Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009
There Once Was an Artist Called Lear...
By Brad Leithauser
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS REVIEW
Edward Lear in Albania: Journals of a Landscape Painter in the Balkans
by Edward Lear, edited by Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie, with a preface by Vivien Noakes
I.B. Tauris, 225 pp., $39.50
Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer
by Vivien Noakes
Houghton Mifflin, 359 pp. (1969)
The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense
by Edward Lear, edited by Vivien Noakes
Penguin, 566 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Nonsense Botany and Nonsense Alphabets
by Edward Lear
University of Chicago Press, 144 pp., $29.95
Nonsense Songs and Stories
by Edward Lear
University of Chicago Press, 128 pp., $29.95
Nineteen children preceded him into a world that he could never quite take seriously but that hurt and tormented him all the same. The great writer of nonsense poetry Edward Lear, born in 1812, was the twentieth of twenty-one children. The Lear household was prosperous, despite its slew of dependents. It was located in Highgate, in those days a charming rural village not yet swallowed up by London. Edward's father was a stockbroker. His mother, it seems safe to say, had her hands full with the children.
Review, 3599 words
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