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. When the little children cry, they cry dust and not tears. There is some water in the sea, but not much:—all the wet nurses cease to be so immediately on arriving:—Dryden is the only book read—the neighbourhood abounds with Dryads and Hammer-dryads: and weterinary surgeons are quite unknown.’
A trip to the Ionian Islands induced a punning declension of archipelago: ‘v.a. Archipelago, P. Archipelament, P.P. Archipelagore.’ In the same manner he has ‘German, Gerwomen and Gerchildren’, and such constructions as ‘geraffino’ for a young Giraffe, and ‘hippo-potamice’ as an improved plural for hippopotamus.
Elsewhere he performs a different trick with an undertone of Learian irony:
‘I went into the city to-day; to put the £125 I got for the ‘Book of Nonsense’ into the funds. It is doubtless a very unusual thing for an artist to put by money, for the whole way from Temple Bar to the Bank was crowded with carriages and people—so immense a sensation did this occurrence make. And all the way back it was the same, which was very gratifying.’
14
But as he is not content with being a punster, he quickly enters into the fun of any verbal trick new or old, and when Charles Dickens popularises Wellerisms, Lear becomes an easy convert to that once fashionable kind of humour: ‘On the whole, as the morbid and mucilaginous monkey said when he climbed up to the top of the Palm-tree and found no fruit there, one can’t depend upon dates.’ The vocabulary of Sam Weller is also exploited in ‘viddy’ for ‘widow’, and ‘wurbl’ for ‘verbal’, and among other Cockneyisms such mispronunciations as ‘chimbly’ (chimney) and ‘suddingly’, recall Mrs. Gamp.
Phonetic spelling plays a considerable part in many of his nonsense words, and often a complete effect is obtained by this process as in ‘yott’ (yacht), ‘rox’ (rocks), ‘korn’ (corn), and ‘toppix’ (topics). He is better, however, in distortions like ‘buzzim’ (bosom), ‘omejutly’ (immediately), ‘pollygise’ (apologise), ‘spongetaneous (spontaneous), ‘mewtshool’ (mutual), ‘gnoat’ (note), ‘fizzicle’ (physical), ‘fizziognomy’ (physiognomy), and ‘phibs’ (fibs).
He weds the ‘n’ or ‘an’ with the next word, as ‘a narmchair’, ‘a nemptystummuk’, ‘a noppertunity’, ‘sill kankerchief’, and indulges in the superfluous aspirate, as ‘hempty’. Sometimes he translates whole sentences into nonsense-spelling, as ‘I gnoo how bizzy u were’, or ‘witch fax I only came at granuously’, or ‘phits of coffin’ or ‘sombod a nokking at the dolorous door’, or ‘vorx of hart’, and reports that he has ‘become like a sparry in the pilderpips and a pemmican on the housetops’, which reads like an excerpt from Finnegans Wake! He likes an absurdity such as ‘sufficient unto the day is the weevil thereof’, and in ‘Mary Squeen of Cots’ he anticipates the verbal inversion known later as a Spoonerism. The fun reaches a climax when inflation is added to distortion and his imagination bodies forth a portmanteau-word of no less than thirty-one letters like splendidophorophero-stiphongious, to express his satisfaction with a dinner-party.
It is none of these verbal adventures, however, that reveal Edward Lear at his best as a word-maker. In the examples I have given he is doing little more than amusing himself and his friends by following a fashion of the moment for that sort of thing, although his success indicates both a natural gift for word-building and a need for that kind of expression. His inventiveness is extraordinary and what nearly always begins as fun often ends in an extension of the boundaries of expression. His imagination is always at its best when it has some concrete form or idea for its objective. This is proved by the nomenclature of his nonsense creatures. In this realm he has only one peer—Lewis Carroll. But where the creator of Alice has some half dozen masterpieces to his credit such as the Jabberwock, Bandersnatch, Snark and Boojum, Lear has a whole zooful of distinguished creatures many of which, like the Pobble and the Quangle Wangle, have become common objects of the popular imagination.
15
This busy and distracted man wrote and illustrated, or illustrated for others, a score of volumes, and left in manuscript many more, including diaries, letters and, as he called them, ‘nonsenses’. In addition, his landscapes in oil and water-colours, his realistic representations of parrots and other creatures, and his masterly nonsense drawings in black-and-white, which often anticipate Phil May’s style and economy of line, would fill a fair-sized gallery; and he had some considerable fame among his large circle of friends as a composer of songs, particularly with Tennyson’s words, which he would render with great expression in a thin tenor voice, often reducing his select audiences to tears.
16
This collection of the Nonsense of Edward Lear forms a complete reproduction of the four volumes of nonsense published during the author’s lifetime, together with a few hitherto unpublished pieces included in the selection called Nonsense Songs and Stories, edited by Sir Edward Strachey, in 1895. In this collection there appeared for the first time the characteristic self-portrait in verse reproduced in the present volume.
I was at first tempted to re-arrange the various items in some sort of classification, but remembering that this collection is for entertainment I decided to follow the Lear tradition by arranging the sections in chronological order. The reader may thus roam about and pick and choose at will—which, after all, is the pleasantest way to know Mr. Lear. Another advantage of this method is that all the illustrations are placed where Lear intended them, and as integral
