Edward Lear (1812-1888)
Illustrated autograph letter signed (‘Edward Lear’) to Emily, Lady Tennyson, address given phonetically as ‘Oatlands Parcotel, Waltnontems, Surry’, 14 January 1861
Four pages, 180 x 225mm, illustrated with two caricatures of Lear seeing off a horse and cart bearing a rectangular package marked ‘MASADA on the Dead sea…with care, not to be jumped on’ and leaning out of a window to feed a bird while a second looks on in anger. Provenance: Papers of Alfred Lord Tennyson: Sold by Order of the Trustees of the Tennyson Trust – Sotheby's, 21 & 22 July 1980, lot 394.

‘The winter-existence in England is so profoundly horrible'. A long, inventive and humorous letter on on the horrors of the English winter, his friendship with the Tennysons (‘It is much easier to write a little note to mere acquaintanceship, than it is to write a letter to you or Alfred’), his travels to the Middle East (‘one of the strangest, wildest places on earth’), his ‘large picture of Masada’ and his plans to travel to Ceylon (‘& once & all draw a troppicle seen ... if by a naxident I manage to sell my 2 large paintings suddenly’). He recounts evenings with Tennyson, Holman Hunt and Chichester Fortescue ('if no friend be here – am dimmy dully-dilly-duffy. – Partly I translate Thousididdles – & so by very slow degrees attain to Greek nollidge. Partly I play on the hinstrument. – partly I drink tea – & rush about the room angrily'), criticises Alexander Pope (‘punctilious & pumpsquibilious’), and asks after Julia Margaret Cameron (‘How is the Bastion of Avignon? Abideth Mrs Cameron thereby?'), before finishing on a comically conciliatory tone – ‘gooseberries may atone for much evil, for there are no gooseberries in the south’.

Winter is ... to me so profoundly horrible & filthy that I can rarely think on any subject but the black doleful bare trees, the gray woolly sky – the torturing cold to feet & fingers: – the gnawing sureness – (if one thinks at all,) that every moment of the day is a bitter longdrawn year to the majority of people in these isles.. . who have no fire nor food nor much clothing ... for those fools & obstinates who speak of LIKING all the filth & horror – forgetting the misery of the poor – I loathe them, one & all: – may the toes of those who lyingly profess to love winter, never be warm! May they cease to know the difference between their toes & their fingers & may both be turned into icicles & afterwards mixed up into icecreams which may they eat, not unaccompanied with fragile biscuits!’... Only two types of Anglosaxon stay in England: 1^st, those who are wealthy, to whom all countries are alike and 2^nd, those who are tied and cannot go ...

Lear met Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1851, and both illustrated some of his poems and set others to music. Even after his friendship with the poet cooled, Emily, Lady Tennyson (1813-1896) remained one of his closest friends and confidantes, to the extent that in 1881 he named his villa in San Remo after her.