Friendship with Franklin Lushington Begins
Poet involved
What happened
While traveling in Malta, Edward Lear met the young lawyer Franklin Lushington, forming an intense and enduring attachment that became the most significant emotional relationship of his adult life. Though the friendship remained largely unrequited in the way Lear hoped, the two corresponded and traveled together for decades. Lushington later served as an executor of Lear's estate.
Literary impact
The unfulfilled longing of this relationship is often read by scholars as a source of the loneliness and yearning for companionship expressed obliquely in poems like 'The Owl and the Pussycat' and 'The Dong with a Luminous Nose.'
Source: Wikipedia
