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‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’: the travels, art, adventures and nonsense of Edward Lear - five online talks by Simon Rees
Edward Lear’s life began in poverty and ill-health – he suffered from bronchitis, asthma, epilepsy, depression and poor eyesight – but he thrived as an artist, a poet, a musician and writer of comic verse, gaining a huge reputation, especially for his limericks and their quirky illustrations, which survives to this day. This series of talks explores Lear’s beginnings, his patronages, friendships (some passionate), his adventures in Italy, Albania and India, and his eventual retirement to Italy.
Simon Rees has studied the poems and pictures of Lear since early childhood, memorising many of the limericks and songs. He has published his own collection of nonsense verse for children, Animals, Beasts and Creatures.
They take place every Monday from 10 November to 8 December 2025 at 4.30pm (London) and, including Q&A, will last just under an hour. They are available for viewing for eight weeks after the last episode is streamed (until 2 February 2026).
Talks
Edward Lear (1812-1888) was born into a family in Holloway, London, that had fallen on hard times. He was brought up by his much-older sister. Self-taught as a draughtsman, he began to sell his drawings from the age of 16, and by his late teens was regarded as an accomplished artist. He was employed by the Earl of Derby to live at Knowsley Hall near Liverpool and draw birds and animals from the Earl’s substantial menagerie. Lear’s beautiful, characterful drawings of parrots made his name, particularly because he drew from life rather than from stuffed skins. Even in these early drawings the ebullience and satirical flair of his later caricatures begins to emerge.
Lear was principally a painter of landscapes, using watercolours and oils. For much of his life he travelled widely, drawing the scenery he found in remote and (from the British point of view) little-known locations. Like Turner before him, he wrote volumes of entertaining prose to detail his travels, and illustrated them with prints. This lecture looks at his travels in Italy from Lazio to Sicily, and his wildly entertaining accounts of his servant, his hosts, and the people he met on his long walks through mountains and ravines.
Lear continued his journeys in Albania, Greece and Calabria, writing entertainingly, observantly and sympathetically about the rural communities he found, and describing the landscapes as vividly as he did in his paintings. Between 1873 and 1875 he travelled in India as the guest of the Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, going to Varanasi, Calcutta, Darjeeling, Delhi and Agra and producing more than 2,000 drawings and watercolours.
Edward Lear did not invent the limerick, but he perfected it as a kind of verse that celebrated eccentricity, wrong-headedness, and sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of his heroes, the ‘Old Man’ or ‘Young Woman’ from wherever that rhymed, generally in opposition to the forces of ‘they’, who protested about their activities but were largely ignored. Lear’s limericks (the last line sharing a final word with the first) started a craze that continues to this day. Their greatest merit, apart from their wit and satire, is the series of spiky, scrawly drawings that accompanied them, showing The Old Man of the Nile, the Young Lady of Smyrna (whose grandmother threatened to burn her) and many other heroes and heroines.
Lear was an accomplished composer, and wrote settings for many of his songs, as well as setting poems by his friend Tennyson. This final lecture will look at such mysterious characters as the Yonghy-Bongy Bo, the Pobble who has no Toes, the Jumblies (who went to sea in a sieve), the Quangle-Wangle and, of course, the Owl and the Pussy-Cat. All of these characters – who may be aspects of Lear himself – are shown roaming the world in search of some elusive happiness, and eventually finding it, as did Lear himself, surrounded by friends and the children who loved his poems, up to the end of his life.
Expert speaker
Mr Simon Rees
Simon is a freelance dramaturg, translating opera librettos for singing and surtitles, as well as lecturing and writing on opera, theatre, art and architecture. He is an Associate Lecturer at the Wales International Academy of Voice, and also teaches at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. A novelist, poet and librettist, from 1989 to 2012 he was dramaturg at Welsh National Opera. Website: dramaturg.co.uk
More tours led by Mr Simon Rees
Frequently asked questions
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Dates & prices
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2025
Date
Speaker
Price
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