Abstract
Vivien Noakes’s biography of Lear is subtitled ‘The Life of a Wanderer’. This essay explores the comic and the romantic dimensions of wandering in Lear’s nonsense poetry and also in his life as a landscape painter. Both in life and nonsense travel offers him an escape from stasis, an imagination of romance, the prospect of new worlds with fewer limits, different rules, unexpected encounters. On the other hand the world of nonsense is in the end a world of impossibility and absurdity, and the traveller’s restlessness may become compulsive and deny the balancing human desire for settled quiet and stability. The essay explores Lear’s alphabets, limericks and longer poems. It ends by suggesting cross-generic links between Lear’s nonsense and his zoological illustrations, and between his nonsense and the four travel journals he published between 1846 and 1870.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
