Refusing to Preach: The Book of Nonsense

Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” but the father of nonsense was far more than a poet. He was a naturalist, a brilliant landscape painter, an experimental travel writer, and an accomplished composer. In Inventing Edward Lear, Sara Lodge presents the fullest account yet of Lear’s passionate engagement in the intellectual, social, and cultural life of his times. Here is an excerpt looking at The Book of Nonsense.

Lear’s A Book of Nonsense (1846) is delightful and groundbreaking for many reasons, but the most obvious to a Victorian child must have been the fact that it eschews didacticism. It is difficult to convey how unusual this made it in a period when literature for children was almost inevitably associated with learning, and usually with moral sentiment. James Orchard Halliwell complained in 1849 that children’s books were dominated by ‘the present cold, unimaginative, — I had almost said, unnatural, — prosaic good-boy stories’. Lady Eastlake, in an 1844 survey of ‘Children’s Books’, which she considered to be already an ‘overstocked’ department of literature, remarked that ‘the one broad and general impression left with us is that of the excessive ardour for teaching which prevails throughout’. William Lisle Bowles’s The Little Villager’s Verse Book; Consisting of Short Verses for Children to Learn by Heart (1837) was typical of early nineteenth-century poetry books for children in using insects to inculcate the lessons of industry and contentment: the busy bee scorns the idle butterfly. In ‘The Path of Life’ the child is encouraged to learn and repeat the lines:

Oh, Lord, — in sickness and in health, To every lot resigned —
Grant me before all worldly wealth, A meek and thankful mind.

To a modern reader, it is striking how often in these books such lessons are extended not only to children but also to the labouring class. Another poem in the same collection, ‘Old Labourer’, inculcates the virtues of gratitude, humility and ‘murmuring not’ at one’s honest toil. Books of grammar, punctuation and elocution also associated reading with the learning of moderation and self-control: Punctuation Personified was, suggestively, taught by a character called Mr Stops. Sara Coleridge’s Pretty Lessons in Verse, for Good Children (1845) tells the story of ‘The Boy at Would Rather Be Naughty than Good’, who prefers to walk in a wood rather than say his lesson. He reforms, abandoning ‘ridiculous raving and rant,/I will and I won’t and I shall and I shan’t’. It is as if the forbidden ‘wood’ represents the child’s indulgence of self-will (what he ‘would’). He must learn to retrain and re- strain his will, to absorb the lesson of social duty and compliance.

Against this background, Lear’s headstrong and wayward characters who will and won’t and shall and shan’t, leap off the page like genies escaping from a bottle. Everywhere, it seems, from Quebec to Tartary, Melrose to Moldavia, the world is full of people whose feelings and behaviour are so strange and excessive that they can’t be contained. The fact that some are ‘young persons’ who ought to submit to discipline but the majority are ‘old persons’ who ought to set an example makes their perversity all the more delightful. The man of Bangor has a face distorted with anger; the lady of Russia’s screams are so extreme that no one can hush her. Whether they are standing on one leg reading Homer, dancing jigs while eating figs or committing suicide by jumping into the river, these persons are the largest figures in their own dramas, the most spectacular ids on the block. Embodying the unruliness and compulsiveness of desire, they take the very notion of the exemplary (the figure who represents a place) and turn it into a blackly comic celebration of oddity, where normality has no place at all.

Most books for children in the early years of the nineteenth century were small, and many were tiny; illustrations, being expensive, were usually rationed and often rudimentary. The freedom and largesse of Lear’s Book of Nonsense lie therefore not only in the rhymes but in the layout. The original book was not a miniature duodecimo but an oblong octavo (215mm long by 145mm tall) in two volumes. Since Lear, like Blake, designed, drew and ‘arranged’ both drawings and text, he was able to control the relationship between them. Each limerick has a double-page spread to itself, and the large, active pictures with their bold and free use of line dominate the text rather than remaining subservient to it: bodies throw their limbs out left and right, jumping stiles, swallowing rabbits, walking on tiptoe and even splitting in two. Bodies, indeed, are front and centre of each story: a celebration of physical energy in characters immune to corporeal shame. Lear’s first limericks had been created as comic performances in real time. The Book of Nonsense retains that sense of surprise. The form of the limerick is like a box. It may be arranged over three lines (as in the first edition of A Book of Nonsense) or four lines (as in More Nonsense) or five lines, but the repeated pattern has symmetry. Out of that box jumps a theatrical succession of new and outrageous acts. ere is pleasure in the contrast between the predictability of the form and the capriciousness of the contents.

Early twentieth-century critics, such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, were inclined to read Lear’s limericks as an allegory of conflict between the individual and society. ‘They’ (the crowd) in the interwar years took on the sinister guise of willing executioners, ‘sober citizens in bowler hats’ of the kind who smashed the noncompliant. This is a powerful reading, darkened by its historical moment. It is, however, perhaps equally important to note that Lear’s limericks refuse spiritual ends or moral consequences. The Book of Nonsense, unlike, say, the book of Job, makes no claim to admonition. On the contrary, it suggests that more often than not people do what they want and that those desires constitute a litany of perversity. These are nonconformist narratives that revel in difference, eccentricity and disregard for prevailing hierarchies. The ‘provoking’ Young Lady of Parma, whose conduct grew calmer and calmer, responds with ‘Hum’ when people ask if she’s dumb. The lady of Peru bakes her husband in the oven, in a ‘mistake’ that the smiling illustration reveals as outrageously intentional.

Lear’s religious mores were founded on ideas of tolerance towards all his ‘fellow humanbeans’ (beans suggests the fundamental similarity of all people, like peas in a pod). He could, however, as he recognised, also be ‘intolerant’; ironically, the forms of strict Anglican worship were among those things most likely to make him aggressive and intemperate. Lear’s limericks allow the reader to experience both tolerance and intolerance. We take the side of the willful and the weird, discovering in them a wild individualism that animates us all; but we can also laugh and gasp at their absurd antics, relishing the physical discomforts that often attend their actions. In this respect the limerick is rather like the pun, which Victorians (including Lear) enjoyed precisely because it acted out a dialogue between pleasure and ‘badness’, the ‘letting’ of a double meaning (like a fart) that could be acknowledged as both socially inappropriate and riotously funny. In one limerick a censorious beadle or church officer puts the ‘bad old man’ of Cheadle in the stocks; in another, a beadle/beetle has run up the neck of the old man of Quebec, who declares that he will slay him with a needle. If the beadle is the social conscience who polices our behaviour, then he is sometimes on the front foot but mostly on the back foot. See him run.

Lear did not invent the limerick. He copied the form from a couple of small books for children that were popular in the 1820s, The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women (1820), and Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen (1821). Some other limerick books published in the 1820s maintain a didactic element; A Peep at the Geography of Europe (circa 1824) highlights the capital cities mentioned in each limerick so that children can learn them. Lear’s limericks do not. The Spectator wryly drew attention to this feature by imagining a ‘mock-examination’ on Lear’s limericks in which candidates were asked, among other questions, ‘What do you gather from a study of Mr. Lear’s works to have been the prevalent characteristics of the inhabitants of Gretna, Prague, Thermopylae, Wick, and Hong Kong?’ Its playful eight-question anticatechism suggests how much adults, as well as children, enjoyed the limericks’ resistance to the idea of forcing the reader to learn facts.

It is interesting to compare Lear’s limericks with other contemporary examples of the form: his exhibit a freedom, both in their illustrations and in their outlook, that is nimbler and more buoyant. Lear drew his ‘nonsenses’ remarkably fast. Although he returned to them and perfected his books with a critical eye for detail, the confident speed of his line is part of the animated impulsiveness that makes his cartoons so successful. Among the collections that Lear learned from, several limericks do make a moral or social judgement on their eccentric protagonists. In The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, the women are implicitly criticised for being stingy, crosstempered and vain. The Old Woman of Croydon ‘to look young . . . affected the Hoyden / And would jump and would skip, / Till she put out her hip;/Alas poor Old Woman of Croydon’. Another limerick in the same volume sneers at an ‘Old Woman at Lynn, / Whose Nose very near touch’d her chin’, cattily suggesting ‘You may easy suppose,/She had plenty of Beaux;/ is charming Old Woman of Lynn’. In a third limerick, a loquacious ‘Woman at Glos’ter’ pays two guineas for a parrot, ‘but his tongue never ceasing, / Was vastly displeasing, / To the talkative Woman of Glos’ter’. The garrulous parrot — imitating her as parrots do — serves her right. The volume closes with the improving moral example of an ‘Old Woman at Leeds/Who spent all her time in good deeds,/She work’d for the Poor/Till her fingers were sore; / is pious Old Woman of Leeds’.

By contrast, Lear’s limericks, promiscuously mixing young and old persons of both sexes, present characters neither as commendable nor as cautionary. His young lady ‘whose nose was so long that it reached to her toes’ simply hires an old lady to carry it for her. The resourceful young lady ‘whose chin resembled the point of a pin’ has it sharpened, purchases a harp, and plays tunes with it. These wacky characters allow us to imagine what it might be like to live if one were, even momentarily, oblivious to social judgement; it is no accident that many of them consort with animals and birds, whom they come to resemble. Lear borrows from The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women the theme of ‘an old lady of Leeds,/Who was always a’ doing good deeds’, but Lear’s old lady ‘sate on some rocks with her feet in a box,/And her neck was surrounded by beads’. This comes close to parody. The do-gooder, perhaps wearing her rosary as a necklace, turns out to be just as odd, confined and antisocial in her private life as everyone else. In a later version, Lear has the lady of Leeds sit on a stool and eat gooseberry fool. Such antics must have been even more amusing and surprising to the original readers of his nonsense books — like the three young men Lear encountered at the offices of Bush, his publisher-bookseller, who were reading the limericks and falling about with laughter. Among the energetic nonconformists Lear added to the 1861 edition of his Book of Nonsense is the ‘Old Man in a pew’, who tears his waistcoat in pieces to give to his nieces. Whether the pew is in a church or not, the Old Man’s free-spirited behaviour rides a nice line between the kind of generosity that echoes Christian values (for example, St Martin giving his cloak to a beggar) and a tendency to violence and public undress that might be regarded as profane. Here is the benevolence that characterises so much of Lear’s poetry, yet here also is a tendency to acts of sudden destruction that is equally characteristic. An impulsive and potentially antisocial vehemence is the flip side of tolerance, and it often strikes Lear amongst the crowds and compulsions of church. It gives his work edge. Such undress will recur, in a more radical form, in his poem ‘ The New Vestments’.