'My name is Nicholas Parsons
'and I've loved Edward Lear since I was a child.
'Nowadays, I do a whole show devoted to him
'and his wonderful, distinctive nonsense verse.'
Have you ever heard of someone called Edward Lear?
He wrote all these nonsense poems and stories about 150 years ago.
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany And Alphabets
is the volume of poetry that first introduced us
to the delightfully illustrated Owl And The Pussycat.
Lear is at the beginning of that movement in children's literature,
which is towards pleasure, which is towards colour,
towards bigger illustrations.
The Owl And The Pussycat
is one of the most famous poems in the English language
and in 2014, it was voted the nation's number one favourite.
"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."
He always has been highly regarded as a poet's poet,
admired by TS Eliot, or WH Auden.
He touches poetry and culture and comedy in lots and lots of places.
'I want to explore what lies behind the nation's favourite poem
'and the connection in which it appeared.'
They are quite moving in many ways and emotionally engaging
and very obvious in immediate ways.
That's the thing I find, find most appealing.
"The owl looked up to the stars above and he sang to a small guitar,
"O, lovely pussy, O, pussy, my love,
"what a beautiful pussy you are, you are.
"What a beautiful pussy you are.
Above all, I want to understand the restless,
complicated character that gave us these poems
and there's no better place to start than here,
in this beautiful, tattered old book.
This is a first edition of Edward Lear's
famous Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany And Alphabets.
"Phattifacia stupenda."
I feel rather privileged to be holding this, because to me,
this is something very, very special.
'Nonsense Songs was first published in 1871,
'an unusually eclectic
'collection of poetry, stories, recipes and drawings.'
We've got the nonsense botany here.
'The book even contains a set of illustrated alphabets.'
"A was once an apple pie, pidy, pidy, widy, tidy...
"Nice insidy apple pie!"
NICHOLAS LAUGHS
'Nonsense, as a genre, celebrates the whimsical and nonsensical,
'using songs and poetry full of invented words
'and impossible characters
'and stories to parody the rules of literature and life.'
Ah, The Owl And The Pussycat. NICHOLAS LAUGHS
And the drawing at the top of it is...gorgeous.
'No poem better illustrates the principles of nonsense
'than The Owl And The Pussycat,
'a poem celebrating the impossible love between two animals
'who are natural enemies.'
"Pussy said to the owl,
"You elegant fowl.
"How charmingly sweet you sing.
"O, let us be married too long we have tarried,
"but what shall we do for a ring?"
"They sailed away for a year and a day
"to the land where the Bong Tree grows
"and there in a wood, a Piggy-wig stood
"with a ring and the end of his nose, his nose,
"with a ring at the end of his nose."
We have a poem there that is about marriage,
it's become a popular poem to be read at weddings,
but it's also a, sort of a poem about escape.
It's full of impossibila
this is an owl and a pussycat
two species that are somehow incompatible, but who fall in love.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?
"Said the piggy, I will.
"So they took it away and were married next day
"by the turkey who lives on the hill.
"They dined on mince and slices of quince,
"which they ate with a runcible spoon
"and then hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
"they danced by the light of the moon,
"the moon,
"they danced...
"by the light of the moon."
APPLAUSE
'In 2012, the celebrated children's author, Julia Donaldson,
'wrote a sequel to The Owl And The Pussycat,
'walking in Lear's poetic footsteps,
'to recreate the ingredients of the original poem.'
She discovered that the key to success
was to imitate the poem's hypnotic and rhythmic structure,
one that Lear in turn imitated
from the verse of the romantic poets of the day.
I had such fun doing it. You know, I reread all the poems
and I loved the metre of The Owl And The Pussycat,
so I stuck to that metre. Oh, yes.
The same sort of sad loveliness that you get in some,
you know, slow movements of classical music... Yes.
..and there is certainly a sort of melancholy lilt,
but that's what I love about Lear.
If you're going to take on the challenge
of extending some other writer's poem,
a poem which is actually a classic,
how do you get into the mind of that
in order to be faithful to the... original?
It is a nonsense language, it's the alliteration, assonance,
the sound of the words,
the nonsense words and the places,
the sense of a quest, I think, cos so many Lear poems are about...
a rather mad, crazy journey and the people,
the landlubbers are saying, don't, don't go, you're mad.
So, shall I just read a bit from... Yes, please do. OK.
"The owl and the pussycat sailed away in a beautiful blue balloon.
"They took some jam and a honey roast ham,
"which they ate with their runcible spoon.
"They sought the ring from autumn till spring
"till they came to the Chankly Bore
"and there stood the crow, with his head hanging low,
"shedding tears on the silvery shore.
"The shore, the shore,
"shedding tears on the silvery shore."
"Alas and alack, said that bird so black,
"tis I who have caused your woes.
"I fear I have sold your ring of gold,
"to the Pobble who has no toes." NICHOLAS LAUGHS
So, the Pobble has the ring,
but they feel sorry for him because he's got no toes... I know...
..he's fallen in love with the ring, so they have to find something
to swap for the ring so they can get their ring back...
Do you know, that's so clever.
It's not only beautiful and Lear-like, but to take on the,
the style and mantle,
it's pure Lear and you've done it, it's wonderful.
And I did, I wrote a happy romantic ending to mime as well... Yes.
In fact, he wrote his own sequel to The Owl And The Pussycat,
or he started writing one... Mm-hm. ..which was really sad,
the pussycat falls out of a tree
and the owl goes demented with grief
and their children, a half-owl and a half-pussycat,
which sounds a bit gruesome,
so, my sequel comes before that all happened. Mm.
"Our mother died long years ago.
"She was a lovely cat.
"Her tail was five feet long and grey with stripes, but what of that?
"Our owly father long was ill from sorrow and surprise,
"but with the feathers of his tail, he wiped his weeping eyes."
'There's a fine line in all of Lear's poetry, between joy
'and melancholy,
'perhaps because his own childhood
'was marked with sadness and difficulty.'
In 1817, when Lear was only five years of age,
his father was thrown into a debtors' prison.
Two of his sisters died of shock and to save money,
his mother gave him away.
But worst of all, he had epilepsy.
And at that time, epilepsy was considered
something which was akin to madness
and people didn't talk about it, in case you were put away.
So, you can see, often ill and lonely,
rejected by his mother,
Lear escaped into his own fantasy world.
Like many survivors of childhood trauma,
the adult Edward Lear found his childhood hard to leave behind.
Writing nonsense was a perfect way to stay playful and childish.
While he was able to enter into the mind of a child,
I always think he also identified with the child within the adult
and brought that aspect of them out.
One of the keys to nonsense is that the absurdity that it exposes
is the fact that we grow old, but we don't grow up.
We are still children. I suppose it's the key insight,
in a way,
of Freudian psychoanalysis, which also comes out of the 19th century.
It's the notion that actually we are still children.
Is that why I love him so much?
Because there's a child within me that I can't escape from?
Well, I think our creative selves are child selves. Hm.
'By the time he was 15,
'Edward was living with his unmarried sister, Ann'
and was looking for work.
He found an outlet for his talents in the newly-opened London Zoo,
but it wasn't as a poet that he would earn a living,
it was as an artist, drawing exotic birds here in the aviary.
It was here he developed not only his skills as an artist,
but his lifelong passion for nature.
It can be no coincidence
that his later poetry contains very few human characters.
"H was a Heron, who stood in a stream.
"The length of his neck and his legs was extreme!
"H! Long-legged heron!"
His drawings were a huge success.
He published a book of them when he was only 19,
which brought him instant recognition.
Before he was a poet, Edward Lear was in fact an illustrator
and his first illustrated book was a book of parrots,
with absolutely remarkably accurate drawings of parrots.
This was produced as a very expensive work,
with 42 plates, produced in colour lithography.
And David Attenborough, for example, considers them to be
one of the most accurate depictions of birds in the early 19th century.
So, a P for Polly has perhaps a particular resonance, I think, for Edward Lear.
"P was a polly, all red, blue and green.
"The most beautiful polly that ever was seen.
"P! Poor little Polly!"
It would be another 40 years before Lear published Nonsense Songs,
but while he was still enjoying his first creative success as an artist,
he was introduced to Edward Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby.
Stanley had a menagerie of his own
at his country seat at Knowsley near Liverpool
and Lear was invited to come and draw the animals.
It was a huge honour,
but one he accepted with mixed feelings.
So, you can imagine this young lad from the background he had
and the emotional troubles which beset him,
arriving in that long drive,
walking all the way down here,
and then coming up here
and having to go up to that door and meet the footman.
Poor man.
This is amazing,
because you know from reading about it that this is where it all happened.
The 13th Earl, who was a very...
entertaining, gregarious character, would have lots of people here,
but think of young Edward Lear, 19, 20 years of age.
It must have been quite difficult for him to enter here
and sit at the table with all these well-connected people.
But he was such a natural person, he gave out spontaneously to people,
he was, in no time at all, he was accepted and admired and loved.
Lear moved in some of the very highest circles of Victorian England
and there's a sense in which he's aware of himself
as a sort of court fool, a court jester,
who is welcomed to that kind of a table,
because he's known to be entertaining and to be funny.
And he's aware, as the best court fools are,
of the sort of...
the in-built ridiculousness and also potential melancholy
of that situation, being kind of in a lonely situation.
Lear's poetry is filled with the sense of an outsider looking in,
with the best views of society's foibles.
In Spikky Sparrow,
Lear satirises the pretensions of a social climber.
The sparrows think that if they buy new clothes
it will give them an entree into the upper classes.
"Then when so completely drest,
"back they flew and reached their nest.
"Their children cried,
"O, Ma and Pa! How truly beautiful you are!
"Said they,
"We trust that cold or pain, we shall never feel again!
"While perched on tree, or house, or steeple,
"we now shall look like other people."
There's that sense of, you know,
if only we're like other people, we'll be happy,
but of course it's completely precarious,
even as he's saying it, "perched on tree, or house, or steeple."
It's like Chekhov's gun, isn't it?
If you're perched on a steeple, you're going to fall off it.
Whilst the aristocracy of Knowsley
may have moulded him into a budding satirist,
this great house offered inspiration in another way.
It was here he first tried his hand at poetry,
but not for the adults.
Oh.
So, this...is the nursery.
It's now apparently a music room, but this is where it all began,
where Edward Lear first started writing his nonsense
to entertain lots of children,
because more than one family
would be living in these stately homes at that time.
You can just imagine the atmosphere.
He would walk in,
he'd be greeted by lots of excited voices,
shouting out from the poems they knew
and asking for other ones, looking at his drawings.
It's...
it's quite nostalgic, it's quite,
almost eerie for me to be here, because having loved Lear for years,
to think that in this very room
something that I've got to know about so well and love so much,
it all began here.
The mid-19th century,
as well as being a time of huge industrial and scientific progress,
was a time of astonishing literary invention.
Apparently from nowhere, there was an explosion of literary nonsense,
not just Lear's poetry,
but also Lewis Carroll's novel, Alice In Wonderland,
appearing within a few short years of each other.
Do you think there's any coincidence that this cult of nonsense,
which appeared around about the same time with both Alice In Wonderland
and Edward Lear, do you think there was something about that period,
that time, that produces a wealth of humorous, nonsensical verse?
One aspect I suppose is that the 19th century
is an era of systematisation. Mm-hm.
So, it's an era where there is a lot of...
taxonomy of plants and animals,
which Lear spoofs in his Nonsense Botany,
it's the era of the railways, of the creation of the police,
of the creation of the universal education system, so...
in a way, you could see nonsense
as a kind of reaction against that curriculum. Mm-hm.
Perhaps the biggest influence on Lear,
as he began to write his nonsense verse at Knowsley,
were the animals he was spending his days drawing,
that lived in the Earl of Derby's menagerie.
These were exotic creatures
that most people in England would never have seen before.
My theory is a lot of the names he came up with
are directly related to the animals that were here.
The animals in particular, not so much the birds.
But a lot of the animals came to Knowsley without scientific names.
They hadn't even been described.
So, they had their original names
from the indigenous people who lived in those countries.
This, the whiskered yarke.
The coquatoon.
My particular favourite is the jingey jonger,
and then you've got all the kangaroos,
with strange aboriginal names, like the woylie,
the narbalek and the quokka.
So, where did Edward Lear get his names from?
He got it from being round here
and then the keeper saying things like,
oh, the quagga's got out again, or, you know,
the jingey jonger just trod on my foot, or something like that.
It's bound to have had an effect on him.
"Said the Duck to the Kangaroo,
"Good gracious!
"How you hop!
"Over the fields and the water too,
"as if you never would stop!
"My life is a bore in this nasty pond
"and I long to go out in the world beyond.
"I wish I could hop like you!
"Said the Duck to the Kangaroo."
Whilst Lear's nonsense
is firmly linked to the Victorian age of discovery,
he didn't invent the genre entirely.
The real roots of English nonsense go far deeper.
There's a tradition, I think of nonsense nursery rhymes,
nonsense songs, refrains in songs of the "hey, nonny, nonny" variety
and also a tradition, I think, of, sort of...
topsy-turvy-dom and fooling,
which goes back through the fools of the Elizabethan stage
and goes back into the kinds of carnivals of fools
of the Middle Ages and back, ultimately,
into the old comedy of people like Aristophanes.
Lear takes nonsense in a new direction.
He perhaps builds on some of the ideas
that are present in earlier nonsense... Mm.
..but his nonsense is full of lyricism, of pathos,
of characters...
and it's hugely exuberant, both verbally and visually
and I think it has much more depth... Hm.
..than much nonsense writing before it.
As well as giving nonsense his own emotional depth,
Lear would bring to his poetry a pioneering visual style.
In 1846, he published his first book,
a collection of limericks called A Book Of Nonsense.
"Fantastical rhymes without reason", he called it.
He used expensive lithographic printing
as he'd done with his earlier book of parrots.
Lear's case is unique, I think,
for the 1846 edition, the first edition of A Book of Nonsense,
because he is both the author of the verse
and the creator of the illustrations so...
And this is not the case with a lot of children's books
where the author would write the text
and perhaps the illustrations would be provided afterwards.
They would be done by a commercial illustrator, for example,
and put in, not necessarily with the full approval of the author.
For its first edition,
Lear wrote under the pseudonym of Derry down Derry,
the name of an Elizabethan fool.
There was an old Derry down Derry
who loved to see little folks merry
so he made them a book
and with laughter they shook
at the fun of that Derry down Derry!
One of the things that contemporary reviewers remarked was
that it was partly the illustrations that children so loved
because so many 19th-century books were not illustrated.
Often, they were really quite small. Yes, you've got some there.
So, you know, this is an example of a book from the 1820s.
The English Reading Book in Verse, 1822,
and it's really quite tiny, which, of course, in a sense,
is suited to small fingers of children
but, at the same time, it's not very rewarding.
The type is very small and we have, you know,
poems which are called things like Meekness.
You know, many of them are quite evangelical
in telling children how they should feel,
whereas, if you look at...
This is a later addition of Lear's Book of Nonsense.
You have this wonderful acreage of space.
There's a tremendous exuberance of line, where...
Here we have the women who is supposedly baking her husband
by mistake in a stove,
but we can tell from her expression
that it is actually far from accidental.
'I'm interested in that relationship Lear creates
'between image and text...
'..so I've come to visit Ralph Steadman,
'a modern-day master of cartoons and caricature.'
This is your studio! This is where it all happens.
Oh, and the piggy-wig here. It's lovely.
Ralph has an interesting take on Lear
and believes that the illustrations are so crucial to his work
that he must have drawn them before he wrote the poetry.
I'm certain he experimented with his curiosity first, visually.
Did a drawing. Did a drawing and then thought,
"What is that?" You know, "Oh, it's..." A jumbly. A jumbly. Yes.
Wittgenstein said, the... German philosopher, wasn't it?
The only thing of value is the thing you cannot say
but, if you can see it,
wow, you see it immediately.
That is a really interesting thing to think about.
Ralph thinks his anarchic creative process is similar to Lear's,
letting his feelings and thoughts flow
from when the first inkblot hits the page.
Ah! Oh, look at that.
I can see a face already there. A mouth.
He thinks the only way to persuade me is to take me out of my comfort zone,
a man of words,
and get my hands dirty.
This is an old-fashioned pen. Yes.
Don't you want to do it with a... I don't know how to. I'll have to...
You're going to have a go now. So what do you want me to do?
Just draw something? Draw something as part of that drawing.
What? Add to it? Add to it, yes.
This is how Lear would have worked. Yes, he would have done.
What he saw from starting to do drawings...
To draw something down.
Our combined effort has produced a drawing
that is definitely saying something,
though I'm not sure what.
Oh, that's a tongue, isn't it?
Yes. Oh, yes.
P is for Parstead,
a funny bird-y word.
Half Parsons, Half Steadman.
A nonsensical bird.
P is for Parstead.
This is a genuine Parstead.
It's a bastard.
It's a Parstead bastard.
It's past being a bastard.
It's a bastard Parstead. Yes.
So, which came first - the Parstead or the egg?
The drawing or the poetry?
We may never know
but what we can be sure of is how completely integral
Lear's drawings are to his verse.
The pictures and the poems are hand in glove in Lear.
They always are.
And he thought of his works as picture-poems
so, if you go to Edward Lear's diary
and you go to the day on which he composed The Owl and the Pussycat,
the entry says, "Went to visit the Simmons
"with a picture-poem for little Janet.
He wrote The Owl and the Pussycat for Janet Simmons,
the daughter of the writer John Altington Simmons.
But what interests me is that,
when he records writing The Owl and the Pussycat,
he describes it as a picture-poem, hyphenated.
They go together.
I mean, I think there is a sort of elements to that
where he's kind of capturing
the Victorian engagement with the visual imagination.
He's kind of combining all the senses
so both the sound of the poems
and the visual layout and the illustrations.
I guess, in a sense, he's the first sort of multimedia poet in that way
and that's the sort of most enduring aspect of his legacy.
Lear was living in self-imposed exile as a painter in Italy
when Nonsense Songs was published.
he always dismissed his writing, which he called "Bosh,"
but the critics thought otherwise.
Some of the responses are quite interesting
from a modern point of view.
So, for example, one of the critics in the Spectator noticed
that it's the female cat who proposes to the male owl,
in the true spirit of women's rights, says the reviewer.
So there's something, you know,
which is actually quite unconventional about these poems
that, you know, nowadays, they're so familiar,
particularly The Owl and the Pussycat,
but there's a spirit of liberty about them,
which I think is part of what we love
and what contemporaries responded to, as well.
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets is now out of print
but Lear's most popular poems have lasted in anthologies ever since,
as has his pioneering nonsensical spirit,
which has been admired and reincarnated
in the work of many other writers to this day.
You can find Lear influencing poets like TS Eliot, WH Auden
and also people like Spike Milligan, Monty Python,
so I think he touches poetry and culture and comedy
in lots and lots of places.
In 1886, Edward Lear wrote his last ever nonsense poem,
Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly.
He could've been writing his own epitaph
it so clearly sums up the essence of his life,
his love of nature and travel,
but his deep feelings at being an outsider and of never fitting in.
On a little heap of barley,
died my aged uncle Arly
and they buried him one night
close beside the leafy thicket.
There his hat and railway ticket,
there his ever faithful cricket.
But his shoes were far too tight.
Well, if you've enjoyed this programme about Edward Lear
and his nonsense songs and stories and verse and so forth,
and also enjoy the other books in this series,
then go to...
..and follow the link to the Open University.