LEAR (EDWARD) Autograph fair copy of 'Some Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly', 19 May 1886;...

LEAR (EDWARD) Autograph fair copy of 'Some Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly', 'Rittleout for E. Carus Selwyn', comprising all 7 verses of 7 lines each, beginning '...Oh my aged Uncle Arly - !/ Sitting on a heap of Barley/ All the silent hours of night. - / Close beside a leafy thicket. - / On his nose there was a cricket, - / In his hat a Railway Ticket, - / (But his shoes were far too tight.)...', two pages, recto and verso, light dust-staining, creased, 8vo (210 x 136mm.), Villa Tennyson, Sanremo, 19 May 1886; with accompanying autograph letter, unsigned, '...I remembered your wish to know about 'Uncle Arly' – of which Wilkie Collins writes to me that he thinks it the best of all 'my poetry!'...', adding as an aside '...Accidental, on his hat, - Once my Uncle Arly sat: Which he squeezed it wholly flat'...', ending '...Incomplete MSS – found in the brain of Mr Edward Lear on dissection of the same in a post mortification examination...', 2 pages on a bifolium, creased where folded for posting, 12mo (135 x 105mm.), Villa Tennyson, Sanremo. '19 May or might would could or should be 19th/ 1886.' Footnotes: 'RITTLEOUT FOR E. CARUS SELWYN': LEAR'S BIOGRAPHICAL LAST POEM PRESENTED TO A FRIEND. 'Some incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly', is full of autobiographical references, most obviously to Lear's life as an incessant 'wanderer'. It was also his own obituary. Even the title contained his name 'uncLE ARly': '...This was his whole life...', writes his biographer Jenny Uglow, '...his youthful love of natural history, his teaching and medical drawings, his forty-three years of wandering, from Bowman's Lodge to the Villa Emily. Always his cricket had chirruped in his ear, poetry's lasting power, the call that 'never – nevermore' would leave him. Lear's poem defied time, with its upside-down sunset and sunrise. It described age and childhood, mocking 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star' – as Lewis Carroll had done. It combined lyrical melody and down-to-earth chat. It was true to himself.... It was, he said, 'the last nonsense poem I shall ever write'...' (Jenny Uglow, Mr Lear: A Life of Art & Nonsense, 2017, p.47). Ostensibly a nonsense poem, Vivien Noakes in her biography of Lear, however, talks of deeper and darker meanings of depression and ill health beneath the whimsy (Edward Lear, Life of a Wanderer, 1968, p.307). Written in the metre of his friend Lord Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shallot', it took him thirteen years to write, partly on the endpapers of The Letters of Horace Walpole in 1873 and of Addison and Steele's The Spectator in 1885, and in various letters to friends. As early as June 1884, he had included the first verse in a letter to Lord Carlingford (ed. Lady Strachey, Later Letters of Edward Lear to Chichester Fortescue (Lord Carlingford), Frances Countess Waldegrave and others, 1911, p.309). Lear sent presentation copies to at least thirteen friends, including Wilkie Collins, whom he references here in his accompanying letter, and John Ruskin, who wrote in 1886 much to Lear's delight, that he considered Lear the first of his 'hundred authors' (Noakes, p.308). He recorded that he finished the poem on 1 March 1886, this version being dated by him 5 March 1886, thus predating the version of the poem dated 11 March, which was sold in these rooms as part of the Roy Davids Collection, Part III, May 2013, lot 279. It was, however, not sent to Selwyn until 19 May, as evidenced by the accompanying letter. Our version offers several differences to the version published in The Complete Nonsense Book, edited by Lady Strachey, 1912, p.395. In line 3, 'All the silent hours of night' written here becomes 'Thro' the silent hours' in the published version; line 9 'All his worldly goods' changes to 'All his goods away'; line 12 reads 'Every evening' and is published as 'Every morning', and in line 42, the alternative reading of the last line of verse 6 reads 'And he wandered thence no more' instead of the definitive published version '(And his shoes were far too tight)'. The letter that accompanies the poem is published in Edward Lear, Selected Letters, edited by Vivien Noakes, 1988, p.280. The recipient of our poem was The Rev. Edward Carus Selwyn, a theologian and scholar, who at the time of writing was principal at Liverpool College (1882-1887). They had met at Monte Generoso in the summer of 1880 and became regular correspondents. Selwyn commissioned a number of paintings from Lear, including, as Lear noted in a letter to Lord Carlingford of 31 August 1882 '...a very pleasant commission for some small drawings, and has besides bought a small copy of my big Cedars of Lebanon, long ago left unfinished...' (Strachey, p.268). From 1887 Selwyn was headmaster of Uppingham School and, when he retired in 1907, he rented Undershaw, the former home of Arthur Conan Doyle. He was to experience great tragedy in his latter years. His wife died in 1894 at the age of thirty-six after only ten years of marriage, probably in childbirth, and he saw his twin sons killed in the Great War, a year and a day apart. For more correspondence from Lear to Selwyn see lot 215. Provenance: The Rev. Edward Carus Selwyn (1853-1918), the great-grandfather of the present owner. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing