The Boston Globe, August 31st, 1988
LEAR. Selected Letters, edited by Vivien Noakes. Oxford University Press. 325 pp. $29.95. "A LIFE LIVED BACKWARDS," read The Times Literary Supplement headline on a review of this book, the first edition of Edward Lear's letters since 1907. The phrase is apt. The topographical artist and supreme practitioner of nonsense-verse assumed an elderly gravity at 20 and seemed to grow ever more lighthearted with the passage of the years. Although his letters are unfailingly blithe, their deeper emotional impression is melancholic. Lear suffered from epilepsy, a condition he concealed from his contempo...
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