Edward Lear was born in London in 1812, the youngest of twenty-one children, and from the age of fifteen earned his living as an artist. He spent much of his life traveling, and was a noted landscape painter and naturalist of his day. He died in Italy in 1888.
Jonathan Allen's youthful sense of the absurd is a perfect match for Lear's Allen is a recent graduate of the Central School of Art and Design in London.
Naomi Lewis, distinguished scholar and critic, is the principal adviser for the standard reference work Twentieth-Century Children's Writers.