Book cover "Mr Lear", A Life of Art and Nonsense by Jenny Uglow.


Edward Lear (12 May 1812, Holloway - 29 January 1888, Sanremo) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, now known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry in poem. Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther, born 1947) is a British biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. She won the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2003 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 1730–1810, and her works have twice been shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. She is a past president of the Alliance of Literary Societies and has also chaired the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.


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Keywords: art, book, cover, edward, faber, house, jenny, lear, life, nonsense, poet, random, uglow, writer