A new biography of English poet and artist Edward Lear will be released next year from historian Jenny Uglow. A.N. Wilson reviews it.

In the case of both Lear and Tennyson, Uglow gives the sense that their introspection and private melancholy – their very non-public selves – were what enabled them to speak so effectively to an enormous audience, both in their own time and since. Of the two, however, it is Lear, translating the numbness of private sorrows into nonsense, who seems the more modern. Uglow wisely analyses this limerick:

There was an Old Man of Nepaul
From his horse had a terrible fall
But though quite split in two, By some very strong glue,
They mended the Man of Nepaul.

‘The glue of the rhyme sticks the pieces together,’ she writes, ‘but in the drawing the man’s two halves are still wide apart.’ That, really, is the essence of this psychologically brilliant portrait of Lear. There was at his core an unmendable dissonance, reflective of his times.

Perhaps this dissonance is always present in every society, but it’s sad to take note of it in some individuals. See the “Old Man of Nepaul” illustration on Lear200.

Here’s a little more on Jenny Uglow, who accidentally became an “adviser on every worthwhile period drama” on TV and some movies as well.

(via Prufrock News)