“Antic Dispositions”: Lear and Dickens

On the day of Charles Dickens’s death, 11 July 1870, Edward Lear, writing in his diary at San Remo, records in large underlined letters: “Charles Dickens is dead” (D, 11 July 1870). Two days later, on 13 July, Lear mentions the death in his diary again: “I read the various writings about Charles Dickens. Sad enough indeed is that death. How few have done a millionth part of that he has done for good!” (D, 13 July 1870). This “good” seems to belong to a moral rather than a literary register. Probably, it appreciates Dickens’s interest in excluded persons, from thieves to child beggars to prostitutes, an interest that extends to the world of Dickens’s novels, which seek to enlarge our sympathy with and tolerance of others. Lear shared these values, and they shape the comparable plurality of his nonsense world, which we might think of as similarly enlarging our sympathy with others, however odd their behavior. Moral questions aside, the forms of literary experimentation we find in the prose of Dickens have much in common with those pioneered in Lear’s nonsense. Among Dickens’s other achievements, it is probable that he did some good for Edward Lear—and for the invention of Victorian nonsense.

While we know from these diary entries that Lear had read Dickens, we do not know what he read or how much.¹ Neither his letters nor his diaries provides any further evidence. This is striking, given how many imaginative affinities there are between the two writers. Just as there is no reference to Lewis Carroll in Lear’s writings, however, the negative becomes a kind of enigmatic evidence. The only distinct trace of Dickens’s influence on Lear is Lear’s adoption of a particular Dickensian form of wordplay in his letters. This aside, by imagining Lear as a contemporary of Dickens, we reveal imaginative elements that were always there but that light up differently with Dickens’s imagination in mind.

G. K. Chesterton wrote not only one of the seminal early books on Charles Dickens in 1906 but in 1902 one of the first significant essays on the literature of nonsense, titled “A Defence of Nonsense.” Chesterton’s interest in both writers revolves around their spirited play with language, keen sense of fun, and skill in exaggeration that contributes to a subtlety that is hard to analyze or pin down. While Lear’s nonsense may seem less part of a “cockney” school than Dickens’s, it invokes the same world. Jenny Uglow notices that Lear’s nonsense sometimes calls to mind “Dickens’s madder characters, splitting and combining words: ‘a nother taito,’ ‘a chikkaboan,’ and dropping or adding ‘h’s.’”² Lear’s linguistic perversity, like Dickens’s, is profoundly social, a reflex of metropolitan modernity. The petrified socialite in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, Georgiana Podsnap—whose arms are manipulated open and shut “like a pair of compasses”³—resonates with Lear’s overwhelmed Young Lady of Dorking, who, having bought a new bonnet for walking, finds “its colour and size, / So bedazzled her eyes, / That she very soon went back to Dorking” (CN, p. 96). Meanwhile, the “Twikky wikky wikky wee” of Lear’s “Mr and Mrs Spikky Sparrow” (CN, p. 274) calls to mind the idiom of Podsnappery, defined by blinkered self-satisfaction and scrupulous conventionality, which approximates a comparable twittering.

This essay makes the preliminary case for what a Dickensian Lear might look like by exploring the exhibitionisms of Lear’s poetry and Dickens’s narrative prose, where enigma often goes hand in hand with conspicuous or gauche performativity. It will fix upon moments in Dickens’s novels that pull against the fragile fulfillments of plot, moments that, I suggest, have something in common with nonsense.

James Williams describes Lear’s limericks as shaping apparently “the most random facts” into forms of poetic destiny, invoking the omen of “a child called Oliver Twist living a life that turns out to have twists in the tale.”⁴ As Lear’s limericks do, the novels of Dickens often make apparently accidental materials reappear rhymingly...