There Was a Fat Man of Bombay

Origins

It shows up in 19th-century nursery rhyme and nonsense collections, sometimes filed alongside limericks. It’s in the tradition of Edward Lear’s nonsense verses (first half of the 1800s), though it isn’t one of Lear’s. Some anthologies explicitly label it a “nursery limerick,” and it circulated widely in Mother Goose type books by the late Victorian period.

Meaning

Like many nonsense rhymes, it doesn’t carry a moral — it’s pure humor. The joke rests on the absurd image of a man in Bombay losing his pipe to a snipe (a bird with a long beak, common in marshes). The humor is doubled by the repetition of “Bombay” to bookend the rhyme, giving it a catchy rhythm.

It’s one of those short comic verses that survived mostly because it’s easy to recite, and children enjoy the silly imagery. It also rides the wave of 19th-century fascination with exotic place-names (Bombay, Bengal, etc.), which Victorians often used to spice up light verse.

Bombay in 1895