If you pick up Inventing Edward Lear in a bookstore, I hope you’ll turn to the pictures first. I would! Maybe you will be delighted by the imaginary enormous Hippopotamouse Rabbitte with its Lilliputian attendants feeding it lettuce; or by Lear’s atmospheric early sketch of Langdale in the Lake District; or by his astonishing self-caricature (drawn in his 20s) as an old man, stooped and with a stick, his spectacles appearing to slide down his nose like snowballs. All these appear here in print for the first time.My book isn’t a biography, though you can glean the essential facts of Lear’s life from it, including a lot of brand-new material about his early friendships and home life. It was liberating not to have to follow Lear on every one of his innumerable journeys and visits. You can read all about those in Vivien Noakes’s or Jenny Uglow’s lives of Lear. I wanted to have the space to look closely at Lear’s work, offering new readings of most of his best-known poems, and engaging closely with the life of his mind, his ideas, his moods, his artistic practices, his reading and viewing. I wanted to be able to draw connections between his work as a writer, an artist, a musician, and a naturalist, suggesting that rich interdisciplinarity was the fundamental quality of his mindset, his oeuvre. The advantage of each chapter being thematic is that you can read them in any order, guided by your own particular interests.However, I really hope that – sooner or later – you will find your way to Lear’s music, which is the subject of chapter one, and listen along to his songs while you are reading. I think you’ll agree that Lear’s setting of Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ compares favorably with song-settings of the same poem by Arthur Sullivan and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In fact, I think it is better. You’ll also hear the musical echo of Lear’s Tennyson setting ‘Sweet and Low’ in the chorus of his nonsense poem ‘The Jumblies.’ The music of the first fits perfectly to the cadences of the second. That realisation clarified for me why ‘The Jumblies’ is a melancholy, wistful poem as well as a happy, wishful one. It is both a lullaby for children and a lullaby for childhood – full of musical regret and emotional longing.In my final chapter, I look at Lear’s life-long history of self-caricature – always as a small creature, a snail, a bee, a bird – and how his self-presentation as an object of amused sympathy has affected his reputation as a poet who is loved but has not until recently been accorded serious critical attention. Lear usually gave his illustrated letters, poems, songs, alphabets, and botanies, as gifts; they were only subsequently published. In his own words, he was an ‘Adopty Duncle.’ This, too, has affected how we approach Lear’s work. It remains in the realm of gift; Lear’s exuberant but self-deprecating, cartoon body is part of the gift. He became identified with his nonsense and was sometimes hailed as ‘Book of Nonsense’ by strangers in hotels. His nonsense is created in social dialogue; it creates a game for more than one player, a song for more than one voice.I think we should value tremendously highly the personal, affectionate nature of the relationship Lear builds with each reader, while also treating him with the respect we give to other Victorian polymaths he knew – John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I would like my book to be a step in that direction.To take entirely at face value the comic, small and ungainly figure of Lear that he promulgates in cartoons – the Lear who hangs on the horns of a mouflon or like a pupating caterpillar in a bag from a tree – runs the risk of re-creating in different form the patronage on which he depended during his lifetime. Lear performed dependency, just as he performed hanging from his inside-out umbrella when the wind sweeps him away, or as he performed the hapless protagonist of the comic song ‘Tea in the Arbour.’ If we assume that Lear’s poetry is always chiefly and directly about his feelings at the moment of composition, we are reading cabaret as soliloquy.Lear was an intellectual who liked the company of other intellectuals. His closest friends included some of the foremost Cambridge scholars of their generation; the women whose company he preferred were authors, musicians, artists, travel writers, linguists, and translators. He read widely and thoughtfully all his life, consuming periodicals and books in several languages that included philosophy and religion, poetry, essays, biography, letters, natural history, travel, novels, and parliamentary reports. He was taller, slimmer, fitter, more capable, more attractive to others, less isolated than is often assumed. In many cases, we can read Lear only through the lens of his self-mockery – as it is such an essential part of his letters and diaries – but it is vital at least to recognize how effectively Lear created his nonsense persona. Only by recognizing Lear’s self-fashioning as a character and responding to his ideas, rather than merely to the pathos of his biography, can critics fully appreciate his art. For ‘Edward Lear’ has proved, in many ways, to be Lear’s greatest and most enduring invention.