Edward Lear: Sudden and Surprising

Nonsense writing often operates through a complex of the familiar and the surprising. This article argues that Edward Lear’s originality—to an extent that distinguishes him from contemporaries like Lewis Carroll—derives precisely from a sidelining of surprise in favor of suddenness: an aesthetic that becomes, in his hands, an ethics of relationship that tenses to an abrupt, unpredictable Other even as it lovingly accommodates it. Carroll’s Wonderland books keep a surprised perspective aloft, through Alice’s incredulous eyes. But for Lear’s protagonists, things are sudden more often than they are surprising. Drawing at every stage on unpublished manuscripts, and rethinking a popular critical image of the poet as a blissful, comfortable refuge for eccentrics and outsiders, the essay contrasts Lear’s writing with that of the more temporally orderly Carroll to argue that, for Lear, suddenness captures a sensation that something might be at once expected and unprepared-for. It goes on to explore how suddenness sends both bodies and feelings out of sync, arguing that suddenness brings home, in Lear’s work, the importance of living tolerantly alongside an unknowable Other. Finally, it traces how in Lear’s hands, the surprising comes to mean something different from the use made of surprise by his contemporaries: the delight of the uneventful, and the persistence of hope for a normal, unremarkable happiness.