Jenny Uglow, Edward Lear’s most sensitive biographer to date, does him proud. She follows him patiently on all his travels, but she also explores the inner journeys suggested by the works that made Lear famous: not so much the botanical and zoological illustrations by which he earned his living as a very young man or the landscapes of his maturity as the nonsense rhymes. Uglow says that nonsense verse came to Lear when his mind was ‘off-duty’. She brings out the ironies and beauties of his most famous poem, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, which was composed for a shy little girl called Janet Symonds. The happiness of the oddly matched pair…

Source: A N Wilson – There Once Was a Man from San Remo