 There was an event at the library who's all Bristol and an expert in nonsense, so those those are our speakers tonight and I should just mention I think be said in her introduction if you have a question about anything we're going to be talking about There is some time at the end of this event where we're going to be Hopefully answering your questions or rather. I will be taking your questions and fielding them over to the actual Lear experts the learographers and hoping that they will be able to answer them better than I could which is pretty much guaranteed Finally, there is a special treat. We've got none other than Dominic West The actor who has recorded two newly discovered Lear poems as as a treat for us and those two poems were discovered by Amy Wilcoxon in the British Library and And she is she is going to be joining us in a minute. She is actually at the British Library desk right now Where she discovered those two new Lear poems, which was enormously exciting. She discovered them last year and So we're going to be talking about that shortly. Dominic West has has recorded these poems for us and I believe we can now go over To to those readings by Dominic now over to Dominic The last of the octopods for a Monte Generoso and the leaves were turning brown 500,000 octopods all painfully came down And on the back of everyone a poffley cop held fast and All their faces dark or fair With sorrow or a cast For months ago 8,000 babes had greedily partaken of red raw beef and brandy buff with curried owls and bacon And so the doctors octopod there can't be any question that all these little innocents have died of indigestion They sent for 90 elephants from Parmy Travencore and when the elephants arrived they sent for 90 more Upon those elephants they tied the coffins all with hay and on each coffin strapped a duck to quack throughout the day and Then a down the mountainside all slowly they descended to look the gates of great Milan the vast procession ended To Milan as the Sun went down in clouds of rosy flame those octopods and poffley cops in dust and sorrow came Four million of stout Lombard men came out to meet them all they said we cannot have them here our city is too small So they dug a fearful hole the city wall beside and all the poffley cops jumped in quite oblivious Died 500,000 octopods in tears all pale and thin Likewise the coffins and the ducks were thrown promiscuous in and lastly all the elephants Majestically sad jumped on the top of all the rest with shrieks and grunts like mad And as the Lombards filled the chasm They clashed their spades and said of octopods and poffley cops of ducks alive or dead of elephants With tusks and trunks and skins all brown and rough of all these things the Lombards sang thank heaven We've had enough icicle bicycle There was an old man on a bicycle whose nose was adorned with an icicle But they said if you stop it will certainly drop and abolish both you and your bicycle Fabulous, thank you very much indeed to Dominic there. So To to start things off. Let's speak to Amy to Amy Wilcoxson PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham who who discovered these these poems these undiscovered previously undiscovered Learworks While looking through paperwork at the British Library and Amy Can you tell us a little bit about the discovery about what you were looking for? And about what you found and how you found it indeed. Yes. Thank you so much, Andrew And thank you to the British Library for Running this event today. It's so exciting to be here And I am actually in the British Library as you mentioned earlier in the very seat where I found The the manuscript and the lights have just been off in here actually very very atmospheric So I am doing a PhD currently at the University of Nottingham But I am not studying Edward Lear. My PhD is on a Scottish romantic poet called Thomas Campbell Who I'm sure you've all heard of No, he's not very well-known at all And it was through looking for one of Campbell's letters that I came across these Lear Documents these Lear manuscripts. So there's a huge full-volume Collection here in the British Library called the Charnwood Collection And it's the autograph collection of a lady called Lady Charnwood Who collected all these wonderful manuscripts together and gave them to the British Library And as I was looking through this collection for one of Campbell's letters I came across This wonderful looking poem with the intriguing title Laser the Octopods or Last of the Octopods This wonderful spidery handwriting, but I'm sure you know, we all recognize And I just started reading and I thought it was absolutely hilarious I was laughing out loud here in the reading room, which is not something you're supposed to do In the quiet of these rooms I started reading down I flipped the page and there at the bottom Was the signature Edward Lear and as you can imagine I was completely astonished I'm a big Lear fan. I'm not sure about expert, but I'm a big Lear fan and I had not seen or read this Poem before which made me sort of think that I'd perhaps come across something rather special My colleague Dr. Edmund Downey was also in the British Library and I ran over to him and asked him to come and have a look What I'd found after I'd done a bit of sort of internet searching I thought I think I think this is something really exciting And and he said to me have you seen if there's anything else in there? Um, I was just so excited by this. I didn't even think to turn the pages to keep looking. Um So I turned the pages and then there was this obviously wonderful bicycle, icicle, liberic that that Dominic West read So beautifully. Um, it's very typically Lear sort of pen and ink caricature Of an old man doing something dreadful as they tend to do in his limericks Um carried on flicking through and there was also A letter that hadn't been published before which contains a Lear Self caricature of himself, which we've also got a picture of and again, this is this is so typically Lear You know, he's a big bushy beard. He's quite retombed. He's got little glasses on Annie's he's done so much traveling. He's actually got swollen Foreman please. Um, that's what we can see there. Um, So yeah, it was just so thrilling to find these things. Um, it was actually six of these Lears manuscripts in the Charmwood collection Three of them were published by Lady Charmwood in some books that she'd written But these three hadn't been published before and I think that's kind of why they slipped Under the radar. Um, they weren't mentioned in the catalogue at all The the the lady who was mentioned in the catalogue was Mary Mondella And I think they've got one of Lear's envelopes, um, to Mondella Um, and Mary Mondella who Lear wrote to who Lear sent these this limerick is poem to Um, was the daughter of a liberal MP called Anthony John Mondella Um, and he was actually the sheriff of Nottingham, which is a nice link to me. Um, Which I rather enjoyed when I when I found that out. Um, and Yeah, she intended to write her father's biography when he when he passed and she collected all the papers together all the Um, the letters from famous people they were writing to, um Tennyson's I think as well Um, and then she bequeathed them to her niece who is Lady Charmwood, which is why they're in the Charmwood collection So that's the kind of family link there and how they ended up, um in the British Library Yeah, I mean it's um, it's very exciting because it does it does make you wonder what else might be there just lurking In collections. I know to ask a completely tangential question and we will get back to Lear in a moment Did you find the Campbell letter you were looking for? I did find the Campbell letter. Yeah It was actually some some pages before the Lear, uh stuff So if I wasn't sort of flicking through it's a very sweet afternoon. It's about You know three o'clock in the afternoon in the British Library on the Thursday I think it was and um, it was that time in the afternoon where concentrations maybe dropped off a little bit This, uh, you know, there's Jane Austen letters Lady Mary look workly Montague letters Alexander Pope. Um, all their letters are in this volume So I was flicking through having luck for those as well. And that's how I came across the Lear, um, which is yeah So exciting, but yes, I did find the Campbell Uh, it's it's just wonderful. Congratulations. Amy. It's really it's just great. And then you alerted the Lear authorities, I imagine You contacted the central body Yes, I'm sure there is a Lear central body somewhere. Uh, yes, the piece was published myself and Ed Downey published These pieces in the crime literary supplement and then That made its way into the national press from there, which is extremely exciting as you can Imagine And yes, and then I'm just thrilled really that the that the pieces are kind of Being read because I think that's what the I mean Lear sort of octet with all red I think we all know the owl and the pussycat Um, I remember my grandparents giving me a book of poetry and that was the first one in there when I was younger And you know, I always think of Lear very fondly uh from that So, yeah, I just want people to read them really and and these beautiful images as well to be to be out there Yeah, it's kind of um, it's it's kind of almost um sumptuous the and kind of You know supernumerate the sheer number of images new words that that throw themselves at your attention Especially when the poem is being read to you, you know, and you're you're not controlling the pace if you like And so I want because I think I think you're right in saying that Lear is chiefly remembered in the public I today as the author of the owl and the pussycat and the lemurix, but there was so much more to him um But interestingly the the two discoveries that you made the the icicle limerick, um, obviously matches up with the public imagination of him and I wanted to ask a bit about the octopods as well because I wasn't very familiar with the octopods and am I right in saying it's his vision of Irritating tourists It is yes, and Sarah's written on this Quite a lot. I think so Sarah's probably a good person to also Ask about this, but yes, um to quote Sarah He used uses octopods as an insult for vulgar crowds at hotels um direct quote there from Sarah, um Yes, and he he writes at this time a lot in his diaries and in in letters about octopods and uses this Um quite a lot. He wrote um the octopods and the rectangles, which is another there is poems at around the same time I think is the last of the octopods um I've got some I've got some quotes written down that he writes in his diary A horrible noise made by octopod children is acutely horrid So, you know, he consistently uses uses that word For irritating tourists. That's interesting. Well, we are we are going to get on to the nonsense and a bit more on the octopods in a bit um, I I was just um wondering about the the kind of discovery um element of this particularly in light of the fact that so much of lia's paperwork was destroyed after his death uh, and I I think I'm right in saying that by um a man with the unimprovable name of franklin lushington, uh, who who lia seems to have, you know fallen in love with it and and uh carried a torch for for many years um So did that add an extra pecancy to the discovery the fact that you know that a lot of lia paperwork is now no longer extant. It's not as though there's a beautiful concordance of absolutely everything he ever said or wrote Yeah, it's it's just I think it's exciting to find anything like like this I mean, I think it was a for me or once in a lifetime thing I think probably, you know, we might not find more lia stuff again I guess and I was very much in the right place I think at the right time and it's only As I said through kind of knowing a bit about lia as I say, I'm not an expert But who knowing a bit about lia that I realized what this was um, I think sarah will be talking about his early as music as well and the fact that he composes their music but a lot of that has been lost Um, so yeah, it's very exciting to to find some things try new things that haven't been Haven't been found before. Yeah, it's well. It's fabulous. Well, I'll tell you what with that with that in mind um, let's cut now to a little bit more of Jimmy McNulty himself Dominic West who I believe is recorded a few he's going to be popping up a few more times throughout the Throughout the evening. So he's recorded a several more limericks for us and let's now Go to the next batch of limericks as read by Dominic West Dominic There was an old man of Dumbury who taught little owls to drink tea For he said to eat mice is not proper or nice An amiable man of Dumbury There was a young lady whose chin resembled the point of a pin So she had it made sharp and purchased a harp and played several tunes with her chin Lovely, thank you very much again Dominic and uh, he'll be back. He'll be popping up again later with a few more of lia's Most loved limericks. So now sarah if I can bring you in sarah lodge You are a senior lecturer in english at st. Andrews. You're the author of the book inventing edward lear You have organized an exhibition on lear. You've organized concerts of his music You are you are steeped in learography So just to to start off were you were you excited to to learn that there was Extra lear suddenly in circulation when this news broke last year. Absolutely. We're all in in amy stache enormously exciting and You know, there are as as one rare book salesman said to me there are pieces of lears in the wild And I love to think that there are actually more. I mean, he wrote lots and lots of letters Um, so to find lear letters is not entirely surprising as he said to myself He wrote to everybody except the venerable bead and mary queen Wrote literally thousands of letters, but to find a new poem two new poems is pretty extraordinary We now come to the second of um lears multiple hats because I wanted to talk to you a bit about lears, uh musicality um And I know that he composed music he He provided the settings for the works of other poets to be read Particularly tennis is that right? Yes, he actually published 12 settings of tennis and poems and tennis and was very fond of them. They're very good Particularly a tears idle tears, which is really emotional really quite operatic And we know he he set many other things as well There are at least nine other tennis and poems that he said that we don't have the music for he set some swin burn He set shelly's poems. Um, so he really he's a very active musician All his life he played in youth. Um, he played the flute and the accordion and the small guitar Just like the owl and the owl and the pussycat, which is sort of I've not actually seen a small guitar in real life But I gather that they're a bit more like a loot, you know They're they're slightly different from what we think of as the guitar But mostly he played the piano and sang those those were his main instruments as it were you've um procured some of his Some clips of his music and I wonder should should we start with those and then and then talk a bit more in general about lears musical life Yes, if any way you like and that the two clips were the first one is is the yongi-bongi bow Just the beginning of the yongi-bongi bow and and some people watching tonight will know this as a poem But you might not have heard it as a song and really my hot take is that all of lears poems are songs In fact, most of the longer poems we know had music and he sang them at the piano It's just really sadly The music has been lost partly because lear didn't read music formally. He just played by ear So unless that happened to be somebody by to transcribe them They were simply in the air. They were airs in the air and and they just It's kind of sad and and yet there's also Something compelling about the fact that they're live, you know that being lear lear was entertainer You know a little bit like tom laurer in the modern world or somebody like that Somebody who could be on the piano and could be playing something very very serious and solemn And then could make it really funny. He he was a very live entertainer in that way And but yes, if you'd like to play the the clip of the yongi-bongi bow, then you'll hear a little of what I mean That was edward robinson. He's a lovely young baritone and david oan norris Who many will know as a pianist and sometimes pops up on on radio three We we actually sort of made it our mission to record all of lear's extant music And it's been a fascinating process because we have those 12 tennis in the songs And then some of the nonsense songs he also When he traveled because he did travel writing as well And he actually recorded songs as best you could And from the different regions that he was traveling in and so in his illustrated excursions in italy in in the 1840s He actually put songs at the end of the book So, you know, you not only accompany him visually and verbally into these regions at the end You can actually play the tunes at home Which is kind of extraordinary as a sort of radio experience in it in its in its own way And the yongi-bongi bow is It's very much, you know that tragic comedy that lear does so well That it's it's like an opera in a sense, you know of this And funny little man little hoddy doddy Who falls in love with the lady jingley jones, but she's already taken On the coast of coromandel where the early pumpkins blow and so it's a tragic romance a romance that cannot be And yet it's also just really funny and when lear describes Saying it or singing it to his friends. Everybody's falling about laughing. So clearly they found it hilarious Yeah, and it's it's funny because in a in a In a slightly later age where the jokes are maybe not Flagged as clearly or they're not that you know for a start we are Everything's coming through a few layers. What you know one is of time. The other is it's not being performed for us As you said it would be it's sometimes harder to tell this balance between The comic and the tragic because lear. I mean lear seems on heaps of levels to have been quite unhappy And a number of areas in his life and yet he's constantly producing light joyful Nonsensical verses and music And he's also always as you say darting around between media I mean he painted what was it something like 8 000 paintings he produces as you say thousands of letters Poems the limericks especially in his 20s. He's constantly darting around between different areas and there's constantly a Slight tragic element mixed in there as well. Is that a fair characterization? Yes, I'm Lear suffered from depression um And one of the the kind of refreshing things is that he was really quite open about that He called it the morbids and he was able to talk about that with Tennyson who also suffered from depression Lear was very clear that he'd suffered from it since he was a very small boy And when he'd gone to see a fairground at the back of his his home In north london and after it was over They'd been a good good music often music is really associated with emotion for lear They'd been wonderful and acrobats and this kind of thing and then after it was over he solved You know and for days, you know, there was a sort of depression that followed it and I think we often have the sense of lear as a rather tragic figure as a figure of pathos partly because that was mediated by his friends and Those those people who who were his sort of early biographers and collected his letters and literally his letters are full of moaning This is kind of a specialist subject But actually if you look at his diaries and you look at his writing and his output He was often very exuberant as well and scarcely lonely in the sense that he had all these hundreds of friends So I think we have to take a slightly balanced view of this kind of isolated figure That is often portrayed Interesting because that's certain. I think that's certainly the imagination That the the image I had of him in my mind. I kind of quintessentially victorian You know frothy ebullient very extremely creative But also prone to as you say absolute fits of the morbids and one of his something he wrote He wrote I see life as basically tragic and futile and the only thing that matters is making little jokes Now that may have also been a little joke of this as you're As you're suggesting or it it depended what day it was He's one of the very very first people to talk about a kind of emotional barometer You know that he talks about his moods as being like the word that they go up and down and he was very aware that He was also epileptic and and he he could feel his fits coming on Which meant he he was able to conceal his epilepsy quite effectively from other people Yeah, I read that he just sort of dashed out of the room. He just hurried out when he felt an epileptic fit coming on Yeah, I I think he he often had them in the evenings actually and and and in the nights and that sort of helped in way to You know that or if he felt that it was going to be an epileptic day He would just sort of keep his chambers as it were and not mix with other people. He certainly had Notice as it were but I think because you know his mental health and and his epilepsy were connected and he was very aware of of his whole body and mind as a kind of sensorium that was constantly Changing and he he was able to to kind of Think of his emotions As a state that was always that was always in flux And and he conveys that I think in his poetry that is you know, even the nonsense poems that we love And the like the jumblies for example, you know, it's a beautiful poem an incredibly consoling poem And yet there's also a kind of sad undertow a kind of counterpoint in the music that is about loss and longing And childhood being a kind of place that we can't go back to you know that you can go to see in a sieve In a kind of magical thinking but only for so long, you know, you can only bear it for so long Do you think that might be one of the reasons why His reputation of legacy are so assured and why he remains popular today because That he has this rather modern understanding of of himself and of all of our emotions I think he reaches out to us in a very very modern way that you know, we are all his friends In a sense, you know, we're amongst you know, those people like the venerable bead and the mario queen of scots who he's always reaching out to And and because his poems are in fact songs, they are intrinsically catchy They they stay with us even if we don't know the music even if the music has been lost I think the fact that they are musical they're Lyricism or or as he called them lyrical And it makes them stay stay with us in an interesting way. This is leo leo again caricaturing It's sort of accurate to the extent but but you notice there's no music. He's just playing by ear It's quite sweet and then you can see, you know, how much music there is in What he calls his pussy and owl song So the owl and the pussy cat the owl is playing his guitar There's there's an old man of the aisles one of the limerick characters who sang he High dumb diddle and played on the fiddle the amiable man of the aisles and then the owl and the pussy cat in the pea green boat with the owl singing And then the dong with with a luminous nose who in this very strange illustration by lear He's he looks like he's playing a kind of trumpet or a horn as well as Illuminating the landscape with his his very peculiar protuberance I I love that picture of him playing The piano Just as the earlier picture that Amy showed us of of of him depicting him I mean, he wasn't concerned with glamorising himself. Was he in his letters? There's no There's no illusion that That he might be, you know, incredibly handsome and un-bespective I mean the thing you wouldn't expect is he was actually really tall particularly for his era He's tall and broad broad-shouldered and actually is quite attractive Though he always thought he had a very big nose, but in his early character Characters of himself. He's always a string bean and then at some point in middle age He becomes this little kind of plum pudding figure with It's interesting Fascinating. Okay. Well, I'm sure we'll come back to all of that and I'm sure we'll come back to More depictions that lear made of himself and and for that matter his his paintings But now I you know, I hear a tapping at the door. Who's that? It's Dominic West again with a couple more limericks. So let's go Right over to Dominic now for the next two There was an old man who said hush I perceive a young bird in this bush When they said is it small He replied not at all It's four times as big as the bush There was an old man of Nepal From his horse had a terrible fall But those split quite in two With some very strong glue They mended that man of Nepal There was an old person of wear Who rode on the back of a bear When they asked does it trot? He said certainly not. He's a moxican flopsican bear Fabulous. Thank you once again Dominic. Um, and so now we come to the the the Nonsense element, which we've already touched on briefly. Obviously, uh of Lear's life And so it's a great pleasure to introduce our third I'm going to say learographer. I'm going to stick with it. Uh, so Noreen Massoud You are a lecturer at the University of Bristol And I do actually want to read out your description on the uh, your agency's website because I find it so magnificent You are a literary scholar working on the 20th century writing about things which in one way or another present variously as absurd unrevealing embarrassing or useless And uh, I think that's magnificent. I think we've all We've all felt like that we've all And so there is there is obviously a huge relevance to Edward Lear here because You know absurdity is Is almost the whole shooting match for him really, isn't it? Yeah It's it's an interesting one because um, I work on things which sort of um, some of the things I work on cast themselves as nonsense And know that they're absurd and unrevealing And then I work on other things which aren't really absurd or unrevealing until you look at them closely And what I'm one of the things I'm always thinking about with lear is is Is that that way that he moves between the absurd and the very lucid and the kind of the useless and the useful um, I think one of the things I like best about lear is that he Is is is nonsense poetry is nonsense writing. Um Is special, I think um, even in comparison to other contemporary nonsense writers like newest carol Um, because I think all of it is in question the big question of how we live alongside other people And I think it tackles that question with that huge sort of existential question very And throughout his work and very seriously um And it offers sort of two sorts of answers for that. There's an easy one But there's also a slightly more difficult one different a more difficult answer about how we live alongside other people um And the first one he offers is a sort of dream of a place where different things things which don't fit anywhere else can get sort of resolved into harmony Like the owl and the pussycat from two different spheres of life or in another poem the duck and the kangaroo Or the quangle wangles hat But all of these strange beings gather on a hat And um and live together, you know, and it often resolves into a kind of dance or it ends up in music of some kind as as sarah talked a little bit about that music or dance is a way of absorbing People and creating a kind of harmony So it's a sort of dream of a place where everyone can find a rhythm Alongside others um an outcast can find harmony with each other So that's the easy Answer that lea gives for how we live alongside other people. Um, and it's really appealing. Of course, we love the image of everything dissolving into a dance um But there's something more difficult that he also suggests The the question of how we live alongside other people when it's not harmonious When it doesn't resolve into something easy and neat and smooth like a dance Because to an extent I think lea knows that this dream of harmony is just a dream And the reality of living with others is seldom so easily It's seldom so easy and you talked a bit sarah about how um, you wasn't lonely at all And often I think he had many more people than he quite knew what to do with he's always lamenting that he's got these visitors He doesn't want he just wants to be left alone. He's got to dine with people. He doesn't like Um, it's all of these sort of jarring interruptions in his life and some of them are human Some of them are things like his fleas. He's always complains at one at one point. There's several diary pages where he's just devoured by fleas and suffering with it. Um And so all of these of jarring jolting things were always happening to him and his epileptic seizures Being one of them and sometimes he did have warning as as we've discussed But there are other times and they come on really suddenly And he doesn't know where they've come from and he describes them as very sudden In his diary this idea of the sudden comes up over and over again suddenly came to awful grief That's one of his seizures. Um And I think he finds suddenness quite alarming. Um There's a limerick. Um, there was an old man of Ibrine who suddenly threatened to scream But they said if you do we will thump you quite blue you disgusting old man of Ibrine. Um, and I think I have quite a lot of sympathy for this this they Who threatened to thump the old man of Ibrine for screaming because it's difficult to live alongside people Who suddenly threatened to do things which jar you or which you don't like um And lia struggles with the suddenness but at the same time I think what's really remarkable is that he welcomed the sort of jolting Difference into his world even though he finds it difficult. Um, I've got a diary entry here from 1873 Which I really like which is a little bit of how he deals with this um Home to dine But everything from unknown causes was later than usual Also fussed the cat suddenly ate up the new cream cheese Also later the lamp abruptly extincted himself I meant to have written to frank. That's frank lushington. He mentioned earlier Um from whom I've not heard from an age heard for from for an age, but it's getting too late too late I love this sort of um This sort of a panoply of nonsense creatures that lia conjures into existence in his way You've got the lamp who extinct himself and the cat who eats up a huge cream cheese before lia can stop him in one go suddenly um Foss in general this is his cat fos who who's this rich source of sudden shocks He's always creating jolts in lia's world. So what this is is one of lia's sort of um Is this in the the harvard library? It's it's sort of one of the fly leaf of one of lia's books And you can see these two huge ink blocks on it and it says Two blocks on Corsica. Oh dear. Dear. Dear. Mr. Edward lia Foss did it. We have a lovely picture of fos there. So obviously fos Jumped suddenly and upset the ink pot and sent it flying and made lots um So you've got this suddenness in lia's life and in his cat. He adores he adores fos And welcomes into his life Um, but also he fills the limericks with this these acts of suddenness as well Like the old man of a dream or the old man of leg horn and in another limerick gets quickly snapped up. He was once by a puppy um And I find this contrast really strange because if we look at lia's diaries, they show that he's Terrifyingly committed to to orderly routines. He Almost every day just skips lunch. He starts work early early in the morning and just works for hours straight the way through. Um, just just Really episteme is really hard working Um, I think maybe that's why lia really loved these sort of abrupt impetuous pets and characters because they're acting on on instinct a sort of animal tendency, which he really loved um And I think lia's interested in the way that things just do act out their sort of inevitable Idiosyncratic Lovable natures It's part of their charm and and you know the the impetuous suddenness of the old man of a dream who's suddenly threatened to scream Yeah, I mean we have we're torn. I think in that limerick Do we have sympathy for that bay who who were really bothered by it? But we also I think have sympathy for the old man who was just called upon to do something that he can't Sort of not do and fundamentally what I think what's interesting is we never know why These creatures in lia act the way they do we never know why the old man of a dream suddenly needs to scream um But I think the for lia it's it's exactly this unknown ability of these motivations which makes them lovable um They they all come all of all, you know lia is fascinated by place names long exotic sounding multi-syllabic place names They hate all of the others all of the the unknown creatures in lia's poetry come from these foreign places And they have motivations which are sort of necessarily foreign to him and priorities priorities, which he doesn't share They move the different speeds from him. They make decisions. He doesn't understand um, and you can't control that and you can't change that all you can do is sort of Brace against it or tolerate it and sort of admire it. You certainly can't absorb it into a kind of harmonious dance all the time It's just something you have to sort of live with and and lia is always negotiating that There's a whole lot of different feelings about that. Sometimes there's a kind of resignation to suddenness Sometimes there's a rage about it as we see I think a little bit in in the wonderful new poem the last of the octopods um, where you know, there are too many octopods And so they all get thrown into a pit and buried because we've had enough of them lia snaps sometimes I can't bear it anymore But sometimes there's this joy in the kind of suddenness and the abruptness of others that we can't understand and we can't absorb and it it says no we can't it Doesn't demand a kind of comfortable communal safety. That's really important I think it doesn't it's under no illusions that that's what we always get sometimes living alongside others involves Just constantly negotiating those different feelings about it all the time never quite relaxing um And I think I think what's really remarkable about that is I I feel like that That's a sort of way of thinking about otherness which has never really been More important I think even though you know not lia's lia's writing is very funny very entertaining very charming But actually a kind of mode of relating to difference Which doesn't expect it to be easy which expects and doesn't demand that it sort of blends in with you The idea that other people or other creatures are always going to have priorities Which maybe we can never understand ways of doing things which we can never understand And actually what sort of demanded of us, you know from in sort of so many walks of life And I think particularly here about things like the refugee crisis. What's demanded of us is to Live alongside difficulty and difference even when it challenges us. I yeah, I think that's what's amazing and unique about lia Really interesting and I wanted to ask as well about Because as you say a lot of the limericks and and and the poems they present And Strangeness suddenness of violence up evil But particularly in the limericks obviously the The limericks that he wrote are unusual by modern standards because you don't typically end with the same word That the first line ended with whereas lia that's a I think a universal thing. I don't think there are any Modern limericks that lia wrote but correct me if i'm wrong There are just a couple of very early limericks which sort of have a different word for the final line, but by far the majority of 70 once he settles into his His his pattern he doesn't change as far as I know. Let's go Right over to dominic now for the next two There was an old man with a beard Who said it's just as I feared Two owls and a hen four larks and a wren have all built their nests in my beard There was an old person of chili Whose conduct was painful and silly He sat on the stairs eating apples and pears That improved old personal chili the new vestments There lived an old man in the kingdom of tess who invented a purely original dress And when it was perfectly made and complete he opened the door and walked into the street By way of a hat he'd a loaf of brown bread In the middle of which he inserted his head His shirt was made up of no end of dead mice The warmth of whose skins was quite fluffy and nice His drawers were of rabid skins, but it's not known whose His waistcoat and trousers were made of pork chops His buttons were jujus and chocolate drops His coat was all pancakes with jam for a border And the girdle of biscuits to keep it in order And he wore overall as a screen from bad weather A cloak of green cabbage leaves all stitched together He'd walked a short way when he heard a great noise All sorts of beasticals, birdlings and boys And from every long street and dark lane in the town Beasts, birdles and boys in a tumult rushed down Two cows and a half at his cabbage leaf cloak Four apes seized his girdle which vanished like smoke Three kids et up half his pancake-y coat And the tails were devoured by an ancient he-goat An army of dogs in a twinkling tore up his port waistcoat and trousers to give to their puppies And while they were growling and mumbling the chops Ten boys prigged the jujus and chocolate drops He tried to run back to his house but in vain Four scores of fat pigs came again and again They rushed out of stables and hovels and doors They tore off his stockings, his shoes and his drawers And now from the housetops with screechings descend Striked spotted white black and grey cats without end They jumped on his shoulders and knocked off his hat When crows, ducks and hens made a mincemeat of that They speedily flew at his sleeves in a trice And utterly tore up his shirt of dead mice They swallowed the last of his shirt with a squall Whereon he ran home with no clothes on at all And he set himself as he bolted his door And not wear a similar dress any more Any more, any more, any more, never more Dominic Wester, thanks to him As always reading Lea's The Vestments So before we cut to audience questions And there is still time to submit one If you haven't yet in the window that you're watching And there'll be a box beneath and please do submit So we've had some fabulous questions already But please do sling more in This is maybe going to be the greatest concatenation of Lea experts I would say anywhere in the world this year I'm going to go out on a limb Sarah, there may be conferences that you're aware of that I'm not But before we cut back to that I do want to briefly talk about Lea as a painter Because I find this really interesting You know, the fact that he, I mean He didn't actually intend I believe originally To publish his Nonsense Which I find fascinating And you know what his view of himself was Did it change much over his life, Sarah? Yes, I mean Lea made his living all his life Really from his visual art I think that's the important thing to say That first as a zoological and ornithological painter Of extraordinary skill And then mostly as a landscape painter But he published his book of Nonsense anonymously Who's Derry Down Derry Who was trying to make little folk marry And he was quite tickled One sentence is perhaps slightly hurt in later life That people thought it might be by somebody else They thought it might be by his patron The Earl of Derby Actually, and that Lea was just an anagram of Earl So Lea did change in various ways And one of the ways I think that he changed was That towards the end of his life I think he understood that Nonsense would be The thing he was most remembered for And he was ambivalent about that But he also knew it wasn't a little thing either To make little folk marry I do feel like he'd be surprised today The sheer weight that's put on Because he, as you say, his visual art I mean, his paintings, his ornithological paintings Were so good, he had three parrots named after him I believe I think it was in life as well And he taught Queen Victoria drawing and painting Amy, you're nodding Do you know a little about this? Very good Yes, she really enjoyed his illustrative excursions in Italy Which I believe was published in 1846 And he delivered a series of 12, I think, drawing lessons for her And some of those drawings that she did under his tutelage Are at Windsor Castle, I believe So, you know, he's such a good artist Also that, I mean, I think when you Google Lea now The first thing or other search engines are available I think the first thing that comes up is that he's an artist Rather than an author, you know, a nonsense poet The first thing that comes up is for his art Which I think is fascinating when we do primarily, as you say Think of him now as a nonsense poet He famously called Queen Victoria a dear and absolute duck To her face or? In description of her But she seemed to like him very much But they had one slightly awkward moment When he asked her where she'd got all these beautiful things Because she showed him some of her private collection To which she replied, I inherited them, Mr Lea Often the way, often the way with Royals Yeah, I just find this life extraordinary I mean, it's, you know, from his childhood Which does seem to have contained quite a quotient of unhappiness To his, you know, early years, he started as a teenager To his own theological paintings Through the nonsense, through to the, as you say The landscape paintings and all the music of his later years And all of his travel as well And he lived a very geographically adventurous life I would say, especially for a man of his time Yeah, I mean, he kind of went everywhere And seems to have been popular in most of those places Although he was once, I want to say stoned by a crowd He went outside with some drawing materials And was greeted, I think, rather with more hostility than Where was that? Albania, I believe it was I think he was not wearing his fez and he was drawing And that prompted So anyway, early negative review for Lear Very unusual in that sense So, okay, so that's the painting side of him Which I just find extraordinary Is there anything that ties all of these elements of his life Together, would any of you say? I mean, that's asking for a unified field theory of Lear Which there doesn't have to be Because as Norian, as you said, he, you know, contains So many of these different elements But if anyone is willing to pitch up and say They've got the key, I'd love to know the theory As adventurous as possible as well I'm getting no bids Well, it was really fantastic to read The Last of the Octopods Because certainly as I was reading that, I was like, oh my goodness Like it's really hitting all the Lear notes Maybe that's the unified theory of Lear Because you've got everything You've got the kind of difficulty with how we live alongside each other I think they sing as well in The Last of the Octopods As they go down the mountain, am I remembering correctly? Anyway, there's some sort of musical ritualized musical lamentation At best of all, you've got that very Learish Ingredient, which is food I mean, so often food is a sort of plot device in Lear Certainly in his limericks, you know, they dine on mints and slices Of quints in the Owl of the Seacat Food's always falling on the rhyme words And here, food is an incredibly dramatic role In The Last of the Octopods, doesn't it? Because it's that that kills all the baby octopods You know, Lear as well loves mixing weird foods together And here it's the mixing of weird And sometimes it goes very well There's a lovely bit in the letter Where he writes to his friend saying I don't have anything to feed you But I'm going to get some olives And some spiders from my cellar And I'm going to mix them all up And it'll make a nice, if not nutritious, jelly So here it doesn't work I'll take them all into a jelly And here, actually, the mixing of weird things Is catastrophic And it kills all the baby octopods So yeah, I think we are very, very lucky To have this new poem Which ties so well into all these major Lear concerns Yeah, go on, Sarah, sorry No, I absolutely agree with everything that Noreen has said But there's a word that's in the new poem Which is quite a favourite Lear word And it's the word promiscuous Which is not a word that we use in the same way today Obviously, we tend to think promiscuous As having a kind of sexual meaning But in this period, it means jombly It means mingled It means all things tumbling down a mixture And in a way, maybe medley is the word It is the unifying thing That actually the union of disparate things Is the thing that is Lear Yeah, that is fascinating Because I mean, I never really think about the line They dined on mints and slices of quints Or when I do think about it When I say it to myself, I focus on the quints And I kind of forget We've just had, you know Whether raw or not, mints thrown in earlier on in the line As a kind of chaotic extra element And in fact, just before we started this conversation Sarah, you were saying that very early on in his drawing career He drew an owl pussycat crossbreed Yes, that's right In the 1830s long before he actually writes The poem that we know about the island of pussycat And the 1870s, he's sort of imagining this hybrid preacher That is partly owl and partly cat You know, he's fascinated by mixtures And how that pans out And he writes a sequel, quite a sad sequel Actually to owl and pussycat The most people have never read Where they actually, they have children And spoiler alert Where the cat has committed suicide Leaving the owl to be a single parent And all the little sort of females Or cats and all the little boys or owls And you know, it's almost as if the sort of species There's an expression of gender And perhaps a kind of crossing of gender And it's another way in which Lear is, you know Can feel quite modern sometimes God, that's interesting And I have to say, I do think that lends a bit of Bit of credence to the idea There's a fair old slab of darkness in Lear's Vision of the world Which is kind of making its way out at various points I think that is close to a unified field theory of Lear The jumble and the combination The unusual crossing of streams I'm going to stick with that Right, so let's hear from Rosemary Who says, hello, thank you all For your fascinating presentations and discussions of Lear How influential do you think Lear's work was On Lewis Carroll's work? Is there evidence of Carroll reading Lear's work? Which is very interesting Because when you think of the Runzable Spoon It's not a big hop and a leap to the Portmanteau words Of the Jabberwocky, the slivy toves All of the combinations Say again, Amy Oh, it's just a Frabjus Day Yeah, a Frabjus Day Exactly Do we know much about the relationship between them, if any? They did read each other's work But interestingly, they mostly ignore one another Or I think there's a Lear letter or a diary entry Where he talks about the daily Jabberwock And meaning a newspaper And he's clearly read the Alice Berks But he doesn't really talk about it much And I think we can also see the influence in Carroll But it's quite subtle Yeah, I think there were things on the surface I think are really, really similar But I don't know I suppose again with the question of what is a particular sort of nonsense doing I think they set out to do quite different things Like a lot of Carroll's nonsense is really clearly satirical Of contemporary things that are going on at the time Like maybe the most famous example is the Caucasus race Where all the creatures run around in a circle And there's no winners nor must have prizes That feels very sort of pointed And Lear is much less satirical directly in that way And much less pointed So yeah, it seems nonsense but towards a very different end That is really interesting I think when certainly lay people like me Think of these Victorian writers The nonsense is a huge element of that And it is one thing that makes the era feel quite modern It's an era where a lot of writers were unafraid To be quite weird in their presentation Or to find new combinations To find new speciations if you like But there's no time to get into the Darwinism element Because I do want to go to another question This actually is a slightly factual one And it's a two-part from Anthea Mayberry The first thing she says is that The late great Nicholas Parsons Performed a stupendous show called How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear Which was performed at Barry St. Edmonds I don't know if you guys have been to Barry St. Edmonds The theatre there is Georgian And it's absolutely superb And Noreen, thank you for the very subtle removal Of your own personal fos And cats are very welcome here I think is what he would have wanted Anyway, I do apologise Anthea says is there any record of that show Because it was superb And that's something that you guys may know You may not I don't myself I'm afraid No, Anthea, I'm afraid we're not able to help you out there I do apologise But I'm going to have a hunt after this ends And see if I can find it Just, I mean, I'm afraid I don't know, Anthea I'm so sorry But the kind of clip you almost heard But didn't quite hear Is actually How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear Which again, we mostly know as a poem A sort of ironic poem that Leo writes about himself But he actually tells us the music It should be sung too And so I was earlier hoping to play you A little sort of extract of How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear With its accompanying music But do not fear Because you can actually find it There's a website with www.edwardlear's music You listen to any of the music And you can find it there Oh, excellent, thank you, Sarah That's brilliant So, Anthea, I hope that answers That element of your question There is another part Anthea just says more about the paintings, please So that's a very pleasantly open-ended query We can go wherever we like with this one Why the shift from the early ornithological stuff To landscape later on in his life Because he made a shift I'm not sure when, 30s, 40s, maybe And he says at the time it's because of his eyes Leo was myopic from the time that he was really a small child And he had to use what he called goggles So, you know, glasses that were the thickest lenses That you could get at the time And he says that he wants to become a landscape painter Because he can't do the close work anymore I think there were actually other reasons too He was desperate to get away, to go to Italy He also suffered from asthma He wanted to get out of England So when the Darby's of Nersley sort of offered him money To go to Italy and sort of become a landscape painter He jumped at that opportunity He completed about a thousand drawings When he travelled around India Again, a pretty adventurous journey For him to make at the time And given his age Because he was getting on a little bit by then I think he would have been maybe 50 Or maybe not quite 50 actually So, but again, so much travelling You know, his solo tour of Albania He lived in Rome for years and years and years And then he would occasionally return to England Pick up a stack of new commissions And then start carrying them out So, yeah, it was a really substantial element of his life I do want to move us on to another question Oh, I like this one It's coming in anonymously It's this For such an outside figure How do you explain Lear's enduring and international appeal? Or would anyone like to take up cuddles on this one? Nori? I suppose it's precisely because the reference of his poems Are so sort of abstract and nonsensical And they don't seem pegged to any particular place With, you know, what's interesting with the new poem Is that sort of direct invocation of Milan And strong men in that city Being quite a weird exception Even when and what place names are obviously mentioned But often made nonsensical Or completely detached from the places They're actually talking about And so nonsense I think becomes something that can be completely I don't know, universalised And it doesn't feel specific to a particular culture Although of course it is Of course there are going to be things Which are very specific to Englishness And English understandings of how society works But I think the big question is again That Lear is grappling with Again, for my money, how we live alongside each other Yeah, I think there's questions across cultural boundaries I completely agree I was just going to chip in briefly The reason why Octopods is very sort of pinned to a location Is because the Mandela's who he wrote to He was summing with them He met them at Monte Generoso at the Times And Antony Mandela, his father Was an Italian refugee from Lombardy So that's also how that all kind of ties in It's very linked to the Mandela's And it's kind of where they were at the time But yeah, that was an exception, as Noreen said But yeah, I think Lear is universal It's like Alice in Wonderland, isn't it? Everybody reads Alice in Wonderland Your enduring, as I said earlier I read them when I was a children With my grandparents I mean, my grandparents don't know anything about What I do, really But when I said to them Oh, you know, Edward Lear I found this poem, it's so exciting They instantly both went, oh, they all love the pussycat And I just think it's something that endures all generations I think everybody sort of has heard of Lear On the periphery They know poems like Alan's must have always limericks I mean, it was National Limerick Day Yesterday it was Lear's 210th birthday And I mean, if you looked on Twitter Or somewhere like that The amount of limericks that people were posting From accounts all over the world In different languages It was amazing Really, really amazing And so fun to see, I think Do each of you have a And you don't have to have one A favourite of Lear's limericks Or even a favourite of his poems But I mean, the limericks are going to be shorter Or more easily recitable now Which is why I ask for them Well, mine has to be, of course Bicycle, icicle I was actually, I came in the British Library Where I am now I came in earlier on to have a look at the poems again Because it feels like such a long time Since I'd seen them in real life And it was so evocative Seeing that small It's a very tiny, tiny slip of paper It's probably only about this big With this little limerick on it It was just, yeah, amazing So I'm going to have to say that one I think as the Unearther You absolutely have the rights to that Norrin, Sarah My, the one I always think of When I think about Lear's limericks Is the old man of Whitehaven Who danced a quadril with a raven But they said it's absurd to encourage this bird So they smashed that old man of Whitehaven And what I like about it Is that, you know, it's got a terribly sad ending But it's got beautiful illustration Of a man deraving both sort of the other The man, the raven is spreading its wings And the old man is sort of spreading The tails of his coat And for a moment he looks a little bird-like So he's sort of moving from man to bird In this moment of harmony Oh, that's lovely Thank you I feel like that quadril's quite nonsensical as well, isn't it? Always makes me think of Alice in Wonderlands Yeah, it's certainly nonsensical When I try to do one Sarah, any favourite, favourite limericks To bring us home? I love the limerick illustrations Particularly the one where, you know, there's somebody Who's talking to a frog And they kind of momentarily become Mirrors of one another Or even a man in a bee Who's been terribly bothered by a bee And it's as if the man's pipe kind of becomes a proboscis And there are these wonderful kind of mirrorings Between humans and creatures But my very favourite leopon Is, I think, the jumblies I love the fact that, you know, they go out to see And everybody says, you know, it's going to be disaster Going to see innocent And unexpectedly, they come to delight You know, they come to this wonderful island Where there are monkeys with lollipop paws And no end of stilt and cheese And just this wonderful sense of abundance Of things being possible That shouldn't be possible I think is what I come back to lyric for again and again That's absolutely marvellous And I think that sense of abundance Is a wonderful note to end on Because he has provided such abundance, you know His thousands of drawings His hundreds of limericks, his paintings Everything about him seems to have Seems to have kind of burst forth In this huge, you know, wonderful protuberance And, you know, extraordinary Maybe he was the don with the luminous nose all along I think that's a really lovely thought about Lea to end on Thank you so much to all of the speakers To Amy Wilcoxon To Noreen Massad and to Sarah Lodge That has just been, what a treat To spend time talking and thinking about Lea I do hope those of you watching have enjoyed it Hope that you're all feeling ready for a nice, roncible evening And with that, we'll all say goodbye Thank you so much for watching this And we do hope you enjoy it And that it's encouraged you to pick up a bit of Lea There was an old man on a hill Who seldom, if ever, stood still He ran up and down in his grandmother's gown Which adorned that old man on the hill There was a young lady of hope Who was chased by a virulent bull But she seized on a spade and called out Who's afraid, which distracted that virulent bull