Book of Nonsense by Lear, 1875.

Edward Lear: Travels of the “Nonsense Laureate”

The bespectacled limerick writer Edward Lear was terrified of both horses and dogs, disliked ships and loud noises, and lived with epilepsy and recurrent asthma. But throughout the mid-20th century, while he was winning fans both young and old for his nonsensical and comic verse and sketches, he also established himself as a renowned topographical artist and writer, travelling and exploring the far corners of Egypt, Malta, India, and the Mediterranean.

In his book Travel: A Literary History, Peter Whitfield writes that the travelling Lear was “an eccentric, an oddity, and he knew it, representing no tradition of learning, no imperial or nationalist agenda, no viewpoint but his own.”

A Lear self-portrait.

When he was thirteen, Lear’s bankrupt father disappeared into a debtors’ prison, and the young artist spent his teenage years channeling a naturalist’s precision into his sketches of parrots at the London Zoo, which he sold to support his family. At 23, with the publication of his book of ornithological lithographs and the sponsorship of the Earl of Derby, he declared it his life’s calling to roam and record the landscapes of his surroundings.

His zoological curiosity followed him through his travels as he filled countless journals and sketchbooks with his literary-topographical method, producing sketches, oil paintings, maps and lithographs, penning descriptions of the landscape that were both exacting and poetic.

One of Lear’s lithographic prints of the Italian city of Melfi.

Lear lived in Italy for much of his adult life, and died in his villa there in 1888.

In the 1852 preface to his journals from a trip in Southern Italy, he writes that he preferred a simple and low-cost rhythm of travel, “perform[ing] the whole tour on foot” and “depend[ing] entirely on introductions to some family in each town” for a place to sleep at night.

Two decades later, at 62 years old, Lear arrived in Bombay after a 27-day voyage from Naples. It was his first time to India, and would be the last expedition of his life. His writing from the trip reflects his nature as a visual artist, with sensory details layered across the shadow of setting: “The texture of coco-nuttery is something quite unlike what can be seen except in this and other, extended tropical coast scenery; myriads of small, white flashes and as many myriads of deep, shady dots, caused by the light and shade of the great, innumerable palm fronds….Beyond the village all is green until it gradually becomes sandy to the sea-shore where the ancient pagoda stands in complete loneliness above the fretting waves.”

Lear’s gravestone is in San Remo, Italy, and is inscribed with the following lines from his friend and admirer Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “To E.L., On His Travels in Greece:”

Tomohrit, Athos, all things fair,

With such a pencil, such a pen,

You shadow forth to distant men,

I read and felt that I was there.

—Erica Berry