Unlike Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear never published explicit parodies of other people’s poems, which is not to say that he did not write any. On the contrary, his early poems, starting with “Eclogue,” based on Collins’s “Hassan, or the Camel Driver,” are very often parodies. Lear was also fond of providing his own comic illustrations to popular poems (see my previous Irish Sources of Edward Lear’s Early Picture Stories).

Although he did not have a formal musical education, Lear also enjoyed singing at the piano; in later life he was quite successful with his arrangements of Tennyson’s songs (see Lear Vamping), a selection from which was published in 1859 (the entries in his Diaries for September-November 1858 record his collaboration with E.F. Rimbault to prepare this edition). As a young man in Knowsley he probably preferred lighter subjects to entertain Lord Derby and his guests, and in this context adding a few stanzas to a well-known comic song would have been a good idea.

I have been unable to find “The Nervous Family,” the “published song” Lear decided to add to, but it is mentioned in the advertising section of Comic Songs to Popular Tunes. Ninth Collection, by J. Beuler (London: J. Beuler, 1833) as having already been published by the same “J. Beuler, 4, Bury Place, Bloomsbury, London” in a collection of Songs with accompaniment for the Piano-forte.

The song, in any case, was the parody of an older one, “We’re a’ Noddin,” composed by William Hawes on a poem, two versions of which can be found in The Universal Songster; or, Museum of Mirth: Forming the Most Complete, Extensive, and Valuable Collection of Ancient and Modern Songs in the English Language. Twenty-nine Wood-cuts by George and Robert Cruikshank engraved by J.R. Marshall. Vol. 1. London: Jones and Co., 1834, 208:

WE’RE A’ NODDIN.

(Original Words.)

CHORUS.
WE’RE a’ noddin, nid, nid, noddin,
We’re a’ noddin, at our house at hame.

Gude e’en to you, Kimmer, and how do ye do?
Hiccup — quo’ Kimmer, the.better that I’m fou.
We’re a’ noddin, &c.

Kate sits i’ the neuk, sippin’ hen broo,
Deil tak Kate, and she be na noddin too!
We’re a’ noddin, &c.

How’s a’ wi’ you, Kimmer, and how do ye fare?
A pint o’ the best o’t, and twa pints mair.
We’re a’ noddin, &c.

How’s a’ wi’ you, Kimmer, and how do ye thrive?
How mony bairns hae ye? — Quo’ Kimmer, I hae five.
We’re a’ noddin, &c.

Are they a’ Johnny’s?—Eh! atweel na;
Twa o’ them were gotten when Johnny was awa.
We’re a’ noddin, &c.

Cats like milk weel, and dogs like broo,
Lads like lasses weel, and lasses lads too.
We’re a’ noddin, &c.

О, WE’RE A’ NODDIN AT OUR HOUSE AT HAME.

(As altered, and sung in London, &c.)

O, WE’RE a’ noddin, nid, nid, nodding,
O we’re a’ noddin at our house at hame.
When the dame’s asleep, and the gude man’s fu’,
When lads love lasses, and lasses love so true,
Kate sits i’ the neuk, and her Jo sits by.
And the moon shines bright as the love in her eye.
And they’re a’ noddin, &c.

And how d’ye kimmer? and how d’ye, dear?
How long hae ye loved me? — a twalmonth or near;
I ha’ lov’d ye a twalmonth, dearer than life,
And e’re a day aulder, I’se mak’ ye my wife.
And be aye noddin, &c.

And how d’ye kimmer? and how d’ye thrive?
O’ siller and goud I ha plenty to wive;
Gie’s your hand then, my Jo, — O, na, na, na,
My hand it was promised to Willie far awa!
And we’re a’ noddin, &c.

The latter, the version used in Lear’s parody, is attributed to Robert Burns, from Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, vol. 3, 1790. The two first stanzas, however, appear in Herd’s collection, 1776. John Lockhart, The Works of Robert Burns; Containing His Life. (New York: William Pearson, 1835), 167.

A score for the poem, but with different words, appeared in Davidson’s Universal Melodist. Vol 1 (London: G.H. Davidson, 1853), 192:

Hawes’s song was wildly popular in the 1820s, so much as to be the cause of a copyright-infringement case, as told in The Georgian Era: Memoirs of the Most Eminent Persons. Vol. 4. (London: Vizetelly, Branston and Co., 1834), 280:

“Mr. Hawes had previously acquired a deservedly high celebrity as the composer and harmonizer of various songs, duets, &c. On the production of Montrose, or the Children of the Mist, at Covent Garden, in February, 1822, Miss Stephens sang two songs arranged by Mr. Hawes, Charlie is my Darling, and We’re a’ Noddin. The latter acquired great popularity, and being pirated and published in one of the magazines, by Mr. Taylor, jun., Mr. Hawes applied to the lord-chancellor for an injunction; but after having, in support of his copyright, expended £120, and Mr. Taylor, in his defence, £70, the lord-chancellor (Eldon,) finally declared that he knew nothing of music, and left each party to pay his own costs!!”

The detailed version is offered by the Gentleman’s Magazine, 42, January-June 1822 p. 270:

Thursday, March 14.
In the Court of Chancery (Hawes v. Sams.) Mr. Shadwell applied to the Court for an injunction to restrain the defendant, Mr. Sams, from publishing the song “We’re a’ noddin, nid, nid, noddin,” which, he said, was an old song, but with new music arranged by the plaintiff. The defendant had thought proper to publish it in the monthly publication, called the “Gazette of Fashion,” with the precise music of the plaintiff. The Lord Chancellor said he had got the “Gentleman’s Magazine” from the first number down to the present, in each of which a song had been published. He did not like to cut up a book of this description because this song was in it. His Lordship refused the application. — A Motion has since been made in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court, but has met with the same ill success.

The song appears to have been very fashionable in the 1820s, when it was repeatedly published in different versions, but it clearly remained a favourite for a long time e.g. We’re a Noddin, with Variations for Flute, with an Accompaniment for the Piano Forte, by Wm. Card. London. Lavenu. (1824), Trois Airs variés pour la Piano-forte, par Henri Hertz. — No. 1. Partant pour la Syrie; — 2. La Swissesse au bord du lac; — 3. We’re a Noddin (1828), Thalberg’s fantasia on “We’re a’ noddin” (The Musical World, XXIX, 1851, p. 251) as well as the above-mentioned version.

Here, at last, is the text of Edward Lear’s manuscript:

The Nervous Family

(Tune –

We’re a’ noddin,
nod, nod, noddin,
& we’re a’ noddin,
at our house at home)

1

We’re all nervous, very very nervous,
And we’re all nervous, at our house in town,
There’s myself, & my Aunt, & my Sister, & my Mother, –
And if left in the dark we’re quite frightened at each other!
Our Dog runs away if there’s a stranger in the house,
And our Great Tabby Cat is quite frightened at a mouse, –

For we’re all nervous, very &c.

2

My poor shaking Aunt can’t work at the needle,
And my shaking hand spills half my cup of tea.
When wine at her dinner my timid sister’s taking –
She drops it on the table, so much her hand is shaking –
And my poor old shaky Mother when to take her snuff she tries
To pop it in her nose, — she pops it in her eyes.

For she’s so nervous, very &c.

3

We all at dinner, shake – shake at carving,
And as for snuffing Candles, we all put out the light;
T’other evening after dinner we all to snuff did try,
But my Aunt couldn’t do it, nor my Sister, nor could I.
“Chill! Give me the snuffers!” said my Mother in a flout,
“I’ll show you how to do it!” – so she did, & snuffed it out,

For she’s so nervous,
very very nervous, — –
& we’re all of us nervous
at our home in town.

{Thus far is part of an old published song – the rest is mine. E.L.}

4

We’re getting much too nervous to go out to dinner
For we all sit a shaking, just like puppets upon wires.
I’m too nervous to speak loud, so I’m scarcely ever able
To ask for what I want, or to talk across the table; –
And my poor shaking Aunt where’er she sits, I sure to see,
Some sympathizing Jelly always shaking vis a vis, –

Which make her more nervous, very very &c.
And we’re all of us too –

5

We’re too nervous to get ready in time to go to church,
So we never go at all, since we once went late one day;
For the clergyman looked at us, with a dreadful sort of frown,
And my poor shaky mother caught his eye & tumbled down; –
And my Aunt & Sister fainted, — and tho’ with care & pain
We dragged them slowly out, — yet we’ve never been again –

And we’re all nervous, very &c.

6

Our nerves in stormy weather are particularly bad,
And a single peal of thunder is enough to drive us mad.
So, when a storm comes on, we in a fright begin
To lock ourselves in closets where the lightening can’t come in;
And for fear a little thunder to our nervous Ears should come,
We each turn a barrel organ, & my Mother beats a drum,

For we’re all nervous, very very nervous,
And we’re all nervous at our house in town.

These last 3 verses were composed by me at Knowsley, 1836.

Edward Lear.

The Edward Lear version of the song was first published, together with an alternative, very different one which appears to take its metre from the original “We’re a’ Noddin,” in The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense (ed. Vivien Noakes, London: Penguin, 2001, 53) and has been arranged for chorus by Benjamin Lees and performed by The Young People’s Chorus of New York: you can listen to part of the song and buy the CD containing it at CDBaby (the song is also available on iTunes). A review of the concert reveals that Lees was also inspired by Lear’s limericks to compose the interesting-sounding Vocalise:

The Nervous Family, commissioned by Young People’s Chorus, introduced the young chorus to the stage, and a double bassoon accompaniment added to the mix. The students, in yellow, red, and lavender, with young ladies in scarves and young men in jackets, were theatrically ready, as they kept repeating the word “nervous” in a humorous and surreal fashion. Lees’ Vocalise, a world premiere, inspired by Edward Lear limericks, reconfigured the chorus, as they sang only a one syllable short-A vowel, over and over, in melancholy, but melodic tones.

Rush to Barnacle Press to enjoy the full run of The Explorigator, one of the most original, and nonsensical, comics of all times and meet a crew on a par with the one that set out to hunt the Snark.

When it comes to citing these supposedly unstimulating poems, newspapers, in particular the Times that started it all and Reuters, have chosen to emphasize nonsense such as Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussy-cat.”

While the report itself does not sound so negative as the newspapers have chosen to make it appear, see the summary, it seems to me that the problem is not so much nonsense poetry, which might also be considered too challenging, as the lack of variety. On the other hand, the fact that the same poems are chosen in most schools simply means that teachers prefer to support an established canon: not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion, unless it is the result of indolence.

Thanks to Michael Sporn.

One might have deemed the book universally known, but it apparently escaped Freyer’s upbringing in East Germany. He reportedly read it only after agreeing to the project based on his esteem for Chin’s earlier music. But in an interview in the German magazine Rondo he criticized Carroll’s treatment of Alice as obscene and the work’s surrealism as outdated.

And:

A frosty relationship is said to have developed in rehearsals between Freyer and Chin, who in the Süddeutsche Zeitung took a swipe at his staging, calling it constrained.

All reviewers, at least so far, seem to agree on the “fascinating” nature of Chin’s score. From the little I have been able to see in the clips on the Staatsoper site I must say the staging looks fine to me, but it is not difficult to see how it may get boring in a show lasting over two hours.

More information, including a photogallery and a video, is available at the Bayerische Staatsoper site.

Parts of the opera were previewed during the 2005 Proms under the title snagS and Snarls and broadcast by BBC Radio 4.

Here is Chin’s own program note:

1 Alice Acrostic
2 Who in the world am I?
3 The Tale-Tail of the Mouse
4 Twinkle, twinkle, little star
5 Speak roughly to your little boy

snagS & Snarls was commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera and is a kind of sketch for the opera Alice in Wonderland, also for the Los Angeles Opera. With the exception of the first piece, its movements are based on scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

1 Alice Acrostic
Lewis Carroll wrote this poem as a conclusion for his two Alice stories. It is an acrostic in which, reading down, the first letters of each line spell out the name Alice Pleasance Liddell, the girl who inspired the Alice stories. In this poem Carroll recalls, nine years after the event, the boating trip on the River Thames on 4 July 1862, during which he made up and first told some of the Alice adventures to the three Liddell sisters. In the last line of this acrostic, ‘Life, what is it but a dream?’, Carroll was probably making reference to the anonymous canon that even then was popular in England:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream –
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.

2 Who in the world am I?
The text is taken from the chapter ‘The Pool of Tears’, in which Alice has an existential crisis arising from finding herself in a world in which another kind of logic appears to rule. It contains the poem ‘How doth the little crocodile’, which is a parody of a well-known English pious poem of the 18th century.

3 The Tale-Tail of the Mouse
A picture-poem from the chapter ‘A Caucus-Race and a Long Tale’

‘Mine is a long and sad tale,’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice; and sighing. ‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail … And she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so that her idea of the tale was something like this …

The music reflects the picture-poem. The phrases begin loudly and become softer and softer; the instruments move upwards quickly: the notes on the pages thereby take on the appearance of a mouse’s tail.

4 Twinkle, twinkle, little star
The punning text is a series of variations upon the Mad Hatter’s song ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat’, from the chapter ‘A Mad Tea-Party’. This text is in turn a parody of the poem ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’ by Ann and Jane Taylor. (The Carroll expert Martin Gardner has noted that Carroll was probably making another joke since ‘bat’ was what one well-known mathematics professor of Carroll’s acquaintance was called by his students.) The people and animals alluded to in the text, including Bill, Pat, and Ed, appear elsewhere in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

5 Speak roughly to your little boy
This scene is based on the chapter ‘Pig and Pepper’ and takes place in the Duchess’s kitchen, where the Duchess sings a grotesque lullaby to a baby who is later transformed into a pig. In the midst of it, the cook throws cooking pots and other kitchen utensils at the Duchess and others present, which is represented musically by an expanded percussion section that includes wineglasses, cutlery and cooking pots.

According to the author Martin Gardner, the text ‘Speak roughly to your little boy’ parodies a nowforgotten English religious instructional poem, ‘Speak gently!’, that was written by one of Carroll’s contemporaries. In addition I have inserted texts from Carroll’s stage version of Alice, which give the scene a ritualistic quality.

It now seems that evidence that Carroll knew and appreciated Lear’s books has been around for a long time, at least since Florence Becker Lennon’s The Life of Lewis Carroll. New York: Collier Books, 1962, pp. 171-2:

The strangest hiatus between Carroll and his contemporraries reaches to Edward Lear, in whose biography Angus Davidson says: “There occurred during the autumn of that year [1865], in the world which, until now, Lear had been indisputed king — the world of Nonsense — an event of the utmost importance, the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. From Lear’s complete silenceon the matter it might be thought that he never heard either of the book or of … its author; yet this is hardly possible. He was in London when it came out.” Lear and Dodgson both knew most of the pre-Raphaelites and moved in overlapping circles; if they never met, they could hardly have escaped hearing each other’s bon mots. But Carroll never mentions Lear either, and Mr. Madan [in a letter to Lennon] said there seemed to be “no trace” of Lear in his library. Nevertheless it is unthinkable that Carroll had not read the Book of Nonsense, which came out when he was fourteen. Carroll at least eventually appreciated Lear, for Miss [Menella] Dodgson writes in a letter that he gave her and her sisters one of the Lear books. Perhaps the two lions were mutually carnivorous, like Eugene Field’s fierce toy animals, and circled round at a respectful distance to keep from eating each other up.

In this case, too, we do not know what Carroll thought of Lear’s Nonsense, but his opinion must have been positive if he gave a copy of one of his books to his nieces.

More recently, while reviewing Charlie Lovett’s Lewis Carroll Among His Books (Jefferson, NC and London, McFarland & Company, 2005) in the latest Lewis Carroll Review (Issue 35, May 2007, p. 3), August A. Imholtz Jr. writes:

There is [in Lovett's catalogue, purporting to include books that Carroll read even if there is no trace in the existing lists] … no work by Edward Lear, and yet the late Iona Opie more than twenty years ago told me she had acquired Carroll’s own, unfortunately unannotated, copy of Lear’s Book of Nonsense, which is now in the Opie collection of Children’s Literature at the Bodleian.

Lennon’s idea that Carroll could hardly have ignored Lear’s 1846 Book of Nonsense might be confirmed by the fact that the young Dodgson actually wrote a few limericks, all of them composed in that same year.