Masada on the Dead Sea, Edward Lear, 1858 He suffered from periods of severe melancholia which he referred to as "the Morbids". When Lear was about seven years old he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the instability of his childhood. His adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, bronchitis, asthma and, during later life, partial blindness. Lear suffered from lifelong health afflictions. Ann doted on Edward and continued to act as a mother for him until her death, when he was almost 50 years of age. Jeremiah Lear ended up defaulting to the London Stock Exchange in the economic upheaval following the Napoleonic Wars owing to the family's now more limited finances, Lear and his sister were required to leave the family home, Bowmans Lodge, and live together when he was aged four. He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of 21 children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.Īs an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. The Book of Nonsense, The Owl and the PussycatĮdward Lear ( – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. Children's literature, literary nonsense and limericks.
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