While browsing through magazines at a bookstore recently I happened upon an article on the Lizzie Borden case. It appears in issue No. 70 of Murder Most Foul, “Britain’s No. 1 True Crime Quarterly.”
This sort of thing happens pretty frequently, as more and more magazines, journals, books, and online sources discover Miss Lizzie Borden and find her story worthy of telling.
This one appears on page 46. The short 13 paragraph, half-page summary of the case averages almost an error every paragraph, with some “new” facts presented as well. The most interesting reconfiguration is this:
“The trial received huge national publicity and became a landmark in media coverage of legal proceedings. One newspaper even made up an advertising jingle that entered popular culture as a playground rhyme: ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks, when she saw what she had done she gave her father 41.'”
The doggerel was not created as an advertising jingle, but, instead, was invented by an unknown person after the murders and was supposedly sung or chanted outside the courthouse where Lizzie was on trial for the murders in 1893 in New Bedford, MA.
