Nursery Rhymes – Page 4 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ Nursery Rhyme

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Humpty Dumpty was originally a drink, then he became an egg in a nursery rhyme. Quite how this happened, nobody seems to know, but it did. The name ‘Humpty-dumpty’ was given to a drink of boiled ale and brandy in 1698, and that’s only the first known reference in print – the name is probably considerably older.

By 1785, as Francis Grose recorded in his fascinating collection of contemporary slang, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, the rhyming term had been applied to people, and was used specifically to describe a ‘short, dumpy, hump-shouldered person’ and, by extension, a clumsy person. But the words ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ mean one thing and one thing alone to most readers: an egg in the famous nursery rhyme which begins, ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall’. What is the meaning of this little rhyme, and what are its origins?

First, before we attempt an analysis of this curious nursery rhyme, here’s a reminder of the words:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

This rhyme didn’t appear until the early nineteenth century, according to Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford Dictionary of Nusery Rhymes), when it was included in a manuscript that was mysteriously added to a printed 1803 copy of Mother Goose’s Melody. Since the Opies compiled their dictionary in the early 1950s, the rhyme has been traced back to an earlier source, Samuel Arnold’s 1797 work Juvenile Amusements:

A Short Analysis of the ‘Jack and Jill’ Nursery Rhyme

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’: we all know these words that call back our early childhoods so vividly, yet where did they come from and what does this rhyme mean? It can be dangerous to try to probe or analyse the meaning of nursery rhymes too deeply – much like analysing the nonsense verse of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, we are likely to come upon a hermeneutic dead-end. But ‘Jack and Jill’ is so well-known that a closer look at its meaning and origins seems justified.

A Short Analysis of ‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’ is a well-known nursery rhyme. But this intriguing little quatrain has attracted some surprising speculation and its origins are often erroneously attributed. What does this short rhyme mean? And where did it come from? What is this ring o’ roses and what is it being used for? And why does everyone fall down? The questions multiply.