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ENGLISH NURSERY RHYMES

Before 1744: Oral Culture

Most famous English nursery rhymes are between about 200 and 500 years old, composed between c. 1500 and 1800. We do not know who the original authors were, and in many cases the rhymes were probably developed over a long period of time, with several people contributing ideas. In this early period the rhymes were not published as rhymes, but they are sometimes referred to in plays, satires, and other kinds of writing.

These references make it clear that nursery rhymes had a very low cultural status. They were associated with the “nonsense” and “ignorance” of lower-class culture. They were not regarded as especially suitable for children: on the contrary, they were often connected with drinking songs and salacious humour. Children were understood as exposed to them by nurses and servants.

In Thomas D’Urfey’s comic play, The Campaigners (1698), for example, a nurse is portrayed speaking to a child:

“Ah Doddy blesse dat pitty face of myn sylds, and his pitty, pitty hands and his pitty, pitty foots, and all his pitty things, and pat a cake, pat a cake, baker’s man, so I will master as I can, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and prick it, and throw’t into the oven.”

This is the earliest known reference to one of the most famous English nursery rhymes:

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.

Bake me a cake as fast as you can;

Pat it and prick it and mark it with B,

And put it in the oven for baby and me.

In general, the middle class, especially the religious middle class, saw the rhymes as silly at best and bad at worst. Educationalists condemned their influence on children. In his Improvement of the Mind (1741), for example, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), one of the leading writers of books for children at the time, wrote:

the dull rhymes that are sung to lull children asleep, or to sooth a forward humour, should be generally forbidden to entertain those children, where a good education is designed. Something more innocent, more solid and profitable, may be invented instead of these fooleries. … Let not nurses or servants be suffered to fill their [children’s] minds with silly tales, and with senseless rhymes, many of which are so absurd and ridiculous …

1744-1800: The Transition to Books of Rhymes

In 1744 Tommy Thumb’s Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, were published by Mary Cooper, a London publisher: the first books of nursery rhymes. These are complex publications: they claim to be books for children (“fit for the Capacities of Infants”), but at the same time they include a good deal of bad language and illustrations of children behaving badly. Some modern scholars think these books were designed more for adults than for children, and that to some extent they make fun of children.

The next collection of nursery rhymes was Mother Goose’s Melody, probably put together in the 1760s, but not published until 1781. Interestingly, in this collection the nursery rhymes are all given “moral” and “philosophical” notes—but these are generally ironic. This suggests that middle-class readers still had an awkward relationship to the traditional rhymes now “dignified” by being published in a book.

Two more collections of nursery rhymes that appeared in the 1700s were clearly intended mainly for adult readers: Joseph Ritson’s Gammer Gurton’s Garland, or the Nursery Parnassus of 1783 and Noel Turner’s Infant Institutes (1797). They show that people were becoming increasingly interested in nursery rhymes as expressions of traditional folklore.

1800-1850: Popularity and Controversy

In the period 1800-1850 the cultural status of nursery rhymes was transformed, even though they remained controversial. Many books of nursery rhymes were now published specifically for children. Though some educationalists still criticized them as “nonsense” that would have a bad effect on children, other educationalists defended them as highly imaginative, and above all as a “traditional” part of children’s education. The most important collector and writer on nursery rhymes at this time, James Orchard Halliwell (1820-89), wrote in 1842:

The absurdity and frivolity of a rhyme may naturally be its chief attractions to the very young; and there will be something lost from the imagination of that child, whose parents insist so much on matters of fact, that the “cow” must be made, in compliance with the rules of their educational code, to jump “under” instead of “over the moon”; while of course the little dog must be considered as “barking,” not “laughing” at the circumstance.

The rhyme he was referring to is:

Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon,
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

1850-1950: The Search for Deeper Meanings

By this time, there was almost no opposition to nursery rhymes, which had become a standard part of a child’s education all over the English-speaking world. But now that they had a “classic” cultural status, people began to dispute that they were just fun and nonsensical. The idea developed that they were actually full of cryptic references to real historical events and persons. This approach culminated in The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930), by the American scholar Katherine Elwes Thomas. The problem with this theory was that in most cases it was impossible to prove a connection, and by the end of this period it was being widely rejected.

The actual relationship of the nursery rhymes to historical events—if it exists at all—is certainly a complex one. A good example is one of the best-known nursery rhymes, “The Grand Old Duke of York”:

Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

Since the middle 1800s it has been repeatedly stated that this rhyme refers to Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany (1763-1827), the second son of King George III, who was appointed commander of the British army in 1793.

In the 1940s, Alfred Burne made a detailed study of Prince Frederick, however, and concluded (i) that the rhyme (in this form) did not exist in Prince Frederick’s lifetime and (ii) that there was “no event in his [the Prince’s] military career that remotely resembles the operation described in the jingle.” Moreover, he found a much earlier rhyme, dating back to at least 1594:

The King of France went up the hill

With twenty thousand men;

The King of France came down the hill

And never went up again.

Burne argued that the more modern rhyme had evolved from the earlier one, and that at some point after 1827 “The grand old Duke of York” was substituted for “The King of France.” Since Burne wrote, another 1800s version has been discovered in which it is Napoleon who marches up the hill.

Nursery Rhymes Today

Nowadays nursery rhymes are still an important part of every child’s education, and in general they are regarded simply as good fun, likely to stimulate a child’s imagination, and useful for developing a child’s interest in language. Modern media have presented them to children in more and more different ways.

The best-known nursery rhymes are the truest form of popular culture, because almost everybody knows them. References to them in other contexts can easily be recognized, and they have been featured in novels, films, operas, pop songs, television shows, political satires, advertising, and many other areas of cultural life.

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