Some Limericks (1928)
The Norman Douglas 'Some Limericks':
Collected for the use of students, & ensplendour'd with introduction, geographical index, and with notes explanatory and critical.
Norman Douglas was 60 when he first offered this delightful collection—the result of a lifetime of assiduous research—in a privately printed edition. Anthologies of limericks are many, but this one, like a good wine, is rare indeed.
It was during the reign of Queen Victoria, according to Douglas, that this fine art achieved its greatest successes, and it is from this era that most of the choices in this volume come, though some from the '20s and an American sampling are also included. As important as the limericks themselves are Douglas's witty, pungent notes which follow each selection.
“He must be a quintessential fool who does not realize that the following fifty limericks are a document of enduring value,” writes Norman Douglas in his Introduction to this urbane and often hilarious collection. “I may be abused on the ground that the pieces are coarse, obscene, and so forth. Why, so they are; and whoever suffers from that trying form of degeneracy which is horrified by coarseness had better close the book at once.... At the same time I am convinced that nobody under the age of ten should peruse these pages, since he would find them so obscure in places that he might be discouraged from taking up the subject later on, which would be a pity. Ten, and not before, is the right age to commence similar studies.... Ten was the precise age at which I began to take an interest in this class of literature, and it has done me all the good in the world.”
