BOOKBUSTER REVIEW
Cracking Humpty Dumpty
By Tim Devlin
Published by Susak Press, rrp £12.99, available at Bookbuster
Review by Tim Barton
Of ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, Tim Devlin, in his lovely intriguing new book offering ‘an investi-gative trail of favourite nursery rhymes’, quotes nursery rhyme commentator Chris Roberts: “Of all the nursery rhymes this is the one that most people think they ‘know’ the origins of.”
Tim is here to roundly disabuse us of such notions and, as with Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, the net effect is not to lessen our enjoyment of these ‘childhood rhymes’ but to deepen it. I have put ‘childhood rhymes’ in quotes because whilst most of us will have first heard them this way, many were political chants, or bar-room songs. This book rounds up twelve of our most popular rhymes, and gives intriguing historical detective work, drawn from both primary and secondary sources, plus common sense and imagination, to give us ‘most likely’ meanings and roots that will often confound the reader.
His introduction gives a brief précis of the historical sources for many of our rhymes and a bibliography of speculative volumes on their history, dating from an 1837 essay on The Archaeology of Our Popular Phrases and Nursery Rhymes by John Bellenden Ker, to a 2018 work, Warts & All, by Sandy Leong. A few are featured regularly throughout the book, sometimes as offering great solutions, sometimes to be interrogated, even mocked (at least one writer has since referred to Ker as ‘Bellend’ it seems). These sources are themselves intriguing, one for example offers the view that nursery rhymes are a ‘remnant of popular protest’, and another finds the roots of a few in ‘dance, game’ as well as ‘rhyme’.
A lot of the rhymes long pre-date the anthologised eighteenth and nineteenth century versions we know and love, and have evolved over time. Some referred to very different events and people than those we were taught to think were intended, some remain open questions, though Tim makes a ‘best guess’ in such cases.
In this volume he covers Baa Baa Black Sheep, including a brief eye-roll at the (semi-literate) ‘ban it, it’s racist’ brigade; Georgie Porgie, and it’s antecedents; the Grand Old Duke of York (which of the 16 such dukes was it?); Hey Diddle Diddle, more fiddly than you think; Humpty Dumpty, with some outré conclusions that may surprise you, even seem downright weird; Jack & Jill (hint: the chapter is sub-titled ‘A case of mistaken gender identity); Little Boy Blue, who was apparently not blue at all; Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, a rhyme whose history will appeal to the Hilary Mantel and Philippa Gregory fans out there; Old King Cole, whose source seems to be deepest Essex; Oranges and Lemons, with a good few lines I’d not heard before, and a chart of East End churches with details of trades based nearby, and their condition before and after the Great Fire of London; and the afore-mentioned Ring a Ring o’ Roses, which, as you’ll have guessed, was not originally a rhyme about the plague!
Also covered is Little Bo-Peep, which is of greatest interest to Hastings folk, as it appears likely to be about smuggling and excise-men hereabouts, though Tim gives several other interpretations taken from the copious literature on nursery rhymes, as he does with each of the twelve herein. I will say no more about this rhyme; it is worth buying the book to get a fuller picture. In fact, it is clearly a great stocking filler and we sold a few in the first two days it was on the shelf!
A second volume is planned, and in the Postscript Tim asks us to let him know what our favourite rhymes are, and about any theories we may have about the meanings of nursery rhymes. As he lists his content for the next book, one assumes a third is in the embryonic stages of mapping out!
• This book is also beautifully presented, with egg-cellent (sic) illustrations by Tim’s nephew’s wife, award-winning illustrator Katarina Dragoslavić, some of whose work is to be found on Instagram at Katarina_illustration.
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How can I get a copy of the book if I live in Australia?
On his website Tim writes:
“If you live in the UK and want to buy the book, click on the picture of Humpty Dumpty and follow the instructions as normal going up to the purchase cart at the top.
If you live outside the UK please e-mail me at [email protected]”
Hope that helps.