Recommends: The Birds

 
   
   

First published in Prospect (Issue 198)  

Happy Birthday Edward Lear: 200 Years Of Nature And Nonsense
The Ashmolean Museum, 20th September 2012 - 6th January 2013

Literary conspiracy theorists set a lot of store by pedigree. Last year, Anonymous dusted off the claim that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Queen Victoria trumps Tennyson (a mere Lord) as the author of ‘In Memoriam.’ Edward Lear tried to quash rumours that it was really his patron the Earl of Derby who wrote his nonsense verse.

It must have been a tempting theory: Lear was known for most of his life as a serious landscape painter, who travelled through the Mediterranean, Egypt and India making sketches. The Ashmolean’s collection includes his oils of the plains of Lombardy, and a sweeping view of the pass of Thermopylae. As a young man, he published a book of watercolours of parrots, which garnered comparisons with Audubon, and had the distinction of being the first collection drawn entirely from nature rather than stuffed birds.

Yet seen alongside his illustrated poems, the idea that they aren’t by the same person seems nonsensical. Even if his “Old Man of Thermopylae / Who never did anything properly” has outlived the majestic scene he painted. 

Photos via Harvard

Recommends: Hardy fest

First published in Prospect (Issue 197)  

The 20th International Thomas Hardy Conference & Festival
Dorchester, 18th-26th August

For at least the last decade of their marriage, Emma and Thomas Hardy had become so estranged that she had moved into the attic. Yet after her death in 1912, Hardy began an outpouring of desolate elegies, imagining himself haunted by her: “still she rides gaily / In his rapt thought / On the shagged and shaly / Atlantic spot…”

This is one strand of Hardy’s life and work picked out at the Thomas Hardy Festival, where the “Emma poems” (recently given new life in a slim volume selected by Claire Tomalin) will be read with piano accompaniment. Musical interpretations of Hardy abound, and there will be walking tours of the sites in his novels and performances of his work by poets Roger McGough and Daljit Nagra. Among the lectures given during the week, Professor Michael Irwin will speak on “The good little Thomas Hardy: a century of condescension.” No danger of that here.