Lear’s Leftovers

In an affectionate letter of 1871, Edward Lear woos his friend Chichester Fortescue by playacting the careful housewife: “if you come here directly, I can give you 3 figs, and 2 bunches of grapes: but if later, I can only offer you 4 small potatoes, some olives, 5 tomatoes, and a lot of castor oil berries. These, if mashed up with some crickets who have spongetaneously come to life in my cellar, may make a novel, if not nice or nutricious Jam or Jelley. Talking of bosh, I have done another whole book of it.”¹ If Fortescue comes late, Lear signals, his host will have to scour the larder for odds and ends, mixing the remnants of a salad with some household pests to make a solid (if not respectable) meal. It is a game that Lear, and the characters in his verse, love playing: “The Two Old Bachelors” (1877) involves a search for Sage and Onion, to combine with a serendipitously found Mouse and Muffin, for dinner, while “The New Vestments” (1877) revolves around a “purely original dress” made from dead mice, biscuits, and cabbage leaves (CN, pp. 415, 409). The project of using up leftovers propels the narratives of Lear’s nonsense writing, keeping his characters busy, giving them a goal. His letter to Fortescue positions the “novel . . . Jam or Jelley,” which mashes together leftovers and waste, as itself a kind of “bosh”: as much a muddle of absurdities as his new book of nonsense. Nonsense, as a genre, brings together incongruous objects: Lear’s pairing of olives and crickets is first cousin to his “Ribands and pigs” (CN, p. 135) or Lewis Carroll’s “cabbages—and kings.”² It assimilates and redeploys the trivial, the everyday, the overlooked. Lighted upon by nonsense, abject things are at once framed as redundant and reinvigorated with unforeseen potential.

The word “leftover” captures this simultaneity of uselessness and possibility. Calling something a leftover both conveys the tragedy of its present rejection and invokes a future in which it will be reintegrated. One throws away scraps; one keeps leftovers for tomorrow. Edward Lear is a poet of leftovers in precisely this sense. Using up his “spongetaneous” crickets is a way (as this essay argues first) of being industrious and dutiful. It minimizes waste, and it tidies away everything unwanted. And yet that action, I suggest, reveals the fissure in the Victorian cult of frugality: it keeps the abject substance in play, as something prominent and foregrounded. Lear’s poetics revolve around a bustling using up of leftovers—but in doing so, they frame more acutely the astonishment of finding something still, starkly, remaining.³ That doubleness becomes key, finally, to rhyme’s operation in Lear’s limericks, such as “There was an Old Person of Brussels.” In his hands, the form becomes conflicted because it promises, but ultimately withholds, the coalescence of feelings and props into a successful event. The final surprise is that there is no surprise. After all the effort, the limericks offer up to us only what we started with: the final repetition of a word that has not quite undergone the meaningful change that we expect rhyme to offer. That transformation promised by rhyme is deferred, endlessly, in favor of an inert leftover that cannot be used up.

“Domestic (or Drumstick) Economy”

Lear’s letter to Fortescue evokes his “Nonsense Cookery” (1871): a set of absurd recipes for delicacies such as “Amblongus Pie” and “Crumbobblious Cutlets.” Startling ingredients (“herring-bones,” “powdered gingerbread”) are subjected to impossible preparations (“having cut [the strips of beef] into the smallest possible slices, proceed to cut them still smaller”) (CN, pp. 249–250). All this is presided over by the gravely patronizing tones drawn from Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery (1845) and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861), bibles of resourceful Victorian housekeeping. As guilt and sympathy grew through the century for the plight of starving people near and far, these guides to housewifery evangelized about frugal, waste-free cooking.⁴ Alexis Soyer (1810–1858), cook and visionary, responded to the Irish famine by proposing culinary innovation: “[T]he country...