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

  The first written version of ‘Three Blind Mice’ was published between 1609 and 1611 by Thomas Ravenscroft (1582-1635), whose booklets Pammelia (1609), Deuteromelia (1609) and Melismata (1611) brought together a collection of street songs, ballads, poems and children’s songs that included ‘Three Blind Mice’, although with slightly different lyrics to the ones we know so well today:

  Three Blinde Mice,

  Three Blinde Mice,

  Dame Iulian,

  Dame Iulian,

  The Miller and his merry olde Wife,

  Shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife,

  The Three Blinde Mice.

  Publishing the poem only fifty years after Queen Mary’s Persecutions, Ravenscroft, a noted scholar, composer and musician, could have been recording a well-known rhyme of its day or, as some believe, may even have composed it himself. While authorship of the rhyme is a matter of dispute, what is generally accepted is that ‘Three Blind Mice’ refers to the brutal slaying of the three bishops (‘she scraped off the entrails and licked the knife’, to translate line 6) opposed to Queen Mary’s religious reforms, one of whom had made the mistake of dissolving Mary’s mother’s marriage to King Henry VIII and reducing her status from princess to commoner. And it meant that from the moment Mary became queen, Thomas Cranmer must have known his days were numbered.

  Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son

  TOM, Tom, the piper’s son,

  He learned to play when he was young,

  But the only tune that he could play

  Was ‘Over the hills and far away’.

  Over the hills and a great way off,

  The wind shall blow my top-knot off.

  Tom with his pipe did play with skill,

  And those who heard him couldn’t keep still;

  Whenever they heard him they would dance,

  Even the sheep would after him prance.

  According to one theory, ‘Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son’ evolved from an old legend about the son of a Scottish bagpiper who would play his pipes while out on the hills looking after his flock of sheep. But Tom only knew one tune (the only tune that he could play), which he played over and over again. Even so, the tree spirits would emerge and dance to this tune whenever Tom played (Whenever they heard him they would dance). The Celts believed that trees possessed magical and mystical powers, and it is from this belief that a wand acquires its magic and the modern tree huggers get their empathy with nature.

  So it makes me feel very cynical to have to point out, however, that the rhyme itself can’t be all that old as it contains a reference to ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’, a well-known song from the early eighteenth century, of which there is a version in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). But the refrain Over the hills and far away appears in many other poems and songs, suggesting a traditional origin, and Tom was a traditional name for pipers.

  Another, equally familiar, version of the rhyme goes:

  Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,

  Stole a pig and away did run.

  The pig was eat

  And Tom was beat,

  And Tom went howling down the street.

  This version would seem to belong to that category of rhymes with a moral (see also Little Bo Peep and Mary Had a Little Lamb), here pointing out to children the punishment that may befall them if they try to steal – a beating severe enough to make them cry (Tom went howling down the street). The pig in question would have been a sweetmeat one sold by a street hawker, so no animals were harmed in the making of this rhyme, its message was that children had to learn that stealing is stealing, whatever the value of the object stolen.

  Turn Again, Whittington

  TURN again, Whittington, thou worthy citizen,

  Turn again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.

  Make your fortune, find a good wife,

  You will know happiness all through your life.

  Turn again, Whittington, thou worthy citizen,

  Turn again, Whittington, thrice Mayor of London.

  Thanks to this rhyme – sung as a round (see London’s Burning) – and his representation in pantomime in the manner of a fairy-tale character such as Cinderella or Aladdin, one might be forgiven for thinking that Dick Whittington is fictional, but he was a real person.

  Born in the village of Pauntley in Gloucestershire around 1354, Richard Whittington went to London as a boy, after supposedly being told the streets there were ‘paved with gold’, to learn the trade of a mercer (trader in textiles). He worked hard and soon became successful, importing exotic new material such as velvet and silk and exporting English wool in return (see Baa, Baa, Black Sheep). By 1397, he was making such a fortune that he started lending vast sums of money to the king, Richard II. In return, the king granted him the prestigious position of Lord Mayor of London. Richard Whittington worked just as hard at making a success of his new role and proved to be so popular that he retained the honour for an unheard-of second year.

  But when King Richard was deposed, in 1399, Whittington feared for his future and decided to return to

  Gloucestershire and a comfortable retirement. It was on his journey out of London, legend has it, that at High-gate Hill he heard the peal of Bow Bell (see Oranges and Lemons), calling him back to the city: Turn again, Whittington. The popular merchant duly returned and prospered even further under Richard’s successors, Henry IV and Henry V, supplying the court with valuable textiles and cloth. In 1406, Whittington became Lord Mayor of London for the third time (thrice Mayor of London) and again, for a final term in office in 1419, although the rhyme doesn’t allude to that.

  He never forgot his humble origins, however, and was fondly known by Londoners as Dick, rather than Richard, Whittington. During his lifetime, he donated most of his profits to the City of London, financing many improvements for the benefit of the common people, such as public drinking fountains, a ward at St Thomas’s Hospital for unmarried mothers, and accommodation for the homeless. He also rebuilt the Guildhall, paid for basic drainage systems and sanitation in slum areas and built Greyfriars Library to help improve education in that area.

  When he died, in 1423, he left £7,000 to the Company of Mercers (equivalent to around £5 million in modern terms), which funded construction of the Guildhall Library, repairs to St Bartholomew’s Hospital and the building of further almshouses for the homeless. In death, Dick Whittington became something of a folk hero and his legend is sure to live on. The only unfortunate part is there appears to be no mention anywhere in records of his life of his faithful cat, made famous by its appearance in story and pantomime. Although the image of a cat is supposed to have been carved above the gates of Newgate Prison after his death and, some say, also painted on a carriage presented in Whittington’s name in 1572 to the Guild of Merchants, there is no real evidence to substantiate either of these claims.

  It is through the legend of Dick Whittington that the expression ‘The streets are paved with gold’ has passed into common usage to describe a town or city full of opportunity and well worth a visit for the aspiring young entrepreneur. The first record of any London play about the former Lord Mayor dates from around 1605 with a production entitled The History of Richard Whittington, of his lowe byrth and his great fortune. Later in the century, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary in 1668: ‘Then to Southwark fair, very dirty, but saw the puppet show of Whittington, which was pretty to see.’ In 1814, Dick Whittington made his debut as a pantomime character, with one of the greatest clowns of all time, Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837), playing the role of Dame Cecily Suet. Chiefly thanks to pantomime, London’s most famous Lord Mayor still lives on today.

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee

  TWEEDLEDUM and Tweedledee

  Agreed to have a battle;

  For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

  Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

  Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

  As black as a tar-barrel;
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  Which frightened both the heroes so,

  They quite forgot their battle.

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee found fame as fictional characters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, published in 1871. Carroll describes the two as a pair of tubby brothers whom Alice comes across on her travels and who put her in mind of ‘the old song’, which the brothers later act out. Carroll’s illustrator, John Tenniel (see also Humpty Dumpty and The Queen of Hearts), depicted the ‘fat little men’ as identical twins, ‘like a couple of great schoolboys’, completely indistinguishable from each other. And that is why the expression Tweedledum and Tweedledee is used to this day to describe any two persons or objects that are so alike they cannot be identified individually.

  But he didn’t invent them. They were figures from a nursery rhyme Carroll would have heard as a child. The original Tweedledum and Tweedledee made their first appearance at least a century earlier, in a poem published in 1725 making fun of two feuding composers, Giovanni Battista Bononcini (1670-1747) and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759).

  Handel and Bononcini had a long history. In Berlin in 1696, the young Handel was recognized as a child prodigy. At the royal court he met an established Italian composer, Bononcini. The older composer was instantly jealous of the young newcomer and attempted to injure his reputation by composing a particularly testing piece for the harpsichord and then asking him to play it at sight. When Handel executed it without a mistake, the schemer was foiled by his own device and duly hated the younger man all the more for it.

  Twenty-four years later, in London, a number of noblemen formed themselves into a company for the purpose of reviving Italian opera in England. The king himself, George I, subscribed £1,000, and allowed the society to take the name of the Royal Academy of Music. Handel was appointed Director of Music.

  Bononcini and Attilio Ariosti were attracted to London by this new venture, and stage two of the rivalry followed. The composition of a new opera, Muzio Scevola, was divided between the three composers. Attilio was to put the first act to music, Bononcini the second, and Handel the third, but a dispute developed between the latter two. Amused by this bout of semiquavers at ten paces, the poet John Byrom wrote:

  Some say, compar’d to Bononcini,

  That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny;

  Others aver, that he to Handel

  Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle:

  Strange all this difference should be

  ’Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!

  Clearly Byrom is suggesting a small dum here and a tiny dee there are the only real discernible differences in the two composing styles – in which Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee sound like a mocking representation of their music – or, at least, that is what they were arguing over. Handel was extremely put out by this – he didn’t want to be identified as part of a matching pair with his nemesis – and so, when the opportunity to get rid of Bononcini arose, he grabbed it…

  This all came courtesy of another composer and former friend of Handel, Maurice Greene (1676-1755). A gifted composer in his own right, Greene had once been close to Handel but they had fallen out when the latter found Greene was also friends with Bononcini. As a result, Greene’s friendship with Bononcini became even closer; indeed, in 1728 Bononcini fashioned the madrigal ‘In Una Siepe Ombrosa’ (‘In a Shady Hedge’), attributing the piece to his new friend in an attempt to help raise his profile. Unfortunately, another composer, Antonio Lotti, then complained he had written the music thirty years earlier and was able to produce eight separate witnesses who were prepared to confirm they had heard Lotti play the piece in rehearsal. Bononcini was thrown out of the Academy in disgrace, Handel pouring scorn on him in public at every opportunity, and eventually driven from London. Despite

  never having signed the work, or so much as even claiming authorship, Bononcini’s reputation hung in tatters and he’s now barely remembered. He died alone in 1747 somewhere near Vienna.

  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star

  TWINKLE, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are;

  Up above the world so high,

  Like a diamond in the sky.

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are.

  This famous rhyme is actually a shorter version of a poem called ‘The Star’, written in 1806 by Jane Taylor (1783-1824). Only twenty-three years old when she composed it, Taylor wrote many collections with her sister Mary, notably Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804) and Hymns for Infant Minds (1808).

  However, the well-known melody accompanying the words is French in origin, based on a song called ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’ (‘Ah! Let me tell you, Mama’) and first published in 1761. The message of the song is somewhat different to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’. For those of us who cannot speak French, it can be roughly translated as:

  Ah! Let me tell you, Mama,

  What causes my torment.

  Papa wants me to reason

  Like a grown-up; But me,

  I say that sweets have

  Greater value than reason.

  It is often claimed that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) composed the tune, but he was only six years old in 1761 when the French folksong was first published. It’s much more likely that he borrowed the folk tune as a motif for the piano variations that he wrote as a seventeen-year-old. As the third famous rhyme to have come from Colchester (see Humpty Dumpty and Old King Cole), a plaque is now fixed to the wall of the Taylors’ house in the old Dutch quarter of the city in honour of the author of the English poem.

  The original version of ‘The Star’ had five verses of four lines each:

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are;

  Up above the world so high

  Like a diamond in the sky.

  When the blazing sun is gone,

  When he no longer shines upon,

  Then you show your little light,

  Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

  Then the traveller in the dark

  Thanks you for your tiny spark;

  He could not see the way to go

  If you did not twinkle so.

  In the dark blue sky you keep

  And often through my curtains peep,

  For you never shut your eye

  Till the sun is in the sky.

  As your bright and tiny spark

  Lights the traveller in the dark,

  Though I know not what you are,

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

  Personally, I’ve always preferred Lewis Carroll’s nonsense parody of this, sung by the Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865):

  Twinkle, twinkle, little bat,

  How I wonder what you’re at!

  Up above the world you fly,

  Like a tea-tray in the sky.

  Wee Willie Winkie

  WEE Willie Winkie runs through the town,

  Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown,

  Tapping at the window and crying through the lock:

  Are all the children in their beds, it’s past eight o’clock!

  Some have suggested this rhyme is about William of Orange, pointing to the unpopular rules and curfews that he imposed upon England after he had replaced James II as king in 1689. It is certainly true that William’s Act of Toleration of the same year, guaranteeing religious freedom, actually extended only to Protestant non-conformists whereas Roman Catholics were shown no tolerance at all but kept under close scrutiny.

  However, that’s pretty unlikely to be the origin of this rhyme, considering that its first publication date was 1841 –centuries after the reign of William of Orange. In fact the author of the poem was himself called William. William Miller (1810-72) was a Scottish poet; the version we know is a translation from the Scots and there are nineteen more verses. Here are just four (also in translation) to show how the poem develops:

  ‘Hey, Willie Win
kie, are you coming in?

  The cat is singing purring sounds to the sleeping hen,

  The dog’s spread out on the floor, and doesn’t give a cheep,

  But here’s a wakeful little boy who will not fall asleep!’

  Anything but sleep, you rogue! glowering like the moon,

  Rattling in an iron jug with an iron spoon,

  Rumbling, tumbling round about, crowing like a cock,

  Shrieking like I don’t know what, waking sleeping folk.

  ‘Hey, Willie Winkie – the child’s in a creel!

  Wriggling from everyone’s knee like an eel,

  Tugging at the cat’s ear, and confusing all her thrums

  Hey, Willie Winkie – see, there he comes!’

  Pop Goes the Weasel

  Weary is the mother who has a dusty child,

  A small short little child, who can’t run on his own,

  Who always has a battle with sleep before he’ll close an eye

  But a kiss from his rosy lips gives strength anew to me.

  So, far from being a Dutch king imposing a curfew on the nation, Wee Willie is actually a magical creature, like the Sandman, that brings sleep to children. In his poem, which would have been recited to children at bedtime (and perhaps that’s why there are so many tedious extra verses – to bore them to sleep), William Miller created a popular figure in much the same way as the anonymous contemporary poem ‘A Visit From St Nicholas’ (published in 1823 and better known as ‘’Twas the Night Before Christmas’) had pinned down Father Christmas properly for the first time.

  What Are Little Boys Made Of?

  WHAT are little boys made of?

  What are little boys made of?