Sexing the Limerick

Lear initiated the modern fashion of writing limericks, a popular craze that began in 1863 in response to a reprinting of the 1861 edition of Nonsense. But the limericks written after Lear have been predominantly crudely sexual, whereas Lear’s are not explicitly sexual. A good proportion of them are, however, implicitly in many ways sexual—so that Lear likely initiated not only the popular craze for writing limericks but also the sexing of the limerick verse form. This literary sexual obsession was well under way by 1872 when he published more sexual limericks, adding to the movement he had initiated. His pre-1861 sexual limericks include; the ‘Lady of Welling’, the ‘Lady whose eyes’, the ‘Person whose habits’, the ‘Person of Ischia’, the ‘Lady of Lucca’, and the ‘Lady whose folly’; his 1872 sexual limericks include; the ‘Person of Bantry’, the ‘Man of Dunluce’, the ‘Person in black’, the ‘Man of Dumrose’, and the ‘Person of Janina’.