21 pages • 42 minutes read
Edward LearThe Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1871A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Victorian “Nonsense Verse”
Along with Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Edward Lear is regarded as an early master of Victorian nonsense verse. Lear was among the first poets to deliberately use the word “nonsense” to describe his poems. Nonsense verse refers to humorous poems that resist rational interpretation. They often feature talking animals that are literally talking animals, rather than an allegorical representation, as well as odd actions that are whimsical more than intentionally symbolic.
Lear often used made-up words like “runcible” (Line 28) in his poems, as did Carroll: Carroll’s words galumphing and chortled are now part of the Oxford English Dictionary. These deliberately whimsical choices were guided by an aesthetic philosophy which by the early 20th century would take the form of the “art-for-art’s-sake” movement. Lear and Carroll were stating, through their poems, that art did not need to moralize or intentionally chase a set meaning. Instead, art could invite a range of interpretations. The rise of nonsense verse has to be seen in the context of other children’s literature during the Victorian era. Much of 19th-century children’s literature tended to be moralizing and instructive. By focusing on the power of language and the imagination instead, writers of nonsense verse offered a quiet rebellion against strict socioliterary norms.
At the same time, Lear’s verse is also grounded in the literary and historical trends of his age. Contrary to the looseness associated with their name, nonsense poems tend to be highly structured, as can be seen in the case of “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” a regular and rhythmic ballad. Lear also perfected the strict limerick form, always consisting of five lines (or four lines with a mid-line pause in the third) with an AABBA rhyme scheme. Lear shared his focus on the sound of poetry with contemporaries as ostensibly different as Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his visually striking style with 19th-century poet-painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Lear’s work reflects the age’s preoccupation with naming and characterizing natural things, and listing the oddities of nature—the Victorian age was, after all, the era in which Charles Darwin revolutionized natural science. Similarly, like many other literary works of the time, Lear’s and Carroll’s works contain motifs of journeys and voyages, mirroring the contemporaneous expanding colonial enterprise. Thus, nonsense verse—even while resisting a fixed interpretation—is still filled with meaning.
Authorial Context: Edward Lear’s Life and Works
“I began to draw, for bread and cheese, around 1827” (Lear, Edward. The Book of Nonsense. F. Warne & Co, 1887), Edward Lear would write of his need to earn early in life. In 1827, Lear was only 15 years old, and his father was about to be sent to debtor’s prison for defaulting on loans. The family’s situation was dire. Lear was the 20th of his parents’ 21 children—most of whom did not survive beyond infancy—and had not been formally educated for lack of resources. To support his parents and siblings, Lear had to rely on his natural skill as a painter. In the days before photography, photorealistic illustrations and lithographs were much in demand; Lear got work making medical drawings and illustrations of animals and plants for naturalists.
His love for painting and his exposure to the scientists and naturalists of Victorian London was to inform his famous humorous verse, which he began to publish only in 1846. Informed by Lear’s love for naturalistic drawing, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” has a highly visual quality, and features two specimens—a fowl and a feline—of the kind Lear would often draw from life. Other biographical influences also inform Lear’s most famous poem and his other children’s verse. For instance, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” features a voyage, a common motif in Lear’s poems. Throughout his adult life, Lear travelled widely through Europe and Asia, including India and Sri Lanka, eventually settling in San Remo, on the coast of northwestern Italy.
Journeys, like the one the owl and the pussy-cat undertake in the poem, are typically happy events in Lear’s oeuvre. They symbolize hope and escape, offering characters new opportunities. On the other hand, Lear’s attitude toward couples is more ambiguous. While the lead pair of the poem get their happy resolution, many of Lear’s other characters do not, perhaps reflecting Lear’s own mixed fate in romance. He never married, and the only woman to whom he proposed marriage, rejected his offer not just once, but twice. Lear’s sexuality was never made explicit, but his biographers believe Lear was attracted to men. As relationships between men were a crime in Victorian England, Lear had little option but to keep his sexuality a secret.
The disappointments in love, coupled with his lifelong struggle with epilepsy, partly contributed to what Lear termed “the morbids,” times when he felt very low. Writing his children’s rhymes sparkling with music, inventive wordplay, and whimsy, was a way to cope with and better the vagaries of the real world. Lear’s verse is also informed by his love for children and animals: “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” was written for the three-year-daughter of Lear’s friend John Addington Symonds, and the pussy-cat was a tribute to Lear’s beloved cat Foss.
