Edward Lear
A nonsensical Victorian-era Englishman
Poetry figured in my early literature education
The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money, wrapped up in a five pound note…
This was one of the first poems I was exposed to as a young child as I was learning the power of words to delight. We recited it as a class when learning to read at 5 or 6 years old. I can’t remember the rest of the poem but those lines from the opening stanza still bring a smile to my face.
Edward Lear, as well as being an accomplished artist wrote The Owl and the Pussycat
I challenge you to show me any five year old child who doesn’t smile at the image of a those 2 protagonists in a boat
Lear was born in London in 1812. As an artist, he is perhaps best known for his work as an ornithological draughtsman for the Zoological Society. His first book was published in 1830, and included the parrot illustration above. Lear is acknowledged as being the first to draw from live birds rather than skins, and many compare his work to that of John James Audubon
In 1832, Lear entered the service of The Earl of Derby who had his own private menagerie, where he produced illustrations of Derby’s birds and animals. Later in life, he also illustrated some of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poems
His 1846 book was a collection of 109 delightfully nonsensical limericks, and Lear popularized what has become know as the genre of literary nonsense
The limerick has emerged to be a popular (especially with children) poetic form, with a standard structure, meter and the A-A-B-B A rhyming pattern, as in the example below (author unknown):
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical
I was delighted to learn recently of Fred Hornaday, the self-proclaimed King of Limericks whose web site greets us with a delightful proclamation in the troubling times of 2023:
There’s a method for healing creation
For the illness afflicting the nation
If hate is the cancer
Then I have the answer
Through Lim’ricks I offer salvation
The Owl & the Pussycat was written for the Earl of Derby’s children as a song, and Lear, wearing his musician’s hat, often accompanied his literary works in private social gatherings, playing the piano, flute, accordion or guitar. It seems fitting to close with the final lines