Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (37 page)

But the popular secular tradition has it that the original “Mary” was Mary, Queen of Scots; that the phrase “quite contrary” referred to her well-documented frivolous French ways; and that the “pretty maids” were her renowned “Four Marys,” the ladies-in-waiting Mary Seaton, Mary
Fleming, Mary Livingston, and Mary Beaton. The cockle shells were decorations on an elaborate gown given to her by the French dauphin. This argument is also as old as the rhyme.

“Three Blind Mice”: 1609, London

Three blind mice, see how they run!
They all run after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife,

Did you ever see such a thing in your life,
As three blind mice?

The verse is regarded as the best-known example of a “round” in the world, and it is the earliest printed secular song still sung today. From the time of its creation, it was a round, a verse in which multiple voices repeat a rhyme, each voice a line behind the previous speaker. Rounds were regarded as educational tools to improve children’s powers of concentration.

“Three Blind Mice” first appeared on October 12, 1609, in
Deuteromelia; or, The seconde part of Musicks melodie
, by Thomas Ravenscroft, a teenage chorister at St. Paul’s church. He is taken to be the song’s creator.

“Old Mother Hubbard”: Pre-1805, London

Old Mother Hubbard

Went to the cupboard

To fetch her poor dog a bone
;

But when she came there

The cupboard was bare

And so the poor dog had none
.

When this long, fourteen-stanza rhyme was first published in London in June 1805, it quickly sold over ten thousand copies, to become an immediate best-seller, with several reprintings. Overnight, Mother Hubbard became an integral part of nursery rhyme literature.

The comedic verse was written in 1804 by Sarah Catherine Martin, an early love of Prince William Henry, who later became King William IV. Her manuscript is on display at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.

Sarah Martin, a vibrant, vivacious woman, composed the verse during a stay at the home of her future brother-in-law, John Pollexfen Bastard, an MP for Kitley, Devon. The Bastard family maintained that one day, while John Bastard was attempting to write a letter, Sarah Martin garrulously chattered away, until he ordered her to “run away and write one of your stupid little rhymes.” She did.

Was Sarah Martin’s creation original?

Not entirely. She apparently based her poem on a little-known rhyme first published in 1803 and titled “Old Dame Trot, and Her Comical Cat.” The rhymes are too similar to be merely coincidental;

Old Dame trot
,

Some cold fish had got
,

Which for pussy
,

She kept in Store
,

When she looked there was none

The cold fish had gone
,

For puss had been there before
.

Other stanzas of the rhymes also parallel each other:

“Dame Trot” was published by a T. Evans one year before Sarah Martin composed her verse. But historians have discovered that the verse about the “comical cat” had already been known for about a hundred years, and was included in a 1706 book,
Pills to Purge Melancholy
. Moreover, Sarah Martin did not originate the character of Mother Hubbard. She was a popular satirical cartoon figure as early as 1590, when she appeared in a satire,
Mother Hubbard’s Tale
. The character is believed to have been modeled on the eighth-century French martyr St. Hubert, patron saint of hunters and dogs. Little is known about St. Hubert. He was bishop of Tongres-Maestricht and died at Tervueren on May 30, 727, following injuries incurred while hunting.

Historians are forced to conclude that Sarah Martin had been told the “Dame Trot” rhyme as a child, and that she was familiar with the satirical Mother Hubbard. When she hurried off to compose one of her “stupid little rhymes” —drawing on a little-known cartoon character, a little-read comic cat poem, and a long-forgotten patron saint—Sarah Martin combined memory and imagination to immortalize a nursery rhyme.

“Little Miss Muffet”: 16th Century, England

Little Miss Muffet

Sat on a tuffet
,

Eating her curds and whey
;

There came a big spider
.

Who sat down beside her

And frightened Miss Muffet away
.

Of all nursery rhymes, this appears most frequently in children’s books. It was written in the sixteenth century by, appropriately, an entomologist with a special interest in spiders. Dr. Thomas Muffet, the author of a scholarly work,
The Silkwormes and their flies
.

As Longfellow had composed “There Was a Little Girl” for his daughter Edith, Dr. Muffet wrote “Little Miss Muffet” for his young daughter Patience. At that time, a “tuffet” was a three-legged stool, and “curds and whey” was a milk custard.

“Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses”: Pre-18th Century, England

Ring-a-ring o’ roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down
.

The rhyme first appeared in an 1881 book,
Mother Goose
, though in oral tradition it is much older. And for all its apparent innocence and playfulness as a child’s game, the verse is about something deathly serious: the Great Plague of London in 1664–65, which resulted in more than 70,000 deaths at a time when the city’s population numbered only 460,000.

The disease, caused by the bacillus
Pasteurella pestis
, was transmitted to humans in crowded urban areas by rat fleas. In the rhyme, “ring o’ roses” refers to the circular rosy rash that was one of the plague’s early symptoms. And the phrase “pocket full of posies” stands for the herbs people carried in their pockets, believing they offered protection against the disease. The final two lines, “A-tishoo! A-tishoo! / We all fall down,” tell of the plague’s fatal sneeze, which preceded physical collapse; literally, the victim fell down dead.

“Sing a Song of Sixpence”: Pre-1744, England

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye;
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie
.

A sixteenth-century Italian cookbook,
The Manner of Cuisine of What Meat for What Affair
, offers a recipe for actually baking live birds between crusts of a pie. If the instructions are followed, the book promises, “the birds may be alive and flie out when it is cut up.” The purpose of such a pie was
to create a “diverting Hurley-Burley amongst the Guests.”

In fact, it was not uncommon in the sixteenth century for a chef to hide surprises inside a dinner pie. (See “Little Jack Horner,” page 189.) The rhyme, first published in England in 1744, is thought to be a straightforward attempt to capture a then-popular baking curiosity in verse.

Children’s Literature: 1650, Europe

Before the mid-seventeenth century, books written expressly for children were virtually nonexistent. Literate children from poor and wealthy families alike had to content themselves with adult books. One of the most popular was
Aesop’s Fables
, a sixth-century
B.C
., Greek work that had existed for centuries in French translation and was first rendered into English in 1484.

That book, which anthropomorphizes animals, remained the only truly suitable adult literature for children until 1578. That year, a German author and publisher, Sigmund Feyerabend, issued a
Book of Art and Instruction for Young People
. This landmark volume, a picture book, was a collection of woodcut illustrations of contemporary European life, fables, and German folktales, with a text consisting mainly of extended captions. The volume was an immense success, and Feyerabend, a pioneer publisher of quality books, is honored today with the largest of all annual book fairs, held each autumn in Frankfurt, his hometown.

Another favorite book enjoyed by children in the late 1500s—though not intended for them—was John Foxe’s 1563
Actes and Monuments
, popularly titled “The Book of Martyrs.” Replete with text and illustrations of raging infernos consuming sinners, of saints in the agonizing throes of martyrdom, and of sundry Christians being stoned, flogged, and beheaded, the book was among the volumes most widely read, by adults and youths, in the late sixteenth century.

Not until 1657 would a truly important children’s book of text reach print:
Orbis Sensualium Pictus
, a Latin volume of text with illustrations, by Czech educator Johannes Amos Cemenius; it was published in Nuremberg, Germany. Cemenius was the first author to appreciate the importance of combining words, diagrams, and pictures as a children’s learning aid. The book’s subtitle, “A Nomenclature of All the Chief Things in the World,” conveys a sense of its encyclopedic scope and educational tone. This seminal volume had an enormous effect on subsequent books for young readers, and in many ways it was a forerunner of the modern encyclopedia.

The widespread use of the printing press eventually made the production of small, inexpensive children’s books a reality. In the seventeenth century, the popular “chapbooks” appeared. Sold by “chapmen” along European roads and on town street corners, the thin volumes, of about ten pages, were poorly illustrated and printed, but their low cost won them wide readership. They featured medieval folktales, poems, jokes, and humorous anecdotes of an uncensored, and sometimes ribald, nature. Their all-too-rapid
death knell was sounded by the 1662 Act of Uniformity, which ushered in a wave of stern puritanism and strict moral sanctions on printed materials.

It was in this repressive climate that historians locate the true birth of children’s literature—that is, the regular, rather than occasional, appearance of books written expressly for children. The books, later called “heaven and hell” tomes, were dogmatic, moralistic, and intended to strike terror and shape behavior in the young. The predominant theme was that life on earth led irrevocably to an eternity in hell—except for the mercy of God. The books’ illustrations, often showing children suffering in hell, were reinforced by verses such as:

Children that make
Their Parents to Bleed
May live to have
Children to revenge
That deed
.

For many decades, the only relief children had from this fire-and-brimstone literature lay in alphabet and arithmetic textbooks. Escape came at the close of the 1600s and in the form of the fairy tale—and in particular, as we have seen, with the 1697 publication of Charles Perrault’s classic,
Tales of Times Passed: Tales of My Mother Goose
. For generations, such folklore had been transmitted through oral tradition; Perrault committed the legends to print, and in a style so vivid and imaginative that eight tales at least were at once immortalized. Reading to youngsters in the nursery would never again be the same.

Chapter 8

In the Bathroom

Bathroom: 8000
B.C
., Scotland

Men inquire, “Where can I wash my hands?” and women ask, “Is there a place to powder my nose?” Schoolchildren stammer, “May I be excused?” while travelers abroad beg for directions to the nearest “comfort station,” which the British call a “WC.” What everyone is really asking for is, of course, the location of the nearest…well, rest room.