A Blog of Bosh

I had just finished my previous post when I received the following article from Arthur:

A New Book of Nonsense

The nonsense craze started by Edward Lear in the 1840s eventually swept through the entire English speaking world. The spread, however, was more of a creep than an explosion in the early years by today’s standards.

In America the earliest books of limericks were published in New York and London simultaneously:

Parkes, Harry. Random Rhymes. London & New York: Frederick Warne & Co., c1860.

Rummical Rhymes with Pictures to match set forth in fayre prospect Alphabetically & Geographically. New York: Hurd Houghton, 1862 and Dean & Son, 1863.

The first American printing of Lear’s A Book of Nonsense was probably:

Lear, Edward. A Book of Nonsense. Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 1863. First American printing. Some distribution with original title-leaf canceled and imprinted “New York: M. Doolady, agent.”

The first distinctly American limerick books were associated with the American Civil War:

Ye Book of Copperheads, Philadelphia: Frederick Leypold, 1863. Reprinted in 1864 in conjunction with the Lincoln-McClellan presidential campaign.

The Book of Bubbles: A Contribution to the New York Fair in aid of the Sanitary Commission. New York: Endicott & Co., 1864.

The New Book of Nonsense: A Contribution to the GREAT CENTRAL FAIR in aid of the Sanitary Commission. Philadelphia: Ashmead & Evans, 1864.

The New Book of Nonsense, like The Book of Bubbles, was produced and sold as a fund raiser for the Sanitary Commission. The Sanitary Commission was a civilian organization in the North dedicated to remedy the “unsanitary conditions” to which Union soldiers were subjected. The nearest thing to the Commission today would be the Red Cross.

The book was clearly an attempt to take advantage of the popularity of Lear’s nonsense books. The printing and binding is very slipshod, with limericks often cropped in part. But the style of the verses and their topics, while many are perhaps shocking today, and certainly politically incorrect, are an excellent window on the way 1860s Americans viewed the world.

A number of early limerick books are now available for your online enjoyment, including the four published in the 1820s that inspired Edward Lear:

1. The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women. Illustrated with as many engravings; exhibiting their principal eccentricities and amusements. Much credit is due to our artist, I ween; For such pictures as these can seldom be seen. London: J. Harris and Son, 1822. First edition 1820. [From the Hockliffe Collection website. Colour scans at the Edward Lear Home Page.]
2. Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen. London: John Marshall, c 1821. [Colour scans at the Edward Lear Home Page.]
3. Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Young Ladies. By the Author of “Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen.” London: E. Marshall, c1822. [From the Hockliffe Collection website.]
4. A Peep at the Geography of Europe. Illustrated by Comic Figures of the Several Nations. London: E. Marshall, c1824. [Courtesy Arthur Deex.]

Also worth a look are: A Lady. Little Rhymes for Little Folks: or, Poetry for Fanny’s Library. London: John Harris, 1823 [Arthur Deex], which contains a few limericks; and Thomas Hood. The Headlong Career and Woful Ending of Precocious Piggy. London: Griffith and Farran, 1860 [University of Florida], in which the story is told in monorhyme limericks, every single line in the book rhyming with “pig”.

In addition, you can now read three early American books from Arthur’s collection:

1. The New Book of Nonsense. A Contribution to the Great Central Fair in Aid of the Sanitary Commission. Philadelphia: Ashmead & Evans, 1864.
2. Ye Book of Bubbles. A contribution to the New York Fair in aid of the Sanitary Commission. Endicott & Co., New York: March 1864.
3. Ye Book of Sense. A Companion to the Book of Nonsense. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, n.d. Title and thirty-one hand colored plates. Oblong 8vo. c1870.

Arthur has also provided two very beautiful limerick books from the 1900s:

• John Prentiss Benson. The Woozlebeasts. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co. 1905.
• Edmund Dulac. Lyrics Pathetic & Humorous from A to Z. London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1908.

Not enough? For some time our gallery has been hosting Bennet Cerf’s Pop-up Limericks (New York: Random House, n.d.).

Arthur Deex has digitized two more early limerick books, Ye Book of Bubbles (1864) and Ye Book of Sense (c1870), and writes of the latter:

A Review in the May 88 Pentatette

A recent addition to my collection was a book of limericks that was previously unknown to me: Ye Book of Sense: A Companion to the Book of Nonsense. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, n.d. Title and thirty-one hand colored plates. Oblong 8vo. c1870.

Its oblong shape [the first books of nonsense / limerick verse were all oblong to accommodate their three or four line format; they remained oblong for a time even after format stabilized at five lines] and the reference in the title to Lear’s Book of Nonsense clearly mark it as one of the earliest American books of limericks.

A reasonably accurate estimate of the publication date of the book requires more than a little conjecture built on observation:

Although the limericks are obviously Lear inspired there are marked changes from the Lear style.

Only seventeen of the thirty-two limericks in the book use the standard Lear first line rhyme word as the fifth line rhyme word.

Ten of the limericks are not geographically oriented.

The clothing styles in the illustrations are not unlike Civil War fashions. There are no uniformed men, however, — in fact most of the men wear full length robes or skirts.

Not as rough in metre and rhyme as the Sanitary Fair limericks, they are completely free of references to soldiers or the Civil War.

To me all this this suggests that they pre- or post- date the war by several years. Because of the maturity of the verses, and by this I mean dissimilarity with A Book of Nonsense, I place it about 1870. The verse on the back cover suggests the same kind of fund raiser as the Sanitary Fair limerick books.

It could, on the other hand, be immediately prior to the Civil War; A Book of Nonsense was, after all, published in 1846 – leaving plenty of time for the notion of the nonsense verse to cross the Atlantic.

And adds in the e-mail:

An interesting side point is that the single vertical picture (p 30) is bound with feet left (toward the spine) and head right (away from the spine). That makes the picture upside down when you read the book. I don’t know if that was intentional or just a mishap down at the binding shop.

There are two known copies of this book in addition to mine: University of Florida and The Newberry Library, Chicago. My estimate of the date of publication is 1870 — U Florida puts it at 1878 and The Newberry, 1860s –so the consensus is 1870 +/- a decade.