Editing Clerihew (section)

==Practitioners==
The form was invented by and is named after [[Edmund Clerihew Bentley]]. When he was a 16-year-old pupil at [[St Paul's School (London)|St Paul's School]] in London, the lines of his first clerihew, about [[Humphry Davy]], came into his head during a science class.<ref name=gale>{{cite book|last=Gale|first=Steven H.|year=1996|title=Encyclopedia of British Humorists: Geoffrey Chaucer to John Cleese|page=139|publisher=Taylor & Francis|isbn=0-8240-5990-5}}</ref> Together with his schoolfriends, he filled a notebook with examples.<ref name=First>{{cite book|first=E. Clerihew|last=Bentley|title=The First Clerihews|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=1982|isbn=0-19-212980-5}}</ref> The first known use of the word in print dates from 1928.<ref>{{OED|clerihew, n.}}</ref> Bentley published three volumes of his own clerihews: ''Biography for Beginners'' (1905), published as "edited by E. Clerihew";<ref name=gale/> ''More Biography'' (1929); and ''Baseless Biography'' (1939), a compilation of clerihews originally published in ''[[Punch (magazine)|Punch]]'' illustrated by the author's son [[Nicolas Bentley]].

[[G. K. Chesterton]], a friend of Bentley, was also a practitioner of the clerihew and one of the sources of its popularity. Chesterton provided verses and illustrations for the original schoolboy notebook and illustrated ''Biography for Beginners''.<ref name=gale/> Other serious authors also produced clerihews, including [[W. H. Auden]],<ref>{{cite book|last=O'Neill|first=Michael|year=2007|title=The All-sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry Since 1900|url=https://archive.org/details/allsustainingair1900onei_049|url-access=limited|page=[https://archive.org/details/allsustainingair1900onei_049/page/n106 94]|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-929928-7}}</ref> and it remains a popular humorous form among other writers and the general public. Among contemporary writers, the satirist [[Craig Brown (satirist)|Craig Brown]] has made considerable use of the clerihew in his columns for ''[[The Daily Telegraph]]''.