seems inevitably to evoke. I am glad to say that, having noted such matters, he at once leaves them to the laborious bores of criticism, and with diffidence, delicacy, and sensibility has surmised what the private impulses of the poet were.
Review, 2182 words
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