nursery rhyme

"Hey Diddle Diddle", a popular nursery rhyme

The term nursery rhyme is used for "traditional" poems for young children in Britain and many other countries, but usage only dates from the 19th century and in North America the older ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ is still often used.^[1]

History

Lullabies

The oldest children's songs of which we have records are lullabies, intended to help a child sleep. Lullabies can be found in every human culture.^[2] The English term lullaby is thought to come from "lu, lu" or "la la" sound made by mothers or nurses to calm children, and "by by" or "bye bye", either another lulling sound, or a term for good night.^[3] Until the modern era lullabies were usually only recorded incidentally in written sources. The Roman nurses' lullaby, "Lalla, Lalla, Lalla, aut dormi, aut lacte", is recorded in a scholium on Persius and may be the oldest to survive.^[4]

Many medieval English verses associated with the birth of Jesus take the form of a lullaby, including "Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting" and may be versions of contemporary lullabies.^[3] However, most of those used today date from the 17th century. For example, a well known lullaby such as "Rock-a-bye, baby on a tree top", cannot be found in records until the late-18th century when it was printed by John Newbery (c. 1765).^[3]

Early nursery rhymes

From the later Middle Ages we have records of short children's rhyming songs, often as marginalia.^[5] From the mid-16th century they begin to be recorded in English plays.^[6] Most nursery rhymes were not written down until the 18th century, when the publishing of children's books began to move from polemic and education towards entertainment, but there is evidence for many rhymes existing before this, including "To market, to market" and "Cock a doodle doo", which date from at least the late 16th century.^[7]

The first English collections, Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, are both thought to have been published before 1744, with such songs becoming known as 'Tommy Thumb's songs'.^[8] The publication of John Newbery's compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, c.1765), is the first record we have of many classic rhymes, still in use today.^[9][10] These rhymes seem to have come from a variety of sources, including traditional riddles, proverbs, ballads, lines of Mummers' plays, drinking songs, historical events, and, it has been suggested, ancient pagan rituals.^[1] About half of the currently recognised "traditional" English rhymes were known by the mid-18th century.^[11]

19th century

In the early 19th century printed collections of rhymes began to spread to other countries, including Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) and in the United States, Mother Goose's Melodies (1833).^[1] From this period we sometimes know the origins and authors of rhymes—for instance, "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", which combined the 18th-century French tune "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman" with a poem by English writer Jane Taylor and 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', written by Sarah Josepha Hale of Boston in 1830.^[1]

Early folk song collectors also often collected (what were now known as) nursery rhymes, including in Scotland Sir Walter Scott and in Germany Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806–1808).^[12] The first, and possibly the most important academic collection to focus in this area was James Orchard Halliwell's, The Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and Popular Rhymes and Tales in 1849, in which he divided rhymes into antiquities (historical), fireside stories, game-rhymes, alphabet-rhymes, riddles, nature-rhymes, places and families, proverbs, superstitions, customs, and nursery songs (lullabies).^[13] By the time of Sabine Baring-Gould's A Book of Nursery Songs (1895), folklore was an academic study, full of comments and foot-notes. A professional anthropologist, Andrew Lang (1844–1912) produced The Nursery Rhyme Book in 1897. The early years of the 20th century are notable for the illustrations to children's books including Caldecott's Hey Diddle Diddle Picture Book (1909) and Arthur Rackham's Mother Goose (1913). The definitive study of English rhymes remains the work of Iona and Peter Opie.^[11]

Meanings of nursery rhymes

The hidden meanings and origins of nursery rhymes has been argued by some, most notably in the writings of John Bellenden Ker (?1765–1842), who argued in four volumes that English nursery rhymes were actually written in 'Low Saxon' a hypothetical early form of Dutch. He then 'translated' them back into English, revealing particularly a strong tendency to anti-clericalism.^[14][15] Many of the ideas about the links between rhymes and historical persons, or events, can be traced back to Katherine Elwes, The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930), which found identities for (then famous) characters in nursery rhymes on little or no evidence in any historical source, assuming that children's songs are a peculiar form of coded historical narrative, propaganda or covert protest, and rarely considering that they could be just entertainments.^[14][16]

Nursery rhyme revisionism

"Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", from a 1901 illustration by William Wallace Denslow

There have been several attempts, across the world, to revise nursery rhymes (along with fairy tales and popular songs). Even in the late 18th century we can sometimes see how rhymes like "Little Robin Redbreast" were cleaned up for a young audience.^[22] In the late 19th century the major concern seems to have been violence and crime, which led leading children's publishers in the United States like Jacob Abbot and Samuel Goodrich to 'improve' mother goose rhymes.^[23]

In the early and mid-20th centuries this was a form of bowdlerisation, concerned with some of the more violent elements of nursery rhymes and led to the formation of organisations like the British 'Society for Nursery Rhyme Reform'.^[24] Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim strongly criticized this revisionism, on the grounds that it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues and it has been argued that revised versions may not perform the functions of catharsis for children, or allow them to imaginatively deal with violence and danger.^[25]

In the late 20th century revisionism of nursery rhymes became associated with the idea of political correctness. Most attempts to reform nursery rhymes on this basis appear to be either very small scale, light-hearted updating, like Felix Dennis' When Jack Sued Jill – Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times (2006), or satires written as if from the point of view of political correctness in order to condemn reform.^[26] The controversy over changing the language of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" in Britain from 1986, because, it was alleged in the popular press, it was seen as racially dubious, was apparently based only on a rewriting of the rhyme in one private nursery, as an exercise for the children.^[27]

Nursery rhymes and education

It has been argued that nursery rhymes set to music aid in a child's development.^[28] Research also supports the assertion that music and rhyme increase a child's ability in spatial reasoning, which leads to greater success in school in the subjects of mathematics and science.^[29]

See also

Children's literature portal

Notes