

He was raised by his eldest sister, also named Ann, 21 years his senior. Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of 21 children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.Īs an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets.

The Book of Nonsense, The Owl and the PussycatĮdward Lear ( – 29 January 1888) was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.

Children's literature, literary nonsense and limericks.
