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.
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