By Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Little Bo-Peep’ is a classic nursery rhyme, probably one of the most famous in the English language. But what are the origins of ‘Little Bo-Peep, and what does it mean? Before we attempt an analysis of this children’s rhyme, here’s a reminder of the words:

Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,
And can’t tell where to find them;
Leave them alone, and they’ll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.

Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep,
And dreamt she heard them bleating;
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were still all fleeting.

Then up she took her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they’d left their tails behind them.

It happened one day, as Bo-Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails, side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.

She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
To tack again each to its lambkin.

That final verse is sometimes rendered as:

She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks she raced;
And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,
That each tail be properly placed.

‘Little Bo-Peep’ is unusually melancholy for a nursery rhyme: unlike ‘Ring-a-ring o’ Roses’ or ‘London Bridge is falling down’, it’s hard to imagine children dancing around and clapping to its words about a poor shepherdess who loses her flock of sheep, only to discover their tails hanging somewhat gruesomely from a tree.

However, there is a possible game-link, which Little Bo-Peep’s name takes us to: the children’s game ‘Bo-Peep’, a game played with babies in which a handkerchief is thrown over the child’s head, with the adult calling out boldly, ‘Bo,’ then lifting up a corner or pulling it off altogether, and saying, ‘Peep!’ (This game is also known as peekaboo.) The idea of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t is certainly relevant to Little Bo-Peep’s lost sheep, making her perhaps one of the best examples of nominative determinism in all English nursery rhymes.

‘Little Bo-Peep’ first turns up in print in the nineteenth century, although who the author of the rhyme was, and whether it existed in oral culture for a long time before it was first published, nobody knows for sure.

A bit of Bo-Peep-related trivia: in the early years of his career, Henry Irving, later to become the first English actor to be knighted, played the part of the wolf in a pantomime production of ‘Little Bo-Peep’ at Edinburgh.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

Image: via Wikimedia Commons.