Verse and Worse

If the name Baring-Gould seems vaguely familiar, perhaps you grew up as I did, exposed every Sunday to Hymns Ancient and Modern. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924) wrote many of them, including such traditional favourites as ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Now the Day is Over’. He was a hagiographer and an extraordinarily prolific writer, credited with over 1,240 publications on various subjects. He also found the time to father fourteen children, one of whom emigrated to America where his grandson, William Baring-Gould, was born in Minnesota in 1913.

William certainly took after his grandfather when it came to research and is best known for his biography of Sherlock Holmes, a major scholarly undertaking which plausibly fits together all the famous cases and stories, and convincingly fills in the gaps. I think, however, that you really need to be a member of the Baker Street Irregulars to fully appreciate all the allusions and connections. William and his wife Ceil (Lucile) produced The Annotated Mother Goose in 1962. It might perhaps be described as a coffee-table book, but it is not one of those extravagantly illustrated travelogues or a volume packed with photographs of impossibly perfect gardens. It is a book unlike any other that I have enjoyed and one from which I have learned a lot; also one in which the footnotes and illustrations are more compelling than the rhymes they describe. It includes nearly a thousand verses, although some of them are variations on a theme and others might more properly be termed folk songs, and nearly a thousand footnotes. This may sound daunting and even boring, so here is an early example to confute that impression: in England (the origin of most of them) the verses are generally called nursery rhymes, often associated with Old Mother Goose as a teller of tales. Who she was is a mystery: there are various theories going back hundreds of years, ‘But now it is time for the New World to put in its claim,’ writes William: Elizabeth Foster was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1665. At the age of 27 she married Isaac Goose who was then 55 and had been married before, and so she became stepmother to his ten children. She herself bore Isaac six more – perhaps she might also be the original Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe – and she was grandmother and teller of tales to dozens of others. ‘True or not, it is a pleasant story, and it would be cheering to Americans to think that “Mother Goose”, like Sherlock Holmes, may have been American.’ William’s tongue was often firmly in his cheek, and (to mix metaphors) he must have enjoyed pulling the legs of his numerous English cousins. Many of the rhymes have a long history, and some were printed on handbills. The first surviving collection, Mother Goose’s Melodies, was published in Boston in 1719, and Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (Volume II) ‘for the diversion of all Little Masters and Mistresses’ came out in London in 1744. Only one copy is known to exist, a treasured possession of the British Library. They cover every imaginable theme: lullabies and counting songs, prayers and memory aids, riddles and tongue-twisters, games and charms, proverbs and weather lore, and many that are simply entertaining nonsense. Some certainly had political and religious undertones, but as William dryly points out, ‘some students may, perhaps, have been a little overzealous in reading meaning into rhymes where no meaning was ever intended’. There can, of course, be no definitive answer: ‘Mary, Mary [or ‘Mistress Mary’] Quite Contrary’ is generally thought to refer to Mary, Queen of Scots, but is an example of how interpretations can differ. William cites the theory that the ‘pretty maids all in a row’ may have been ‘the Four Marys’, her ladies-in-waiting, and the cockleshells may have been decorations on a dress given to her by the Dauphin. As a child I was told that the pretty maids were nuns (Mary was after all a Roman Catholic), and that the cockleshells were a reference to those carried by the Palmers, so called because they brought back palm-leaf crosses from their pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Who knows? And does it really matter to children? There are of course slightly different versions of many of the rhymes, not just between Britain and America, but within Britain itself, and quite naturally we all tend to think that the versions we learned as children are the ‘proper’ ones. William notes the variations, and often explains them: there are all sorts of fascinating scraps of information and folklore throughout the collection. For instance, I remember the rhyme ‘Taffy was a Welshman’ (perhaps now considered politically incorrect) but was unaware of the origin of the name: ‘The Welsh pronunciation of the name “Davy”, David, became a nickname given the Welshman by the Englishman.’ The name ‘Margery’ (as in ‘Seesaw, Margery Daw’) was apparently used mostly by poor country people, and a Daw was ‘an untidy woman, slut, slattern’ (Oxford English Dictionary). ‘The suspicion arises that Margery Daw, whoever she may have been, was no better than she should be.’ The volume is beautifully and profusely illustrated, the early sections with old woodcuts and engravings, the later ones with a wealth of wonderful drawings by well-known artists, some of whom produced their own collections of nursery rhymes, such as Arthur Rackham, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott. Their styles are very different: Rackham’s delightful nursery rhyme illustrations are generally (and sensibly) much simpler than those he produced for other subjects such as Grimm’s tales and the German legends; Kate Greenaway’s children are models of good behaviour and decorum; Randolph Caldecott obviously took a sly delight in country scenes and bucolic characters. William cites more than 130 books containing or about nursery rhymes – half of them written before 1900 – but that is as much a measure of their importance in social history as it is a sign of nostalgia for simpler childhood days and the curiosity inevitably aroused by some of the verses. Who was Old King Cole? Bobby Shafto? The fine lady upon a white horse? Where was Tom Tiddler’s Ground? Why is the little red beetle called a ladybird? Which rhyme is quoted in King Lear? The answers are all in his fascinating collection. William published another entertaining volume of verses, but this is one you might want to remove from the coffee table when Great Aunt Gladys is visiting you. The Lure of the Limerick: An Uninhibited History was first published in 1967 and contains nearly 500 examples, with appropriate illustrations by the French Art Deco artist André Domin, Oscar Wilde’s young associate Aubrey Beardsley and – by way of contrast – Edward Lear. William realized that some people might be surprised:

Why, it may be asked, should anyone want to write about such an indecorous form of verse as the limerick? . . . Hardly an educated man is now alive who does not treasure in his memory at least one limerick, proper or improper. The chances are that he did not read it in a book or a magazine: it was passed on to him by word of mouth, by ‘oral tradition’. As such, the limerick is authentic folklore – a vital part of our heritage.

There are of course perfectly proper limericks about scientific phenomena:

There was a young lady named Bright Whose speed was far faster than light; She went out one day, In a relative way, And returned on the previous night.

Then there are others such as the one that Monsignor Ronald Knox persuaded an unwary newspaper editor to run as a classified advertisement: Evangelical vicar, in want, of a portable second-hand font, would dispose of the same, for a portrait, in frame, of the Bishop-Elect of Vermont, and W. S. Gilbert’s sarcastic response to the simplicity of Edward Lear’s verses:

There was an old man of St Bees, Who was stung on the arm by a wasp. When asked, ‘Does it hurt?’ He replied, ‘No, it doesn’t; I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet.’

The origin of the limerick is obscure, but some scholars claim to be able to trace it back to the fifteenth century, and there are several examples in Shakespeare’s plays of very similar verse forms. Even some nursery rhymes follow the format – ‘Hickory, Dickory, Dock’, for instance – but the Founding Father of the limerick, in William’s opinion, was Edward Lear with his Book of Nonsense (1846), although with few exceptions Lear ‘ignored the whiplash ending which makes the modern limerick so effective’ and often repeated the end of the first line:

There was an old man of Thermopylae, Who never did anything properly: But they said, ‘If you choose To boil eggs in your shoes, You shall never remain in Thermopylae.’

William traces the development and origins of the limerick, and provides examples of many famous authors from Lewis Carroll to Robert Louis Stevenson who ventured into this creative realm, including W. H. Auden:

The Marquis de Sade and Genet Are most highly thought of today, But torture and treachery Are not my sort of lechery, So I’ve given my copies away.

Auden was on the right track however because, generally speaking,

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.

The second half of this unusual book consists of a colourful collection of mostly bawdy limericks, many of them, as might be expected, recording the escapades of young men and women anywhere from Algiers to Zion:

There was a young girl of La Plata Who was widely renowned as a farta. Her deafening reports At the Argentine sports Made her much in demand as a starta.

She probably did not have much in common with Little Bo Peep, although both are attributed to the same prolific author, ‘Anon.’ William Baring-Gould died of a stroke in 1967 at the age of 54. He left an extraordinary legacy: mischievously entertaining accounts of meticulous literary research into subjects no serious academic would dare to explore – a fictional detective, children’s rhymes and questionable limericks. I wonder what he would have tackled next.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 79 © Alastair Glegg