Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes Read online

  Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

  And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.

  ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ has featured in countless books and been illustrated hundreds of times since its original appearance in Edward Lear’s Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, published in 1871. Lear (1812-88) was a noted author of nonsense verse and credited with popularizing the art of the limerick. ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ was written in 1867 and presented as a gift to the children of his patron and benefactor Edward Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby. This led to rumours that the real author was the earl himself as many believed Derby was using his first name, Edward, plus an anagram of the word ‘earl’ as a pen name.

  The poem is notable for introducing the word runcible into the English language. Indeed, during the 1920s, nearly four decades after the poet’s death, some dictionaries began defining the word as a small, three-pronged pickle fork, curved like a spoon and otherwise known as a ‘spork’. But this does not describe the spoon featured in the original illustration of Lear’s poem nor, for that matter, the one in his illustration of the ‘Dolomphious Duck’ in which the runcible utensil, while big enough to hold a frog, is quite clearly a spoon and not a fork. In fact, lexicographers of the 1920s appear to have completely missed Lear’s references to the word in other poems, such as a ‘runcible cat’, ‘runcible hat’, ‘runcible goose’ and ‘runcible wall’. None of which could possibly have anything to do with the three-pronged spork. Clearly Lear made the word up for his own amusement and for the entertainment of others and yet it sparked off a hunt for the meaning lasting several decades. I’d like to suggest that if any linguistic explorers are still looking for the Bong-tree and a ring-wearing Piggy-wig they should stop right now.

  Polly Put the Kettle On

  POLLY put the kettle on,

  Polly put the kettle on,

  Polly put the kettle on;

  We’ll all have tea.

  Sukey take it off again,

  Sukey take it off again,

  Sukey take it off again;

  They’ve all gone away.

  One popular theory about the origins of ‘Polly Put the Kettle On’ centres on the life of a writer living in London in the mid eighteenth century with his young family of two boys and three girls. Apparently there were many arguments between the children about who could play in which room of the house. The girls, keen to be rid of the noisy boys, would often pretend to start a girls-only tea party. The youngest, Polly, would reach for the toy kettle as the other girls sang: ‘Polly put the kettle on.’ At this point, the boys would scarper, leaving the girls to play quietly together in the drawing room as the eldest girl, Susan, took the kettle back off again. (Polly was a common pet-form of ‘Mary’, as was Sukey of ‘Susan’, in middle-class families of the time.) Their father was so enamoured with the girls’ cheek that he wrote it all down, set it to music and the rhyme was subsequently published. It is a charming story, although there is little evidence of this actually ever having happened.

  However, this is what we do know. Joseph Dale originally published a poem called ‘Molly Put the Kettle On’ in 1809 and shortly afterwards ‘Molly’ was substituted with ‘Polly’ in a version published in Dublin. The melody is similar to a rather strange 1788 Viennese folksong called ‘O du lieber Augustin’ (‘Oh, you poor Augustin’), about a popular street musician who, in 1679 as the bubonic plague tore through Vienna, fell into a pit filled with plague victims while making his drunken way home one evening. Luckily, Augustin managed to crawl back out and, somehow, also avoided catching the disease.

  ‘Polly Put the Kettle On’ was hugely popular in the nineteenth century. Grip, the raven in Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge (1841), when very much excited cries, ‘Hurray! Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea; Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea. Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!’ ‘Polly put the kettle on and we’ll all have tea’ became a popular catchphrase at Victorian tea parties, the precursor to ‘Shall I be Mother?’.

  Poor Old Robinson Crusoe

  POOR old Robinson Crusoe!

  Poor old Robinson Crusoe!

  They made him a coat

  Of an old nanny goat;

  I wonder how they could do so!

  With a ring a ting tang,

  And a ring a ting tang,

  Poor old Robinson Crusoe!

  Robinson Crusoe is the hero of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a book based upon the true experiences of one Alexander Selkirk, who had run away to sea in 1695 to avoid a court summons in Scotland for ‘indecent behaviour in church’. (The mind boggles.) In 1704, after correctly judging the ship he was sailing on to be unseaworthy, Selkirk deserted on the uninhabited Pacific island of Más a Tierra, only to find himself stranded there for nearly five years, although he would later discover that his former ship had indeed foundered at sea and most of his crewmates had drowned. Selkirk was finally rescued in 1709. Then, in 1719, English author Daniel Defoe published his own version of the story (often described as the first novel in English), to great acclaim. Crusoe is a rather more appealing character than Selkirk – he’s shipwrecked rather than a deserter, for instance. He stays on the island for twenty-three years longer than his real-life counterpart and has all kinds of adventures, including run-ins with cannibals. The book has been a children’s favourite ever since its first appearance.

  The nonsense rhyme has much more to do with the iconic pictures associated with the book – where Crusoe is always shown dressed in a homemade fur garment (They made him a coat / Of an old nanny goat) – than the text itself. It paints a very light-hearted picture of Crusoe’s experiences; he was kept company by goats but had no human companion (or not until he rescued Man Friday several years into his stay). In another triumph of fiction over fact, in 1966 the island that had been home for Selkirk for so long was officially renamed Robinson Crusoe Island while another nearby took the name Alejandro Selkirk Island.

  Pop Goes the Weasel

  HALF a pound of tuppenny rice,

  Half a pound of treacle.

  That’s the way the money goes,

  Pop goes the weasel.

  Up and down the City Road,

  In and out the Eagle.

  That’s the way the money goes,

  Pop goes the weasel.

  Every night when I go out,

  The monkey’s on the table.

  Take a stick and knock it off,

  Pop goes the weasel.

  A penny for a ball of thread,

  Another for a needle.

  That’s the way the money goes,

  Pop goes the weasel.

  There has been much debate over the years about the meaning of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’. A hugely popular music-hall song, its memorable and seemingly nonsensical lyrics spread like wildfire throughout Victorian London. But is there more to the rhyme than meets the eye?

  For centuries, the poor and immigrants had lived outside the walls of the City of London in Spitalfields, Hoxton and Shoreditch. These were traditionally areas of high crime and even higher poverty. Ever since the arrival of the Huguenots, French Protestant refugees escaping religious persecution in the 1680s, it had been where all London’s textile work and weaving took place. Packed with sweatshops, it was also the epicentre of the thriving entertainment business and the site of many music halls and theatres whose audiences consisted of the local workers who did long shifts in the factories or laboured in their own homes, creating clothes for very low wages.

  One theory suggests that ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ was an attempt to turn the grim reality of local people’s lives into a hit song. In the textile industry, a spinner’s weasel was a mechanical thread-measuring device in the shape of a spoked wheel that accurately measured out yarn by making a pop
ping sound to indicate the correct length had been reached. The mind-numbing and repetitive nature of the work is captured in the final line of each verse, indicating that whatever you were doing, or wherever your mind had wandered to, reality was never far away with the weasel to pop you alert again. The rest of the lyrics can be seen as snapshots of mundane, everyday life in Shoreditch – of having enough money to buy food (rice and treacle), spend on visits to the Eagle music hall on City Road, or pay for the tools of the trade (A penny for a ball of thread, / Another for a needle). That was the way the money went.

  A more recent theory involves Cockney rhyming slang –invented by East Enders wishing to communicate only with their own kind. Here set phrases are used to indicate an object that rhymes with the final word, hence ‘apples and pears’ for ‘stairs’ or ‘frog and toad’ for ‘road’. Which is reasonably straightforward once you get the hang of it,

  although you have to be a bit quicker on the uptake when just the first part of the phrase is used, as in ‘He fell down the apples’ or ‘I’m going down the frog’. In rhyming slang, weasel comes from ‘weasel and stoat’ and means ‘coat’.

  So, according to this interpretation, the rhyme tells the story of an East End pub crawl (Up and down the City Road, / In and out the Eagle). The current Eagle pub (which has the words of the nursery rhyme painted on its wall) on the City Road is the site of the former Royal Eagle Tavern music hall. A monkey was a sailors’ term in Victorian times for the glazed jug or tankard they drank their rum and grog rations from. ‘Knocking off a stick’ meant to drink alcohol. This raucous night out used up every penny of the worker’s wages (That’s the way the money goes), leaving nothing to live on for the rest of the week.

  It would have been a hand-to-mouth existence at the best of times. In those days, many people relied on the pawnbroker, who would advance money against objects that were left with him. Many would have to put their weasel into pawn (pop), in order to be able to buy even the cheapest and nastiest food (Half a pound of tuppenny rice, / Half a pound of treacle) to keep themselves going until the next payday. After all, without a coat or money, they weren’t going to be able to go on another bender up and down the City Road for the time being. Although it’s a dark song, it also catches the happy-go-lucky attitude that saw one good night out as worth a week surviving on tuppenny rice and treacle, and the people it was written about easily identified with it.

  The earliest published version of ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ appeared in America during the early 1850s. American news sheets labelled it ‘the new English dance’, while, back in England, The Times published an article in 1853 describing various popular songs and dances of the day, including ‘La Tempête, La Napolitenne and Pop Goes the Weasel, three celebrated dances’. In 1854, Boosey & Co., a well-established music and book shop in London, included the following words in one of their adverts: ‘The new country dance “Pop Goes the Weasel”, introduced by Her Majesty Queen Victoria’, suggesting that the rhyme had now reached a wider audience – from East End music hall to Royal Variety Performance.

  Punch and Judy

  PUNCH and Judy fought for a pie,

  Punch gave Judy a blow in the eye;

  Says Punch to Judy, ‘Will you have more?’

  Says Judy to Punch, ‘No, my eye is too sore.’

  Traditionally performed at seaside towns and other holiday resorts, although also making appearances at country fairs and markets, Punch and Judy shows originated in Italy during the early part of the seventeenth century. It was the commedia dell’arte who first introduced the character Punchinello to their popular street theatre.

  The first appearance of Mr Punch was in England on 9 May 1662 (considered by enthusiasts to be his official birthday), introduced by Italian puppeteer Signor Bologna, and the anarchic comedy character was an immediate success. Soon afterwards, the diarist Samuel Pepys watched a performance in Covent Garden, London, and noted ‘an Italian puppet play… which is very pretty. The best I have ever seen and a great resort of gallants.’

  In the British version of the show, the cast usually consists of Punch, his wife Judy (originally called ‘Joan’), their baby, a crocodile, a policeman and a string of sausages. Dressed in a jester’s costume, Punch strikes a distinctive figure with his hunchback and grotesquely hooked nose. The storyline typically involves Punch behaving outrageously, struggling with his wife Judy and the baby, and then triumphing in a series of encounters with the forces of law and order (and often the supernatural). Knockdown comedy has remained wildly popular ever since (show an audience a character being beaten about with a frying pan or other such implement and they’ll laugh their heads off) and the stick that Punch wields so freely is in fact thought to provide the origin of the term ‘slapstick’.

  When the puppets hit each other, it’s like the violence in a cartoon – indeed, Punch and Judy probably taught Tom and Jerry a trick or two – and they always bounce back. In this rhyme the fighting has a serious aftermath, however. Hence the poem may well have been composed with a moral purpose – an early version of ‘Don’t try this at home, kids!’

  Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat

  PUSSY cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

  I’ve been to London to see the queen;

  Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you there?

  I frightened a little mouse under her chair.

  This short rhyme has been popular since the reign of the last Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). For once, this is a story without a dark origin. The rhyme is said to have evolved from a tale told by one of the Virgin

  Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. It is believed that an old, fat tomcat used to roam the corridors of Windsor Castle and nobody knew where he came from or where he was going. But one day the lazy cat lay down to sleep under the queen’s great throne (her chair) and slept throughout an entire royal audience.

  Waking suddenly with a jolt and surprised to hear so much noise, the cat made a bolt for freedom between the queen’s legs, nearly frightening her majesty to death. Amid the fuss, one of the courtiers grabbed the animal and returned it to the queen for punishment. But the great lady took pity and passed a royal order that the cat’s life would be spared and the little fellow was free to roam the castle in return for chasing away the rats and mice. If it is a true story – and I do hope so – it may well have also inspired the adage that a cat may look at a king.

  The Queen of Hearts

  THE Queen of Hearts

  She made some tarts,

  All on a summer’s day;

  The Knave of Hearts

  He stole the tarts

  And took them clean away.

  The King of Hearts

  Called for the tarts

  And beat the Knave full sore;

  The Knave of Hearts

  Brought back the tarts

  And vowed he’d steal no more.

  The first known appearance of this rhyme in print is in 1782. Contrary to appearances, it isn’t about a kitchen theft, but tells a nursery-rhyme version of a game of cards. The Queen, Knave and King of Hearts are all cards, while the tarts are the winning points passed from player to player until the game is won.

  But how we read this rhyme today is coloured by the interpretation of mathematician and keen card-player Lewis Carroll in his classic work Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1862). Backed up by John Tenniel’s equally influential illustrations – which immortalized Humpty Dumpty as an egg – she is clearly a caricature of Britain’s eccentric and autocratic monarch of the time, Queen Victoria, with elements of the real person to make her at once instantly recognizable to parents reading the story to their children, but fantastical enough to render her unrecognizable to children. In Alice in Wonderland, the King of Hearts (like Prince Albert) is meek and compliant, while his wife, the Queen of Hearts, is clearly very much in charge. But Carroll’s queen is also based on the history of the playing card itself. The original Queen of Hearts first emerged on a deck of playing cards produced
in France in 1650, apparently inspired by the Old Testament figure of Judith. When all seemed lost for the Jewish people, this beautiful (if steely) woman had managed to take Holofernes, the evil Assyrian general, off guard and cut off his head.

  In a mocking echo of the biblical story, Carroll’s queen is completely obsessed with decapitation: ‘The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. “Off with his head!” she said, without even looking round.’ During the trial of the Knave (for stealing the tarts), virtually every witness is in danger of losing his or her head, Alice included.

  Rain, Rain, Go Away

  RAIN, rain, go away,

  Come back another day;

  Little Johnny wants to play.

  Rain, rain, go to Spain,

  Never show your face again.

  A favourite with little children, this rhyme originated during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I when the English were at war with Spain. In 1588, the Spanish sailed their fleet of over 130 ships to attack the English coastline. The Anglo-Spanish Wars between 1585 and 1604 were fuelled by a deep-rooted rivalry between the two countries that had escalated during the discovery of the New World, namely North and South America and the West Indies, as both battled for control of the new trading routes.

  The English vice-admiral, Sir Francis Drake, is famous for his insistence on completing his game of bowls when the Armada was sighted, but he knew the weather was worsening and waited until the right moment to launch the smaller, faster English fleet. The English ships’ captains, better used to the unpredictable weather in the English Channel, made use of the howling gales and lashing rain of the great storm and routed the advancing Spanish ships, scattering them in all directions and then hounding them south (Rain, rain, go to Spain, / Never show your face again).