 As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets.He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.Lear was born into a middle-class family at Holloway, North London, the penultimate of 21 children (and youngest to survive) of Ann Clark Skerrett and Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker formerly working for the family sugar refining business.