An antidote to Potter-training

Lear recalled: "It was wonderfully funny to hear the Chancellor read the whole aloud with a solemnity befitting the perusal of grave history." Perhaps some of their sheen rubbed off on him; he was once mistaken for Palmerston by a drunken carabiniere.

He was the 20th of 21 children to straggle from the loins of a father who was better at producing mouths than filling them. His jokes don't grumble but they rumble with a slight, hollow ache as when, aged 17, he pictured himself "looking as black and blue / As a spoonful of milk in an empty plate". George Eliot complained that Byron "riled" her because "he would compare a broken heart to a broken glass", and she might equally have lost patience with Lear as he played about with his demeaning puns on food: "I am quite in a flurry / And nervously warm / like a dish of stewed curry." Yet the replete fantasy of enduring lines such as "They dined on mince and slices of quince" could have been dreamed up only by someone who'd felt an occasional pinch of hunger and who had frequented less elegant fowl than the honey-tongued Owl, birds like the hens of Oripu, which Lear foresaw in a vision of factory-farming: "A fishlike ancient smell and taste / Unpleasant doth pervade / the hens of Oripu".

We owe to Vivien Noakes most of what we know about Lear. Her biography, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, has been rightly praised by such luminous heirs of his as Stevie Smith and Ronald Searle; her catalogue for the 1985 Royal Academy exhibition of his work as painter and draughtsman remains a beacon and a benchmark for all later study. With The Complete Verse and other Nonsense, she at last provides scholars and younger children with a full, reliable text of his songs and stories. All caring parents will buy this volume for their offspring this Christmas, especially for those little dears who are terminally Pottertrained. It unearths dozens of rare gems as well as preserving the old favourites and is thoroughly illustrated with his drawings, even with lavish plates of landscapes from Santa Maria della Salute and the Moon.

Mrs Noakes's careful textual notes tell us a great deal about the delicacy with which Lear calibrated his absurdities. The limericks often end with a line that peaks on an adjective - "You propitious Old Man with a beard", "That accomplished Young Lady of Welling" - and her study of manuscript variants shows him tweaking the epithets, so that the Person of Ischia was "susceptible" before he became "lively old" and the Old Man of Peru was for a while "unhappy" until he settled down as "intrinsic". She is less adept at spotting allusions, either to Tennyson (the diary entry she cites for the day Lear decided not to propose marriage to Miss Bethell is from Maud) or to the Bible (when Lear wrote of pears multiplying "like Widow's oil", he was not muddling up New Testament parables but referring to the story of Elijah and the widow's cruse).

Goodness knows how the prophet, the widow and her son got through the famine but they did. Improbable survivals stirred Lear's imagination as did lurid extinctions. He began earning his living as an illustrator for works of natural history, and a Darwinian sensitivity to the humour of persistence, to the vagaries of sexual selection, breathes through his nonsense stories of love across species-boundaries and in stressful habitats. He prefigured not only Thurber's crazed palaeontologist, Dr Millmoss, but also Walking With Beasts in his Roehampton Chronicle where he solemnly records the "discovery" of household objects such as a hatstand: "the gigantic & fossil remnant of an extinct brute partaking of the nature of the ostrich & the domestic caterpillar - its general appearance at once surprising & objectionable." Scientists were already, in Victoria's day, sounding over- excited, like CNN anchor men, when Lear parodied their announcements that "fresh discoveries are on the point of being about to be expected to be supposed to be made". It was Darwin's propagandist, Huxley, who coined the word "agnostic" but it took Lear with his genius for small expectations to invent a brood of chickens who puzzle over "this mystery of Eggs" and "why we chirp and flap our wings - or why we've all two legs?" and who conclude inconclusively that, perhaps, "we were merely born by chance, / Eggnostics for to be".