It is distressing that Morton Cohen seems to care so little for Sylvie and Bruno, Dodgson’s parable of love and forgiveness. It is here that he is closest to his friend George MacDonald, whose Phantastes was written as a ‘fairy-tale for adults.’ When (in the introduction to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded) he says that he has imagined a possible psychical state in which a human being ‘might sometimes become conscious of what goes on in the fairy world, by actual transference of their immaterial essence,’ he is talking about something of the greatest importance to him. It is not enough to say, as Cohen does, that ‘Charles retreated inward when he should have travelled outward.’
Cohen, however, may well think that after thirty years’ patient study of the material he has earned the right to his own interpretations. Certainly he has avoided ‘the eccentric readings [that], while they may amuse, do not really bring us any closer to understanding the work,’ although, judging from his true grit as a biographer, he has probably read them all. The Red King’s Dream is yet another one. Here the authors, Jo Elwyn Jones and J. Francis Gladstone, set out with the apparent advantage of living at Hawarden Castle, a few hundred yards from the Gladstone Library at St Deiniol’s. Their quest seems to have started there, with a strange conviction that, in Tenniel’s Wonderland illustration, the Lion is Disraeli and the Unicorn (in spite of his unmistakable goatee beard) is Gladstone. Tenniel was a political cartoonist, therefore the whole book must be a contemporary satire. (Dodgson, in fact, chose Tenniel not because of his work for Punch, but because the animals were so good in his Aesop’s Fables.) The White Knight must be Tennyson, and Tennyson’s two sons (not twins) must be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In default of other evidence, an anagram will do. For instance, it is decided that the Mad Hatter is Charles Kingsley, so that the Hare must be his brother Henry: the Hare’s reply, ‘It was the best butter,’ is an anagram (though unfortunately it isn’t quite) of The Water Babies. But ‘we still did not know who the Dormouse could be…we could not fit him into the Kingsley coterie.’ It is anybody’s guess, but fit in he must, and he turns out to be F. D. Maurice, while Dean Stanley is the Cheshire cat, and Millais, because of his commercial success, is the Lobster who is baked too brown. And so on, faster and faster.
The only compensation is that the authors seem to be enjoying themselves so much. In this way at least their research is part of what Dodgson called ‘those stores of healthy and innocent amusement that are laid up in books for the children that I love so well.’
Times Literary Supplement, 1995
Old Foss and Friend
Edward Lear: A Biography, by Peter Levi
Edward Lear (1812—1888) made his reputation as a water-colourist after almost no training, and invented himself as an Old Man with a Beard. He is a very attractive example of Victorian self-help. It was not an easy life, of course. English humorists are all depressive, and Lear suffered to the very end from ‘fits of the morbids.’
Vivien Noakes’s Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968), her book on his painting, and her catalogue for the 1985 Exhibition are classics. Peter Levi acknowledges her work without reserve. It has left him free to write an eccentric, affectionate biography, and to indulge himself as well as his subject. Lear was born in Holloway in 1812, the youngest of twenty-one children. When he was four, his father, a stockbroker, was declared bankrupt. Edward had perhaps five years at school and scarcely knew some of his family. He was lucky that his much older sister Anne looked after him tenderly, and he never had to go out to work as a clerk. He was unlucky in having poor sight until he was given spectacles, everything he saw was ‘formed into a horror’, in being epileptic and asthmatic, and in having (at the age of ten) been put through an experience by a brother and a cousin that he remembered as ‘the greatest evil done to me in life excepting that done by C.’ Who was ‘C’? Lear kept diaries, but later destroyed all of them up to the year 1858.
By the time he was sixteen, he was ‘drawing for bread and cheese,’ then made a serious start as a bird painter, and was summoned to Knowsley by the old twelfth Earl of Derby to draw the menagerie. Another benefactor, Lord Egremont, asked him: ‘But where is all this going to lead to, Mr Lear?’ It led to the life of a wanderer, or rather of a voluntary exile. In 1837, Lord Derby (and others) paid his passage to Rome. Lear got himself an attic in the via del Babuino, and began to learn Italian. What was to be drawn was beyond anything he could have imagined, not the antiquities, but the views. At that time, as Levi points out, you could still see the tip of Mount Soracte from the middle of Rome, glittering white in winter, and then there was the Campagna.
Levi believes that Lear ‘became happy from the time he decided to become a landscape painter.’ After nine years in Rome, and the publication of two volumes of Excursions in Italy, there was an unexpected interlude when the Queen, pleased with the Excursions, sent for him to improve her drawing. This was a new opening, perhaps, but it came to nothing. From Rome he went on, travelling in discomfort inconceivable, to Calabria, Sicily, Corfu, Greece, Turkey, Albania, Egypt, Palestine, Athens, Crete. It was his ambition to paint the whole Mediterranean coast, with one last expedition to India. In the 1870s he eventually settled down in a villa at San Remo. As a young man, he had walked almost the whole distance from Milan to Florence. As an old one, he had to be lifted in and out of railway carriages ‘like a bundle of hay.’ But he continued to work. In recording the lands of summer, he made something like ten thousand watercolours.
Levi writes finely about images he loves of countries which he himself knows well. Temperamentally, I think he is drawn to sketches more than to finished pictures, to ‘dew-freshness and variety,’ ‘the heavenly-fresh sketch of the bridge at Scutari,’ yet, on consideration, he believes that the chromolithographs of the Ionian islands are Lear’s masterpiece, and out of these he selects for his one permitted colour illustration the view of Zante, which had worried Lear because he didn’t see how it could be made picturesque. ‘In fact it was that failure which lay at the root of his success…He drew a picture of perfect provincial peace and quiet, enlivened, if at all, only by a few normal-looking goats, but in doing so he expresses the true genius of place…The image has stood still in his eye.’
Lear was deeply interested in technical processes that might create a larger market for him, photography in particular; he didn’t seem to see how threatening it might become to a painter of views. Meanwhile, he continued to make a living in the only way he knew, and as his hero, Turner, had done he either got commissions, or showed his finished works to people who might be likely to buy them. Apart from these, there were his travel albums and the Nonsense books, both of which sold moderately.
Apparently he thought seriously of marriage and proposed twice to the same girl, but since she was forty-six years younger, he must have been certain of a ‘No.’ Friends, the visits of friends, their unaccountable behaviour, their