Michael's books have been translated into many languages including Chinese, Bulgarian and Hungarian, Hebrew and Japanese. He travels all over the UK and abroad talking to children, telling his stories and encouraging them to tell theirs. Lear suffered from health problems. From the age of six he suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures, and bronchitis, asthma, and in later life, partial blindness. Lear experienced his first seizure at a fair near Highgate with his father. The event scared and embarrassed him. Lear felt lifelong guilt and shame for his epileptic condition. His adult diaries indicate that he always sensed the onset of a seizure in time to remove himself from public view. How Lear was able to anticipate them is not known, but many people with epilepsy report a ringing in their ears (tinnitus) or an aura before the onset of a seizure. In Lear’s time epilepsy was believed to be associated with demonic possession, which contributed to his feelings of guilt and loneliness. When Lear was about seven he began to show signs of depression, possibly due to the constant instability of his childhood. He suffered from periods of severe depression which he referred to as “the Morbids.” The centenary of his death was marked in Britain with a set of Royal Mail stamps in 1988 and an exhibition at the Royal Academy. Lear's birthplace area is now marked with a plaque at Bowman's Mews, Islington, in London, and his bicentenary during 2012 was celebrated with a variety of events, exhibitions and lectures in venues across the world including an International Owl and Pussycat Day on his birth anniversary. [23] Author [ edit ] Lear sketches dated 15 May 1864, from Paddy Leigh Fermor's collection. Lear was born into a middle-class family in the village of Holloway, the 21st child of Ann and Jeremiah Lear. He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Ann doted on Lear and continued to mother him until her death, when Lear was almost 50 years of age. Due to the family’s failing financial fortune, at age four he and his sister had to leave the family home and set up house together.

Hofer, Philip. 1967. Edward Lear as a landscape draughtsman. Cambridge: Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. It has been written specifically for the 150th Ionian Anniversary celebrations and tells the story of Edward Lear in 1864 in his final days in Corfu with his Albanian manservant Georgiou. Lear, Edward (1912). Strachey, Constance Braham, Lady (ed.). The Complete Nonsense Book. New York: Duffield & Company. pp. 125-127. OCLC 1042550888. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list ( link) In his years at Knowsley, the more he looked closely at the smart society on one hand and the animals on the other, the more Lear seems to have asked: “What does it mean to be human?” One of his watercolours shows a chimpanzee in a girl’s dress, its pensive head bending heavily over the childish collar.The closest he came to marriage was two proposals, both to the same woman 46 years his junior, which were not accepted. For companions, he relied instead on friends and correspondents, and especially, during later life, on his Albanian Souliote chef, Giorgis, a faithful friend and (as Lear complained) a thoroughly unsatisfactory chef. [19] Another trusted companion in San Remo was his cat, Foss, who died in 1887 and was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson.

For an artist to excel in portraying the particular physical characteristics of a creature with scientific accuracy, while simultaneously conveying the character and temperament of a living creature is such a “rare skill”, Attenborough writes, that Edward Lear may “fairly be accounted one of the greatest of all natural history painters”. Cox, Michael, ed. (2004). The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860634-6. Lear eventually settled in San Remo, on his beloved Mediterranean coast in the 1870s at a villa he named "Villa Tennyson."A Monograph of the Ramphastidae or Family of Toucans John Gould Colour plates: John Gould, H. C. Richter The Knowsley days shaped the course of Lear’s entire subsequent career. In addition to gaining the unflagging patronage of the earl of Derby, he met and charmed many aristocrats who would later buy his paintings and provide entrée to a level of society usually unbreachable by a man of Lear’s impecunious middle-class origins. In 1837, when failing eyesight and lungs forced Lear to abandon the detailed work of natural history draftsmanship and the English winters, the earl provided funds and introductions to establish him in Rome to pursue a vocation as a painter of topographical landscapes. He remained in Rome for ten years, during which time he first established himself as a nonsense poet and formed several of the deepest of his many intimate friendships. The human species is quite as bizarre and protean as the animal. We share the world, and it’s a mistake, Lear suggests, to think ourselves superior. There was once a voice, who sang like the waking dawn to us in the early years of the ‘fifties. As the owls, which were bearing the farm away, the words of Dylan Thomas carried our hopes and our dreams on brown wings somewhere beyond sense and halfway to heaven. There was really not much imagination or incitement in those doldrums of postwar time, and his wild words, so carefully wrought in the nightingales of verse, were our bards and minstrels. He was a funny curly fellow, too, beer-brightness and belly-laughter with his tales of Welsh innocents in the bad pubs of the city, and a regret for the lost wonder of the gills and the spinneys and the fields. The Scroobious Pip, unfinished at his death, but completed by Ogden Nash and illustrated by Nancy Ekholm Burkert (1968)