Author
Edward Lear
1812-1888
English artist, bird illustrator and travel writer who popularised the limerick and wrote nonsense verse such as "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat".
Edward Lear was born on 12 May 1812 in Holloway, north London, the penultimate of 21 children of Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker, and Ann Clark Skerrett. When the family's money ran short after the Napoleonic Wars, four-year-old Edward went to live with his eldest sister, Ann, who acted as a mother to him until her death. From the age of six he had epileptic seizures, as well as bronchitis and asthma.
By 16 he was drawing "for bread and cheese", and he became an ornithological draughtsman for the Zoological Society and for the Earl of Derby, who kept a private menagerie. He was the first major bird artist to draw birds from life rather than from the skins of specimens. When his eyesight grew too poor for such fine work he turned to landscape painting and travel, visiting Italy, Albania, Greece, Egypt and India.
In 1846 he published A Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks that helped popularise the form and the genre of literary nonsense. Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871) included "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat", written for the children of his patron, the 13th Earl of Derby, and Laughable Lyrics followed in 1877. His nonsense delights in the sounds of words, real and invented, and his heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles and Jumblies. The Nonsense Books on this site bring these collections together.
In the 1870s Lear settled in San Remo on the Mediterranean coast, at a villa he named Villa Tennyson. He died there of heart disease on 29 January 1888.
Sources: wikipedia.org
