Autograph letter signed ("Edward Lear").

Small 8vo. 8 pp on two bifolia. Author's annotations in blue pencil. To Emily Tennyson (1813-96), the wife of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson: a long, amusingly written and engaging letter on Lear's daily life in London, his progress on writing a new book, and his thoughts on religion. Suffering from writer's block, he starts the letter expressing his frustration: "I meant to have answered your last before now, but could not for though I am doomed to do-nothingness just now, I am so unsettled that I cannot write, ­ & it is only because I am a tome [!] & have been dining on cold beer & beef that I am able to write a tall [!]". He goes on to complain about visitors who interrupt his daily routine: "For, since I asked people to come & see my pictures, they come, - horribly & disjointedly; sometimes 20 at a time - of all kinds of phases of life: sometimes - for 3 hours no one comes: - so then I partly sleep, & partly draw pages of a new Nonsense book. If I sleep, I wake up savagely at some newcomer’s entrance, & they go away abashed. If I write nonsense, I am pervaded with smiles, & please the visitors". Lear provides an entertaining list of things he desires to have if he ever has some money: "I shall pay off all my debts - & profits - if there's any overplus, buy a pleasing tabby cat, or a guitar or some currant jelly, but I don't think there will be anything over". - An avid traveller, Lear was disinterested in the life and company which the city offered: "No, indeed, I do not like life in London. Dinners daily - but except now & then, they bore me to death [.] The middle classes - professional & otherwise, are by far the best fun & pleasure & knowledge or to converse. The big folk are in most cases a woeful bore. To hear the bigots & the apes talk of the Essays & Reviews! It makes one ill." - The letter continues with a long digression on his dislike of religion and church: "It is a pity so kindly a man should have forsaken God's attribute - reason - for the Priests' art - 'religion' [.] If a man comes to believe the bread & wine made yesterday is the flesh & blood of a person dead 2000 years ago - how can he laugh at Timbuctoo & Mumbo Jumbo? Yet one may pity these poor fanatics - & never in anywise persecute them, for they are but as children who cannot reason much". - In the last pages of the letter, Lear discusses his travel plans and expresses concern for his sister Ann's health: "I am very uncomfortable about it, tho' I cannot at all realize her not getting well. She brought me up from the leastest childhood, & when she goes, - my whole life will change utterly." Ann died on 11 March 1861, only five days after this letter was written. - Tape residue from archival mounting; minor stains.