by Jenny Uglow
Offering to send William Jardine some pictures of Lord Derby’s ‘novelties’, Lear added, ‘He will have great pleasure in your having them, I am sure – indeed, a more liberal and amiable collector (you know we naturalists have a selfish reputation), does not exist.’ During his stays at Knowsley he worked for Derby with immense patience, drawing from life if he could, making many pencil studies, with notes on colour and on texture, silky or rough. He turned a turtle upside down, painting its soft belly and wriggling legs. He learned about anatomy, feeding habits, mating rituals, and his humour showed through as he caught the shrewd gaze of the spectacled owl, and the angular pride of the great crowned crane. His watercolours were far more than an accurate depiction of plumage, markings and anatomy. They displayed a tenderness, an intimate perception, a feeling for the fast beat of a heart, the wetness of a twitching nose, the stress of animals far from their familiar habitat.
Spectacled Owl, Wattle-crowned Crane and Quebec Marmot or Weenusk (Arctomys Empetra), watercolours made at Knowsley
As the birds and animals died, their cabinet skins piled up in Derby’s museum: they are now in the Liverpool Museum that he endowed in his will. Many skins are those of individuals that Lear knew personally, from the stately, embarrassed-looking crowned crane to the Orinoco goose. This goose was one of Lear’s favourites. He loved to see the courtship display: the male and female standing tall with wings widespread, flinging their heads back and puffing their chests in and out, whistling and chuff-chuffing. Derby noted that Lear ‘was much amused by its manner of swelling out the breast like a Pouter Pigeon, which he represented’. The skins of the mammals he painted are in this museum too: a fat little woodchuck from Alaska with its quivering nose; a perky ‘tree rat’ from Central America, with its tail curled round a branch (later named as ‘Lord Derby’s Woolly Opossum’); a black giant squirrel from the high canopies of Asian forests. Painting these birds and animals, Lear touched distant lands and different ways of inhabiting the living world, and he knew that however meticulous his drawings, his flying, jumping, leaping subjects would always remain mysterious.
Malayan Giant Squirrel (1846)
He looked carefully, paying close attention to details like the way an animal’s hair fell over its toes or the creases on a paw. When he sent sketches from London of the Trionyx, the soft-shelled turtle from the Nile, and the beautiful little South American wildcat Leopardus yagouaroundi, he wrote:
I took the sketches very carefully from the living animals, but owing to their not being in a good light, I have had very great trouble in getting the drawings to look satisfactory: even now, only the under side of the Trionyx is what I really like. The cat was very difficult to represent, & the Trionyx, although James Hunte held it for me for two whole mornings – not much less so.
Similarly, when he tackled the Eastern quoll from Australia – his ‘Manges Opossum’ – with its delicately spotted pelt, he explained that he had taken great pains, and trusted that Derby would think he had tried ‘to imitate the fur more nearly’.
These Australian species enthralled him: around 1834 he drew a page of ‘Portraites of the inditchenous beestes of New Ollond’ including kangaroos ‘in their proper propperportions’, a platypus and porcupine, a bandicoot and a grinning ‘common or Natur Catte’. When the Goulds set off to work there, he sounded rather envious.
All the species – familiar and unfamiliar – had to be fitted into the Linnaean taxonomy that Derby and his colleagues favoured, according to strict rules. Species were arranged in orders – for instance the largest order of birds was the Passeriformes, the songbirds – then families, and then by genus and species. To establish a ‘type’, or type series, specimens that would form the standard for a new species or variant, the describer had to produce a detailed document, which must be published to be valid. In the description, the scientific name, such as Passer domesticus (house sparrow), could be derived from any language or from the name of a person but it had to be Latinised and followed by the date of publication (so we have ‘Passer domesticus, Linnaeus, 1758’), and then it had to be checked against other closely related species, to note any difference or variation.
‘Portraites of the inditchenous beestes of New Ollond’
Lear had no background in this work and sometimes grew impatient with the disputes over naming, but he did try to identify the birds he painted, and as some of them were new to science, he was ‘the first describer’. Three birds were named after him: the blue Brazilian parrot, ‘Lear’s macaw’, Anodorhynchus leari, ‘Lear’s cockatoo’, Lapochroa leari, and Platycercus leari, a red and green Tabuan parakeet from Fiji. He also named some birds himself, from specimens that he recognised as belonging to undescribed species, like the long-billed black cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus baudinii, which he named after Nicolas Baudin, the leader of a French scientific expedition to Australia in 1800. But many birds and animals also arrived with names from their country of origin, or given by settlers and hunters. These rolled off the tongue, different and alien: the whiskered yarke and the eye-browed rollulus, the purplish guan and the aequitoon, the ging-e-jonga and jungli-bukra. The music of strange names, never forgotten, echoes in Lear’s late songs, granted to the Fimble Fowl with a corkscrew leg and the others who flock to the Quangle Wangle Quee:
And the Golden Grouse came there,
And the Pobble who has no toes, –
And the small Olympian bear, –
And the Dong with a luminous nose.
And the Blue Baboon, who played the Flute, –
And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute, –
And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat, –
All came and built on the lovely Hat
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.
In his poems, Lear had his own menagerie where all the creatures were free.
6: TRIBES AND SPECIES
The Kicking Kangaroo
Who wore a pale Pink Muslin Dress
With Blue spots
Lear drew this kangaroo for two children, Daisy and Arthur Terry, at a hotel in Italy in August 1870. In his illustrated alphabet the Kicking Kangaroo was joined by the Jubilant Jay, who did up her hair with ‘a Wreath of Roses, Feathers and a good Pin’, the Melodious Meritorious Mouse, who played a merry minuet on the piano, and many others, all mimicking accomplishments and fashions that also – as with the Jay’s feather headdress – showed how the smart set exploited them.
In the mid-1830s, as Lear watched the kangaroos lolloping around the grassy fields at Knowsley, he also watched the human menagerie of the great country house with their dress suits and muslin gowns, music and picnics and play. When he had first come to Knowsley in the time of the old twelfth earl, he had soon learned the complicated family history. Despite wedding celebrations so glittering that they became a legend, the twelfth earl’s first wife ran off with the Duke of Dorset, with whom she had a daughter, and was banished: twenty years later, within three weeks of his wife’s death in 1797, the earl married his great love, the Irish comic actress Elizabeth Farren (many caricatures by Gillray show the short, stubby, ‘baby-faced’ earl dwarfed by the tall, willowy actress). Derby and his sister Charlotte, then in their twenties, lived on with the children of the new marriage in their father’s boisterous household. Kind, crude in the old Regency style, prone to teasing young women about their looks and lovers, and incurably hospitable, the earl added a vast panelled dining room in the Gothic style, hung with portraits of ancestors, its high curved ceiling disappearing into a mist above the chandeliers: his dinners often seated between forty and a hundred. In this tribe, the Stanleys were frequently outnumbered by their cousins the Hornbys, linked through marriages of two generations. Friends, cousins, children, nephews and nieces, grandchildren and great-grandchildren filled the house. It was for those children that Lear wrote the first of his nonsense rhymes.
Knowsley Hall from the west (1835)
In June 1835, when Lear set off for his long summer stay at Knowsley,
he squeezed into the last cheap seat on the coach, behind the box, singing to the mildly drunk coachman and reaching Birmingham, ‘perfectly frozen, to make a beastly breakfast of far gone eggs’. Near Knowsley he left his bags to be collected and walked through the park, later telling George Coombe loyally that the trees were mere gooseberry bushes compared to those of Sussex. He was conscious of his odd status, neither servant nor guest, and went round to the back door to meet the housekeeper, who showed him ‘my rooms’. These were gratifyingly lavish, in the great front of the house looking west into the sunset: ‘Grand piano book case – sofa – fire &c – with lots of Orthodox furniture’. At dinner in the housekeeper’s room, he reported:
all things were going on swimmingly – when lo! A messenger from Lord D. begged me to come immediately to him. To my surprise his Lordship was in the Passage, where he gave me a regular shake of the hand, & apologised for my having been put where I was. ‘I intended of course,’ quoth he – ‘that you should have been one of us – & not dine with the servants.’
So after the meal he left the servants’ quarters, ‘to the eminent opening of eyes of the good people assembled’, and was shown to the drawing room, full of assorted Stanleys and Hornbys, ‘a legion to themselves’. He clearly enjoyed this story and told it again to Dan Fowler, who remembered it with amusement, but added shrewdly, ‘His career was founded on patronage, and under that he was content to enter upon it. It was, too, more or less patronage all his days, but he proved himself worthy of it, if any man ever did.’
Lear was not really ‘one of us’. His letters from Lancashire were forerunners of later reports from foreign countries on their people, customs and tribes. On his first day in 1835 he reported the routine. At ten, a bell summoned the household to prayers, the guests in the library, the servants in the hall; then came breakfast in ‘the enormous dining room – a good one you may guess’. At noon, keen to see the changes since his last visit, Lear toured the aviaries, finding them ‘incredibly altered and improved’; after lunch he talked for two hours to Derby’s nephew Robert Hornby – later a good friend and patron – and sketched until five. At half past six a bell rang for dressing and at seven the company processed into the dining room: dinner, coffee, tea, then Derby played patience with the ladies. Then bed. It looked as though he was in for a quiet time and as it was too wet to work in the aviaries he planned to ask Derby if he could sketch a bird or two indoors, ‘as I want to do 4 every week for him’.
He was young, middle-class, nervous in his new clothes, working hard to fit in. At dinner with the housekeeper, ‘as I saw how matters were going to be – I took all the pains in the world to make myself pleasant’; at dinner with the earl, ‘I behaved myself however – very decently during dinner, & devoured some of the good things with great complacency.’ There were some horrors, like putting up with guests who were only civil, he felt, because the Stanleys and Hornbys liked him. There were moments, too, of pure bafflement, as when the visiting Earl of Wilton, clad like a Van Dyck painting in crimson and a black velvet waistcoat, insisted he drink champagne with him. ‘Why?’ Lear asked another guest, ‘and she began to laugh, and said, because he knows you are a clever artist and sees you always look at him and admire him: and he is a very vain man and this pleases him, and so he asks you to take wine as a reward.’ While he was watching them, they were watching him. Like the animals in the zoo, the artist was a different species, a curiosity, caressed by some and ignored by others. At times, he wrote, ‘the uniform apathetic tone assumed by lofty society irks me dreadfully – nothing I long for half so much as to giggle heartily and to hop on one leg down the great gallery – but I dare not.’
The quiet vanished in late July when the crowd came up for the races:
Another! – Another!! – & Another!!! – the rattling & bustle is very superlative: – at the moment I am writing no less than 3 carriages & 4 – four carriages & 2 – 2 Phaetons with white ponies – 1 Gig – & 3 Grooms with single horses are congregated before the awful door: surely out of all the contents there must be something good at the dinner party – I am sick of splendour – vomiting with excess of pomp – longing for a little porter out of a pewter pot – & some bread and cheese eaten with my fingers … as soon as one gets to like one Sett of people – away they go – & a perpetual change keeps one in a froze. – Would I live so! – St Peter! –
Yet despite his sardonic ‘very superlative’, Lear was impressed, and his protests gave way to a torrent of name dropping. He listed visits to old Cheshire houses like Tabley Hall, where he gorged on raspberries, joined outings, and shared a gipsy picnic in the ruins of Beeston Castle. The high-born women were like exotic specimens, described in general terms rather than in detail: ‘Everybody ought to see Lady de Tabley before they die – she is a most glorious creature: – & not less delightful than beautiful,’ or Sir Philip Egerton’s wife, ‘who is preterpluperfection, (she used to be called the “pride of Cheshire”)’.
At Knowsley more visitors arrived, in bursts of sound: ‘the noise of children, the hurrying of valets – the bustling of ladies’ maids – the orderings of housekeepers – the stumping & squawking of Sir J. Shelley – the giggling of Miss – & the volubilities of My Lady – the barking of six dogs’. Then came shooting parties, ironic in a park devoted to preservation. ‘Rabbit slaughter began two days ago. 138 were demolished in one evening. “Great Fun”, as Lady Shelley says.’ Next there was a new craze: cricket. In the mornings children and women joined in, and ‘after luncheon – the males rush out again, & then there is a match general – grooms – riders – footmen & aristocrats all in a bundle’. The mix of gentlemen and players was not wholly equal. Every time Lear looked out of the window one of the gents was at the wicket.
As he described this in his letters, life at Knowsley was moving towards caricature, even fantasy. He knew that Fanny Coombe loved a good comic disaster, and when a fire broke out as he was writing to her, he seized the moment: ‘Featherbeds are rolling down the stairs – curtains – clothes – books – furniture are being tossed from windows – the heat is dreadful – the women are losing their presence of mind.’ The blaze was small, so Lear could turn it into farce, with the housekeeper deluging him with water, featherbeds felling a cook, the fat butler rolling over four bricklayers and two grooms, and soot-covered gentry passing buckets from the ponds: ‘Lady Ellinor & 20 Gardeners command a regiment of watering pots.’ He enjoyed seeing this well-ordered milieu thrown into chaos. But in a house run like clockwork, butlers and footmen were soon carrying their trays, backs straight, noses in the air, eyes raised above a floor carpeted with beds and books, as if nothing had happened at all.
Next Lear was swept into an excursion by steamer to Puffin Island off Anglesey with Lord D. and several Hornbys who planned to shoot the puffins that bred there in their millions. They were too late in the season: the puffins had vanished and the rain poured down. But for Lear, the scenery made up for all. Escaping a dinner party, he walked to the Menai bridge, gazing at the mountains in the distance: ‘beyond all glorious. Eat hearty supper after 10 miles walk & then sang with accordion & flute till 2 in the morning on the beach.’
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Lear’s status as a hired artist was offset by his reputation as a naturalist. After the Anglesey trip he went to Dublin with four members of a different branch of the family, the Stanleys of Alderley. The leading spirit was the Reverend Edward Stanley, author of A Familiar History of Birds and soon to be president of the Linnean Society; with him came his sons Charles Edward and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. Three years younger than Lear, Arthur became a close friend, although sadly their letters are lost: at the time of this trip he was a student at Balliol, and later he became a noted liberal theologian and Dean of Westminster. The final member of the Irish party was Edward Leycester Penrhyn, Revd Stanley’s brother-in-law, and husband of Derby’s daughter Charlotte – a double connection. They were heading for the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Sci
ence, founded four years earlier as a counter to the conservative Royal Society, ‘to give a stronger impulse and a more systematic direction to scientific enquiry’. (In 1837 Dickens lampooned the BAAS as ‘the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything’, giving it five sections including two Lear-sounding disciplines, ‘Umbugology’ and ‘Ditchwateristics’.)
When Lear was in Dublin the Association was made up of four sections: Physics, Chemistry, Geology and Natural History. Stars among the founders were the polymath William Whewell – who coined the word ‘scientist’ – William Buckland, who had worked on the great dinosaur fossils, and was now putting forward his theory of the ‘catastrophic’ creation of the earth, and Charles Babbage, inventor of the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. The hottest subject was geology, and the most debated work was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830– 3), which argued for the gradual and continuing formation of the earth over millennia, perhaps as long as 300 million years. Alarmed at such thinking, for the past few years authors of the eight ecclesiastically sanctioned Bridgewater Treatises, including Buckland, had presented Nature as the creation of a God who intervened constantly in its workings. In 1837, Babbage would attack this in his pertly named Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. There was no need, he said, for divine miracles to create new species or adaptations. Instead, his ‘Creator’ was a kind of divine legislator, or clockmaker, who designed successive species to appear at set times, and let them progress and change without intervention.
