Doggerel (Jump Rope Rhyme)

The chant falls under the category of “doggerel,” which, according to the dictionary, is “verse loosely styled and irregular in measure especially for burlesque or comic effect.” No one knows exactly when the rhyme first appeared, or who wrote it, but rumor had it that it was written by a news reporter to sell newspapers during Lizzie’s trial. Another rumor circulated that it was the anonymous writers of “Mother Goose” who came up with it.

For many years it was believed that the earliest publication of the rhyme was in the chapter on Lizzie Borden in crime journalist Edmund Pearson’s 1924 book, Studies in Murder. Pearson reported it had already been around a long time by then, often put to the tune of the popular song, Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Di-Yay, and had become so popular over the years that an author friend of his, Miss Carolyn Wells, told him that “when she was repeating some limericks and nonsense rhymes to President [Theodore] Roosevelt, on the veranda at Sagamore Hill, he recited this, and said that of all the doggerel verse he had ever heard, it had remained most persistently in his mind.” (Fun fact: It was Teddy Roosevelt who appointed William Moody, a prosecutor in the case against Lizzie, to the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Oft-repeated stories that children chanted the rhyme outside the windows of the jail where Lizzie was held before her trial are unsubstantiated. Yet, Borden expert Stefani Koorey noted that whether Lizzie heard it while in her cell or not, she certainly heard it many times afterward, at least according to the plentiful “anecdotes by descendants of Fall River residents who regale us with their stories of their grandparents or parents reciting the rhyme in Lizzie Borden’s presence in their childhoods. Or chanting it outside of her home in Fall River, knowing she was at home.”

It was only recently, in 2017, that Koorey brought to light that her sister, Kat Koorey, editor of The Hatchet, discovered a much earlier publication of the rhyme in a Savannah, Georgia newspaper, dated February 3, 1894, less than eight months after the conclusion of the trial. In the following days the same blurb (below) appeared in other newspapers across the country. So it’s very possible that the rhyme was already spreading from town to town before Lizzie ever went to trial.

“A Boston lady who brings her children up very carefully, and never allows them to see a newspaper, found them, on going into her nursery the other day, singing:
Lizzie Borden took an ax,
And gave her mother twenty whacks;
After seeing what she’d done,
She gave her father twenty-one.”

Apparently, the earliest versions of the rhyme used “twenty whacks” (very close to the actual number delivered to Abby), instead of the forty whacks that later became so entrenched through repetition. It would also seem that a number of other verses were invented and occasionally tacked onto the rhyme as well.

From Leonard Rebello’s 1999 book, Lizzie Borden: Past and Present, we find one of those extra verses:

Meanwhile, Sarah Miller, in her book The Borden Murders, reports another verse she discovered.

These extra verses were, like most doggerel, heartless towards their subject, and as cheerfully gruesome as the original verse. Perhaps that is one reason children have always loved to repeat it. Certainly, that catchy bit of rhyme is a huge reason why the legend of Lizzie Borden has not only survived over the years but thrived.