Autograph letter signed (‘Edward Lear’) to Emily, Lady Tennyson, Stratford Place, Oxford Street, 6 March 1861

Edward Lear (1812-1888)
Autograph letter signed (‘Edward Lear’) to Emily, Lady Tennyson, Stratford Place, Oxford Street, 6 March 1861
Eight pages, 110 x 179mm, two bifolia, with additional annotations in blue pencil by author. Provenance: Papers of Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Sotheby's, 21 & 22 July 1980, lot 395.

Expressing his dislike of the company he finds in London, describing his life while working on the new edition of A Book of Nonsense, and sharing his scorn upon the superstitions of the church. Concerning his current writing process, ‘although I am doomed to do nothingness just now, I am so unsettled that I cannot write, ­-& it is only because I am a tome & have been dining on cold beer & beef that I am able to write a tall’. Continuing, ‘For, since I asked people to come & see my picture, they come,-horribly & disjointedly; sometimes 20 at a time-of all kinds of phases of life: sometimes-for 3 hours no one comes:-so then I partly sleep, & partly draw pages of a new Nonsense book. If I sleep, I wake up savagely at some new comer’s entrance, & they go away abashed. If I write nonsense, I am pervaded with smiles, & please the visitors’.

Complaining of the company he finds in London ‘the big folk are in most cases a norful bore. To hear the bigots & the apes talk of the Essays & Reviews!!-It makes one ill’ and of the religious bigotry and superstition that he encounters: ‘if a man cares to believe the bread & wine made yesterday is the flesh & blood of a person dead 2000 years ago – how can he laugh at Timbuctoo & Mumbo Jumbo? Yet one may pity these poor fanatics - & never in anywise persecute them, for they are but as children who cannot reason much’. Expressing anxiety regarding the health of his sister Ann: ‘I am very uncomfortable about it, tho’ I cannot at all realize her not getting well. She brought me up from the leastest childhood, & when she goes,-my whole life will change utterly’ and anticipates a tour of Greece when her health improves where he hopes to ‘perjuice a nillustrated work by supscribten’.