The Limerick Craze
One of the attractions of the limerick is that it does not require any poetic genius to come up with a passable version, especially if the first four lines are already provided. This was the concept that made 1907 a golden year for amateur limerick writers, magazines and newspapers offering cash prizes to an entrant who, in the opinion of the judges, provided the best concluding line. The first magazine to launch a competition, in January of that year, was the London Opinion and Truth, which also claimed a place in the nation’s consciousness with its iconic Kitchener poster on the front page of its edition of September 5, 1914.
By September 1907 the limerick craze had swept across the country to such an extent that it was attracting the attention of a bemused foreign press. The New York Times reported that “millions [were] competing for prizes offered by almost every popular paper in England” and that a prize the equivalent to $1,225 was offered for ONE SILLY LINE (their capitals). “Eight weeklies”, it noted, “paid out $61,985 in a single week in their competitions”.
Advertisers soon jumped on the bandwagon, offering even larger prizes, such as a freehold property or a lifetime annuity, for completing the last line of a limerick plugging a certain product. The scale of the mania can be judged from a statement made by the Postmaster-General in 1908 to Parliament in which he reported that the sale of sixpenny postal orders, the usual competition entry fee, had risen in 1907 from less than a million to over eleven million with nearly six million sold in August alone.
Adherents of the “insidious yet rapid growth of the limerick craze” claimed it to be “the best mental exercise the public could possibly have, and people are becoming smarter in their solutions each day”. Enthusiasts were keen to share their techniques. One would write twenty solutions and then after a good night’s sleep would “mercilessly dissect each one”, while another recommended committing the first four lines to memory and then retiring to the quietest room in the house and letting “his mind wander where it will”. After about an hour’s contemplation, “the suitable line literally jumps into my mental vision. I never try to alter it afterwards, and I never post off more than one solution”.
Some tried a collaborative approach. One correspondent described how the whole family, or at least the male members, assembled around the dining room table and “each member, from the schoolboy to the elder brother in business, essays a solution, which paterfamilias duly takes note of. The concerted solution”, the writer avers, “is generally most satisfactory”.
Completing the limerick puzzle became the Edwardian equivalent of idly surfing the internet in the workplace, one city manager reporting that he constantly detected his clerks “in the act of surreptitiously scribbling on their blotting pads”. Some of his clients appeared so distracted that he was certain that their minds were preoccupied on finding the perfect solution. While the limerick mania might have impacted some forms of commercial activity, for one city bookseller it was a godsend as copies of rhyming dictionaries were flying off the shelf.
Limerick enthusiasts seemed to travel around London oblivious to their surroundings. A bus conductor reported that two gentlemen on the Fleet Street to Marble Arch bus were so absorbed in discussing the merits of a solution that they missed their stop at Charing Cross and blamed him for their oversight. On the railways a ticket collector observed that “quite a number of people every day miss trains and appointments through becoming temporarily lost in the maze of possible solutions”. Fortunately, for the travelling public “our guards and engine drivers do not as yet appear to have fallen victims to the craze”, he wryly observed.
Like the stalwart railway employees, not everybody was swept up in the limerick mania, an editorial in The Sphere on October 9, 1907, denouncing the “craze which must be doing a great deal of harm to large masses of people”. With one newspaper boasting of receiving 169,000 entries, questions began to be asked as to how the competitions could be fairly judged and whether they were really little more than lotteries with the winners selected by chance, putting the competitions into dangerous legal territory.
Some years earlier competitions requiring entrants to supply the missing word in a sentence had been banned as they were viewed as gambling. What saved the limerick competitions from that fate was that it was argued that the completion of a limerick required “the exercise of a certain degree of mental ability”. However, the tide was turning. Punch magazine, that bellwether of public opinion, noted that the address of one winner was the London County Asylum, adding, superfluously, that “comment would be superfluous”.
By the end of 1907 the craze had disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced, but to this day the limerick remains one of the nation’s most popular types of poem.
