There was was a man... The great limerick craze of 1907

In September 1907 a magazine called London Opinion offered a big cash prize for the reader who could come up with the best last line for the following limerick:

There was a young lady of Ryde
Whose locks were consider'bly dyed.
The hue of her hair
Made everyone stare...

It was only one of dozens of papers and periodicals to run such a competition. This year marks the centenary of what became one of the greatest crazes ever to grip the British nation, as limerick fever took a hold on all social classes. The extent of the contagion was measured by a statement to the House of Commons by the postmaster-general who noted the following year that sales of sixpenny postal orders – the standard entry fee for the contests – had risen from 800,000 the year before to 11 million. Nearly six million were sold in the month of August alone.

Even the local press ran competitions. The West Cumberland Times set one which began:

A man in the island of Skye
Had a notion he knew how to fly
Some wings he contrived
From a steeple he dived...

The winner was one U C Tinker whose completing line ran:

"Tempus fugit," said he, "Why not I?"

The runner-up, Charles Hales, offered:

And his wife added 'P' to RI.

The Great 1907 Limerick Craze was, of course, a lucrative affair, for competition organisers who pocketed huge sums; so much so that the government launched an investigation under the Lottery Act. But it cracked down on publications with competitions for which no real skill was needed – for example: guess, to the nearest fiver, the amount of cash in the Bank of England's coffers that week.

The limerick madness escaped, though there were a number of lawsuits from disgruntled entrants who claimed that the winning line was the same as the one they had sent in. One Frederick W Jones sued the News of the World for £72 16s 11d for a competition in the paper of 24 November 1907. The paper settled out of court.

The limerick is, of course, a far older form than the Victorian competition mania might suggest. The form can be traced back to the 14th century. Children's nursery rhymes, such as "Hickory Dickory Dock" are limericks. Because the verse is short and easy to remember bawdy limericks were common forms of entertainment in English taverns of the 15th and 16th centuries.

They became a vehicle for political and ontological messaging. Boswell's Life of Johnson cites a now-unfunny satirical limerick about a young lady who appeared at a masquerade dressed as a Jesuit. Meanwhile the 18th-century philosophical position that things only exist when we can see them was summarised in limerick form:

There once was a young man, who said: "God,
must find it extremely odd,
to think that this tree
will continue to be
when there is no one about in the quad".

To which deist opponents replied:

Dear Sir, your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
s observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

The limerick was first given its name after a singing game popular in early 19th-century Ireland where each singer contributed a different line recounting the exploits of imaginary people from different Irish towns. At the end of each verse everyone sang the chorus beginning with the line: "Will you come up to Limerick."

It was Edward Lear who first appeared to have translated it into its modern form. The limericks in his Book of Nonsense in 1846 prompted the humorous magazine Punch to begin printing them. A typical Lear limerick went:

There was an Old Man of Vienna
Who lived upon Tincture of Senna.
When that did not agree,
He took Camomile Tea,
That nasty Old Man of Vienna.

Lear's rhymes feel dated to modern ears, with his practice of repeating the first line as the last. "It feels like a cop-out nowadays," says the poet Roger McGough. "The limerick is the pratfall of poetry: the set up, the 1-2-3, the timing, then the rug is pulled." A good limerick is like a good gag.

Or two, suggests another contemporary poet, John Hegley, citing a rather rude one:

There was a young woman from Leeds,
who swallowed a packet of seeds,
within half an hour
her tits were in flower
and her fanny was covered in weeds.

The enduring attraction of the limerick is also its versatility, suggests Hegley, who swiftly came up with a limerick about the 1907 craze:

I'm a limerick contest I am
But really I'm more of scam
To elicit some cash
From the ready and rash
Who are after a glimmer of glam.

It is, says the Barnsley poet Ian McMillan, a democratic form. "Anyone can write one, unlike a villanelle or sonnet. It has primal rhythm to it, some kind of inbuilt heartbeat that reaches beyond the brain. It's a low art form, one that makes you smile. The very rhythm makes you laugh. It's a bit music hall, it's Rabelesian, it's a seaside postcard. It subverts poetic seriousness."

Sometimes that can done deliberately. Wendy Cope succeeds wickedly in Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis with her limerick version of T S Eliot's The Wasteland. Its five stanzas end:

No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,
Then thunder, a shower of quotes
From the Sanskrit and Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

It is, Ian McMillan asserts, impossible to write a serious limerick. "You can try. It is an exercise I set to students sometimes. Can you rewrite Hamlet in limericks? It would certainly make you think more deeply about what Shakespeare is saying. But would it work?"

On Amazon you can buy the Bible rewritten in limericks, I tell him, but I am at the disadvantage of not having read it. I did, however find on the internet a limerick version of that lyric masterpiece, "The Isle of Inisfree". It goes:

Young Mr Yeats, W B
Thought he'd visit that isle, Innisfree
A cabin he built
Out of twigs and some silt
And then peace dropped down from a tree

"There you are," says McMillan when I read it to him. "It's an inescapably daft form. The rhythm makes you laugh. It's kept the plot, but it just shows you that the original poem is not about plot."

Adrian Henri once tried this mission impossible, but the result is unconvincing:

In the town of the grey granite tower
With the smell of the balsam in flower
On that final June day
When we both went away
You turned as the clock struck the hour.

The bald fact is that there is something about the structure and rhyme-scheme of the limerick that subverts. Often the content marries to that, as with the infamous:

There was an old bishop from Birmingham
Who buggered young boys while confirming 'em
As he knelt on his hassock
He lifted his cassock
And pumped the episcopal sperm in 'em

Indeed some limerick experts maintain that the true limerick, as a folk form, is always obscene. The American scholar Gershon Legman insisted that bawdy humour was a prerequisite:

There was a young queer from Khartoum
Who took a lesbian up to his room.
They argued all night
As to who had the right
To do what and with which and to whom.

Ian McMillan's favourite certainly falls into that category, though inevitably it has a distinctly northern flavour:

At t'Lancashire prick trials just past
A walnut from Bacup came last
There was one from Wigan
It were a big'un,
But best'un, from Preston, were vast.

The winning entry to our opening limerick about the young lady of Ryde, by the way, was this: "She's piebald, she'll die bald!" they cried. In commemoration of the centenary of the Great Limerick Craze we would like to invite Independent readers to join a modern-day equivalent (and to resist the temptation to submit unprintably bawdy entries).

A bottle of champagne awaits the 10 best suggestions received by 16 September. Email your lines to competitions@independent.co.uk. The editor's decision is final.

Notable limericks

A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill will hold more than his belly can.
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week,
But I'm damned if I see how the hell he can - DIXON LANIER MERRITT

There was an old party of Lyme,
Who married three wives at one time
When they asked, "Why the third?"
He replied, "One's absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime!" - Cosmo Monkhouse

There was a young lady of Niger,
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They returned from the ride
with the lady inside
and the smile on the face of the tiger. - ANON

Although at the limericks of Lear
We may feel a temptation to sneer,
We should never forget
That we owe him a debt
For his work as the first pioneer - Langford Reed

There was an Old Man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man –
And, as for the bucket, Nan took it. - ANON

There was a young man from Darjeeling,
Who got on a bus bound for Ealing;
It said at the door:
'Do not spit on the floor.'
So he leant back and spat on the ceiling. - ANON

T.S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
At literary teas
Crying: "What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?" - W.H. AUDEN

Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many in life who were smarter.
But he finished PM,
A CH, an OM,
An earl and a Knight of the Garter. - CLEMENT ATLEE (ON HIMSELF)

A crusader's wife slipped from the garrison
And had an affair with a Saracen;
She was not over-sexed,
Or jealous, or vexed;
She just wanted to make a comparison - OGDEN NASH

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical. - Vyvyan Holland

The limerick's birth is unclear:
Its genesis owed much to Lear.
It started as clean
But soon went obscene,
And this split haunts its later career - O.E. PARROTT