type, tried out during the siege of Gloucester in 1643, a theory Professor David Daube
put forward in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956). This is ingenuity for
ingenuity’s sake; but the inventor must also feel some satisfaction if, as with the current
craze for horrific ‘urban legends’, he can watch his story spreading to a public gullible
enough to repeat it in earnest.
Like other oral traditions, nursery rhymes have also been disseminated in print. Once
it was allowed that books for children should contain entertainment as well as
instruction, nursery songs were naturally considered candidates for inclusion. At the
beginning of the eighteenth century, in the reign of Queen Anne, appeared a primer, A
Little Book for Little Children, by T.W. (c.1712), which contained ‘A was an Archer and I
saw a Peacock with a fiery tail’, as well as three well-known riddle verses. The first
considerable nursery rhyme book was Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, published in
two volumes by M.Cooper ‘According to Act of Parliament’, probably in 1744. Only ‘Voll.
II’ survives, in a unique copy in the British Library. Measuring only 3×1¾ inches, it
nevertheless contains thirty-nine rhymes which (with three exceptions) are as familiar to
the child of today as they were to the young Boswells and Cowpers and Gibbons, its
readers at the time: ‘There was a little Man, And he had a little Gun’, ‘Who did kill Cock
Robbin?’, ‘Bah, Bah, a black sheep’, ‘Hickere, Dickere Dock’. Nearly every rhyme is
illustrated with a pleasant and appropriate little woodcut. The far-sighted publisher was
Mary Cooper, whose imprint also appears on works by Gray, Fielding, and Pope.
The publication of illustrated nursery rhyme books has continued unabated until the
present day, when superb Mother Goose picture books are a mainstay of the children’s
books market and it seems to be the ambition of every established illustrator to ‘do a
Mother Goose’. There has also been a constant flow backwards and forwards between
oral tradition and literature. Consider only two examples: Lewis Carroll’s use of nursery
rhymes in the Alice books, and Robert Burns’s use of traditional songs as a basis for his
own lyrics. Burns’s song ‘My love, she’s but a Lassie yet’ was written for the third part of
Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1790); but a verse of it (We’re all dry with drinking
on’t (see Chapter 12) had already appeared, most unsuitably, nearly fifty years before in
Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book.
When children go to school they encounter a quite different oral tradition. It might be
said that while nursery rhymes echo the voice of the adult, being adult approved, and
adult transmitted, school rhymes echo the voice of children out on their own in a
potentially unfriendly world. The rhymes pass with lightning speed from one child to
another, and have a quite different character. They have a different cadence, and a
difference purpose, which is often mockery. School-children will chant: Good King
Wenceslas/Knocked a bobby [policeman] senseless/Right in the middle of Marks and
Spencers [a British chain of shops], and: Julius Caesar the Roman geezer/Squashed his
wife in a lemon squeezer. They parody the rhymes their parents taught them at home:
Mary had a little lamb
She also had a bear;
I’ve often seen her little lamb
But I’ve never seen her ‘bear’.176 TYPES AND GENRES