Collections and Archives Assistant Ian Gregory reports on a 19th-century visitor to Chatsworth.

While transcribing Chatsworth’s Visitors’ Book from 1846, I came across a famous name. A man called Edward Lear signed in on 11 September. He was a poet and an artist, best known for his limericks and surreal verse like ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ (1871).

Lear was born in 1812 to a stockbroker. His father defaulted on the stock exchange. Due to the family’s reduced financial circumstances, Edward went to live with his sister Ann, who was twenty-one years older than he. Edward developed epilepsy at the age of six. Attitudes to the condition were not enlightened then, so the boy was ashamed of having it. He is thought to have developed clinical depression too.

Lear embarked on a career as an artist while still a teenager. He drew birds for the Zoological Society and for the Earl of Derby, who kept a menagerie at Knowsley Hall. Up until then, artists had drawn and painted birds from dead specimens. Lear took a then radical step by drawing from living creatures. In 1830, aged nineteen, Lear published his first book, Illustrations of the Family of Pisittacidae, or Parrots. This won him the admiration of the great U.S. naturalist John James Audubon, and also of British naturalist John Gould. Lear contributed to six of Gould’s monumental illustrated bird books (all of which are held in the Library at Chatsworth), but his work was unacknowledged, leading to some hard feelings.

Lear travelled extensively and Italy became like a second home to him. From 1842 to 1847 he spent most of his time there. When he signed the visitors’ book at Chatsworth he gave his address as one in Rome. He illustrated landscapes and ruins across the peninsula and published journals describing his travels, several of which are held at Chatsworth.

In 1846 Lear published A Book of Nonsense, a collection of limericks that went through three editions and popularised the form. In 1871 he published Nonsense Songs and Stories, Botany and Alphabets, which included ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’. It was written for the children of the Earl of Derby. It is for his poetry that Lear is best remembered today. 

Eventually Lear settled in San Remo, a city in north western Italy. He set up home in a house that he named “Villa Tennyson” after one of his favourite writers. After a long period of declining health, Lear died at his villa in 1888. He lies buried in San Remo, and verses by Tennyson are inscribed on his headstone.

…all things fair
With such a pencil, such a pen
You shadow’d forth to distant men
I read and felt that I was there