“Nursery rhyme” is a relatively recent term, dating back to the eighteenth century, for a much older oral tradition of rhymes for children. The other, slightly older, Anglo-American name for them, “Mother Goose” rhymes, refers to the collection of children’s fairy tales compiled by French author Charles Perrault in his 1697 Contes de ma Mère l’Oye [Stores of Mother Goose]. In 1765, children’s literature pioneer John Newbery published Mother Goose’s Melody, most likely compiled by author Oliver Goldsmith. This book cemented the connection between oral traditions and their fantasy author, Mother Goose. Nursery rhymes, despite several centuries of being committed to print in such collections as these, are still an oral tradition, and therefore must be memorable to ensure their survival. From a technical standpoint, the memorability of nursery rhymes is achieved through their strongly marked, sing-song rhythm and compactness. The most popular nursery rhymes also share some similarities in content that guarantee later repetition, either utility made catchy through rhyme or rich imagery, usually bizarre or absurd. Examples of these literary devices can be heard in “Thirty days hath September” or counting songs like “One, two, buckle my shoe / Three, four, shut the door” and in the Grand Old Duke of York with his 10,000 men marching in an endless loop or the whole cast of “Hey-Diddle-Diddle” with its athletic, outer-space cows, musical cats, laughing dogs, and absconding dishware.
Most nursery rhymes are anonymous, often attributed to Mother Goose, but there are notable popular exceptions. In the nineteenth century, women writers penned a host of surviving rhymes, such as Sarah Catherine Martin’s “Old Mother Hubbard” (1805), Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” (1806), and Sara Hale’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (1830). History has better preserved the names of the compilers of nursery rhymes, the earliest of which, from 1744, was Mary Cooper’s Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book. While originally two volumes, only the second is extant and includes such favorites as “Lady Bird, Lady Bird,” “Mistress Mary Quite Contrary,” “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” and “Hickere Dickere Dock.” Other popular anthologies include J. O. Halliwell’s The Nursery Rhymes of England (1841) and the more recent Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes by Iona and Peter Opie, two of the most prolific compilers and scholars in the field. Their dictionary contains 550 rhymes, excluding variations. An additional anthology, The Annotated Mother Goose (1958) by another married couple, William and Lucille Baring-Gould, tops this lofty number with 884 distinct rhymes.
Although nursery rhymes cover a huge breadth of thematic topics, some rough categories include lullabies (“Rock-a-Bye Baby”), informational didactic (learning numbers, the alphabet, weather, animal names, etc.), stories (some absurd, some not, “For Want of a Nail”), and games (which would include schoolyard rhymes, marriage or courting rhymes, bouncing or hand games, and linguistic games like “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”). Another well-known game tradition is rhymes for picking who will go first or for keeping time as for skipping rope: for example, “Eenie-meenie miny mo.” Finally, paradoxes and riddles form their own category. An example:
Little Nancy Etticoat
With a white petticoat,
And a red nose;
She has no feet or hands
The longer she stands
The shorter she grows.
The answer to this riddle is “candle.” Sometimes riddle-rhymes, due to their popularity, lose their original purpose. For instance, the rhyme of “Humpty Dumpty” was originally a riddle about eggs, but years of illustrations in children’s literature have transformed the riddle into a bizarre tale about an actual eggman who fell off a wall.
Alongside the history of nursery rhymes is the parallel history of nursery rhymes in the picture book tradition of children’s literature, making many of the most remembered rhymes synonymous with certain images. In more recent collections, illustrations can also be used to reference the lore surrounding the origins of specific rhymes. For instance, in Tony Ross’s Three Little Kittens and Other Favorite Nursery Rhymes, the illustration accompanying “Ring Around the Rosy,” often said to be about the Black Death, has a plague doctor–bird peeking out from behind the trees.
The association of the plague with “Ring around the Rosy,” like many alleged sources for nursery rhymes, has been widely critiqued (Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. 1985. The Singing Game Oxford University Press). Historical sourcing persists, though, as one of the most popular methods of interpreting nursery rhymes. Both the Halliwell and Opie anthologies include detailed notes of the ballads or older rhymes that were likely origins. Unlike some of the historical theories, there is a general consensus that many rhymes derive from longer ballads and that this is part of what has created the “nonsense” in certain songs, like a multigenerational game of “telephone.” For example, the former version of this ditty makes much more sense than the familiar version:
Hey! rub-a-dub, ho! Rub-a-dub
Three maids in a tub
And who do you think were there?
The butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker
And all of them gone to the fair.
Bawdier but more banal: in the nonsense version, the three ladies being spied upon are taken out, of course, and instead we have some tradesmen using a tub as a boat (Opie and Opie 1997). The more popular type of historical sourcing can be found in books promising the “secret” or “real” history behind the classics, as in Linda Alchin’s The Secret History of Nursery Rhymes or Katherine Elwes Thomas’s The Real Personages of Mother Goose, which attributed rhymes to various figures of the British aristocracy. Thomas was especially fond of the idea that encoded messages of pain and death were to be found in these snippets: “Across all this nursery lore there falls the black shadow of the headsman’s block” (Thomas 1930, 30). Another entertaining entry in this field was Albert Jack’s Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes (2008). Like several other authors, he attributed the origin of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” to a thirteenth-century wool trade tax, but his analysis is distinguished by his discovery of an older version of the rhyme, where the last line reads, “And none for the little boy / who cries in the lane” instead of “and one for the little boy / who lives down the lane.” This revision lends support to the 1275 wool tax meaning, since it was “a royal tax of six shillings and eight pence per wool sack—approximately one-third of the price of each sack,” so one-third for the king (the “master” in the rhyme), two-thirds to the church or monasteries (the “dame”), and none for the shepherd (“the little boy who cries”). This also changes the literal interpretation of the text: “Rather than being a gentle song about sharing things out fairly,” Jack points out, “it’s a bitter reflection on how unfair things have always been for working folk throughout history.” Although historical sourcing has the feel of trivia about it, the method owes its persistence to the realization that nursery rhymes are pieces of history, sometimes quite old. Though the degree of specificity advocated by researchers like Jack (who claims among other things to have discovered a sixteenth-century spider expert named Thomas Muffett, who, yes, had a daughter) remains questionable, historical sourcing remains a valuable tool.
For others, the meaning of nursery rhymes is not extratextual, but can be found in the text itself. Sometimes this happens at the level of literal meaning: poems that speak of rocking or lulling a baby to sleep, for example, are meant to do just that. A more nuanced version of this interpretation would be psychoanalytic applications like Lucy Rollin’s Cradle and All (1992). Rollin’s book is similar to Bruno Bettelheim’s more famous The Uses of Enchantment; she looks at the “containment of strong urges and the use of defensives and adaptive maneuvers in the service of maturation” in nursery rhymes. The domestic anxieties that reoccur throughout the canon of nursery rhymes—one parent leaving (“Baby Bunting”), falling apart (“Humpty Dumpty”), safety and security in sleep (“Rock-a-Bye Baby”)—are mini-dramas faced by children, and the rhymes assist in validating these feelings and helping them move past the fears. Karen Coats takes this approach and unites it with form for “Baby Bunting”: “The repetition of a few distinct phonemes, along with the rhythm and rhyme, make this a verse that creates a multifaceted holding environment for the baby—that is, it takes an anxiety-producing situation and wraps it in a tightly controlled meter with a limited number of sounds. The rhyme and meter take the baby back to a time before lack, a womb-time where the steady rushing of blood and the regular beat of the heart held their bodies securely” (Coats 2013).
The idea that form and content of specific poems have an important purpose, whether we know the purpose or not, is supported by the amazing consistency among versions of nursery rhymes through different periods, despite many, many attempts at censorship. Nursery rhymes have been variously attacked for their anarchic quality, periodic violence, and absurdity. In the eighteenth century, Isaac Watts attempted to create alternate, religiously appropriate rhymes to improve morality and supplant the older versions, but to no avail. One lasting attempt was Samuel Goodrich’s, of Peter Parley fame. He included a “fake” nursery rhyme to mock the uselessness and silliness of the genre in his Merry’s Museum (1846):
Higglety, pigglety, pop!
The dog has swallowed the mop;
The pig’s in a hurry,
The cat’s in a flurry—
Higglety, pigglety-pop!
The lesson, like most of Goodrich’s work, did not survive much past the telling, but the rhyme persisted, entering oral tradition. “Thus an archly ironic critique of nursery rhymes becomes a nursery rhyme,” Ronald Reichertz remarks, “such is the power of the form” (Reichertz 1994).
Meredith Wallis
See also Game Songs and Rhymes; Lullaby
Further Reading
Coats, Karen. 2013. “The Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach.” International Research in Children’s Literature 6 (2): 127–142.
Ford, Robert. 1904. Children’s Rhymes, Children’s Games, Children’s Songs, Children’s Stories. 2nd ed. Paisley: Alexander Gardner.
Greenaway, Kate. Mother Goose; Or, the Old Nursery Rhymes. London: Fredrick Warne.
Griffith, Kathlyn. 2004. “Nursery Rhymes: Everything Old Is New Again.” Thinking Through the Arts, edited by Wendy Schiller. London: Routledge.
Jack, Albert. 2008. Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes. New York: Penguin.
Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. 1997. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reichertz, Ronald. 1994. “The Generative Power of Nursery Rhymes.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 19: 100–104.
Roberts, Chris. 2004. Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme. London: Granta Books.
Rollin, Lucy. 1992. Cradle and All: A Cultural and Psychoanalytic Reading of Nursery Rhymes. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
Ross, Tony. 2007. Three Little Kittens and Other Favorite Nursery Rhymes. New York: Henry Holt.
Nursery Rhymes—Primary Document
The Origins of Mother Goose (1791)
The following selection comes from the first English-language collection of “Mother Goose” nursery rhymes, which was reproduced in facsimile and lavishly illustrated for English and American readers by William Francis Prideaux, a British military officer, diplomat, and gentleman-scholar of the Victorian era. The text that Prideaux copied first appeared in a book published in London in 1760, then in Massachusetts in 1785. By the 1820s, Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes had become a household staple. These rhymes were sung to children in a preindustrial world characterized by indentured servitude, traveling to the miller, and fetching pails of water.
A Melancholy SONG.
TRIP upon Trenchers,
And dance upon Dishes
My Mother sent me for some Bawm,
Some Bawm:
She bid me tread lightly,
And come again quickly,
For fear the young Men should do me
some Harm.
Yet didn’t you see,
Yet didn’t you see,
What naughty Tricks they put upon
me;
They broke my Pitcher,
And spilt the Water,
And hufft my Mother,
And chid her Daughter,
And kiss’d my Sister inftead of me.
What a succession of misfortunes befell this poor girl! But the last circumstance was the most affecting, and might have proved fatal.
Winslow’s View of Bath.
CROSS patch, draw the latch,
Set by the fire and spin;
Take a cup and drink it up,
Then call your neighbours in.
A common case this, to call in our neighbours to rejoice when all the good liquor is gone. Pliny.
AMPHION’S SONG Of EURYDICE.
I WON’T be my father’s Jack,
I won’t be my father’s Gill,
I will be the fidler’s wife,
And have music when I will.
T’other little tune
T’other little tune,
Prithee, Love, play me,
T’other little tune.
Maxim. Those arts are the most valuable which are of the greatest use.
THREE wise men of Gotham,
They went to sea in a bowl,
And if the bowl had been stronger,
My song had been longer.
It is long enough. Never lament the loss of what is not worth having. Boyle.
THERE was an old man,
And he had a calf,
And that’s half;
He took him out of the stall,
And put him on the wall,
And that’s all.
Maxim. Those who are given to tell all they know, generally tell more than they know.
THERE was an old woman
Liv’d under a hill,
She put a mouse in a bag,
And sent it to mill:
The miller did swear
By the point of his knife,
He never took toll
Of a mouse in his life.
The only instance of a miller refusing toll, and for which the cat has just cause of complaint against him. Coke upon Littleton.
THERE was an old woman
Liv’d under a hill,
And if she isn’t gone
She lives there still.
This is a self-evident proposition, which is the very essence of truth. She lived under the hill, and if she is not gone she lives there still. No-body will presume to contradict this.
PLATO’s SONG.
DING dong bell.
The cat is in the well.
Who put her in?
Little Johnny Green.
What a naughty boy was that,
To drown poor Pussy cat.
Who never did any harm,
And kill’d the mice in his father’s barn.
Maxim. He that injures one threatens an hundred.
LITTLE Tom Tucker
Sings for his supper;
What shall he eat?
White bread and butter:
How will he cut it,
Without e’er knife?
How will he be married,
Without e’er a wife?
To be married without a wife is a terrible thing, and to be married with a bad wife is something worse; however, a good wife that sings well is the best musical instrument in the world. Puffendorf.
SEE saw, Margery Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master;
Jacky must have but a penny a day,
Because he can work no faster.
It is a mean and scandalous practice in authors to put notes to things that deserve no notice. Grotius
GREAT A, little a,
Bouncing B;
The cat’s in the cupboard,
And she can’t see.
Yes, she can see that you are naughty, and don’t mind your book.
SEE saw, sacaradown,
Which is the way to London
town?
One foot up, the other foot down,
That is the way to London town.
Or to any other town upon the face of the earth. Wickliffe.
SHOE the colt,
Shoe the colt,
Shoe the wild mare;
Here a nail,
There a nail,
Yet she goes bare.
Ay, ay; drive the nail that will go: that’s the way of the world, and is the method pursued by all our financiers, politicians, and necromancers. Vattel.
IS John Smith within?
Yes, that he is.
Can he set a shoe?
Aye, marry two.
Here a nail and there a nail,
Tick, tack, too.
Maxim. Knowledge is a treasure, but practice is the key to it.
HIGH diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jump’d over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such craft,
And the dish ran away with the
spoon.
It must be a little dog that laugh’d, for a great dog would be ashamed to laugh at such nonsense.
RIDE a cock horse
To Banbury cross,
To see what Tommy can buy;
A penny white loaf,
A penny white cake,
And a two-penny apple-pye.
There’s a good boy, eat up your pye and hold your tongue; for silence is the sign [of] wisdom.
COCK a doodle doo,
My dame has lost her shoe;
My master has lost his fiddle stick,
And knows not what to do.
The cock crows us up early in the morning, that we may work for our bread, and not live upon charity or upon trust: for he who lived upon charity shall be often affronted, and he that lives upon trust shall pay double.
THERE was an old man
In a velvet coat,
He kiss’d a maid
And gave her a groat;
The groat it was crack’d,
And would not go,
Ah, old man, do you serve me so?
Maxim. If the coat be ever so fine that a fool wears, it is still but a fool’s coat.
ROUND about, round about,
Magotty pye;
My Father loves good ale,
And so do I.
Maxim. Evil company makes the good bad, and the bad worse.
JACK and Gill
Went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down
And broke his crown,
And Gill came tumbling after.
Maxim. The more you think of dying, the better you will live.
Source: Prideaux, W. F. Mother Goose’s Melody: A Facsimile Reproduced of the Earliest Known Edition [1791]. London: A. H. Bullen, 1904.