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By Carole H. Carpenter |
Jan 1, 2008
Verses of early childhood from birth through kindergarten—many derived from and still active in oral tradition, together with literary versions purposefully composed for children—abound in literature for youngsters worldwide. Many commentaries attempt to define the genre by listing types of verses, most commonly in terms of their uses or forms—for example counting rhymes, bouncing rhymes, lullabies, riddles, short nonsense narratives, and such. This approach neither captures the essence of the category nor offers insight into its defining characteristics: a common audience of children and, frequently, their caregivers; strong and insistent rhythm; strict rhyme; and repetition, often incremental in nature. The rhymes are commonly described as being short, yet many have existed in numerous stanzas. Years of passage through childhood culture have effectively preserved in these verses just the amount of content that is capable of engaging youngsters through its familiarity—typically several stanzas at most. This effect of familiarity exists for the published verse as well, indicated by the not-uncommon disenchantment of child listeners with too much of the same thing or the fatigue of adult readers through repetition beyond the portion of the rhymes preserved as icons of their childhood.
Early Traditions
The oldest verses of this nature were indubitably orally derived, for they represent one of the primary ways adult humans seek to interact and communicate with their young. “Peek-a-boo, I see you” is a simple and widespread example of this adult-child interactive play that can logically be assumed to have ancient roots, owing to the pervasive existence of variations on this form in child-rearing traditions worldwide. Another universal form is that of rhymes associated with making gestures, actions, and mime while touching parts of the child's body. Examples include the well-known toe game “This little piggy” and the tickling rhyme “Round and round in the garden, goes the teddy bear.” Lullabies are a third universal form; these typically gentle tunes are not always matched in gentleness by the accompanying verse, as, for instance, in “Rock-a-bye baby.” Other verse set to music is commonly used to create various amusements, such as the dandling game “There was a nimble pony, whose name was Dapple Gray,” and here again comparable examples exist in languages and cultures throughout the world. The significance of these very early traditional communications has been demonstrated in a Toronto program called Parent-Child Mother Goose, developed for new parents who are recent immigrants separated from their families. Encouraged to use nursery rhymes from their specific cultures, these parents feel more comfortable and competent in interacting with their infants and less isolated from parents of other backgrounds because they, too, are seen to have similar verses. Some of these very early verses enter children's active repertoires as they begin to socialize with other children, but mostly these verses are etched in memory to be used with subsequent generations, as they are when the need to communicate with an infant arises. The remembrances go beyond normal memory, for persons who as preliterate children heard rhymes or songs in a different language or dialect that they themselves never actively spoke will reproduce in comparable circumstances those items as they received them in their infancy. The specific origins of nursery rhymes—as of most folklore—continue to intrigue people, but such details are lost to the ages because (like so much concerning childhood culture in the past) they were never adequately recorded. The basic characteristics of nursery rhymes are common traits of oral traditions in general, and the enduring popularity of the verses owes much to the ownership engendered in the littlest of people through resonance with that most familiar and personal of all human communication. Another stream in the nursery rhyme tradition, however, comprises those verses written by adults specifically to educate or amuse children, and the history of this category, while complex and open to debate, is much easier to document. Iona and Peter Opie have demonstrated that the actual term “nursery rhyme” first appears in 1824 but is preceded by several centuries of related texts—ballads, bawdy or historical or satirical—that some 19th-century folklore scholars argued, in keeping with evolutionary theories of the time, were the detritus of high culture preserved mimetically among children (or the common folk). Such ideas prompted research into the sociocultural sources for the rhymes, offering allegorical referents for persons and events depicted in them: for instance, “Mary, Mary quite contrary” reputedly being Mary, Queen of Scots. A number of studies of this nature exist, among which The Annotated Mother Goose (1962), compiled by the Baring-Goulds, is a good example. From the mid-18th century onward, nursery rhymes became increasingly prominent in the developing literature for children. John Newbery's heirs published a collection, Mother Goose's Melody; or, Sonnets for the Cradle (c. 1766), that helped cement the enduring link between Mother Goose and rhymes—rather than a link between Mother Goose and tales, as first presented in Charles Perrault's 1697 collection for children, Histoires ou contes du temps passé (English trans., Histories or Tales of Past Times, Told by Mother Goose (1729). The chapbooks that became popular in the early 19th century were ideal outlets for a single nursery rhyme or a small collection and helped standardize and cultivate a reading audience for the rhymes. Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826) is one of the larger anthologies of the period, which also gave rise to significant publications in the United States and Canada, such as Mother Goose's Melodies (1833), but similar collections appeared only later in Britain's remaining colonies such as Australia, where W. A. Cawthorne's influential Who Killed Cockatoo? did not appear until 1870. The practice of creating relatively inexpensive but elaborately illustrated books of nursery rhymes commenced in 1881 with the publication of Mother Goose; or, The Old Nursery Rhymes by Kate Greenaway. Subsequently, Randolph Caldecott's highly successful and extended series of relatively short picture or toy books appeared, each presenting one or several rhymes in large print with few words on a page accompanied by elaborate, colored illustrations. A pattern was thus established for accomplished illustrators to use nursery rhymes as the stimulus for their creativity, resulting in such works as The Baby Opera (1877) by Walter Crane, Mother Goose: The Old Nursery Rhymes (1913) by Arthur Rackham, The Real Mother Goose (1916) by Blanche Fisher Wright, and works by many others such as Raymond Briggs, Maurice Sendak, and Richard Scarry throughout the 20th century. There is no standard canon of Mother Goose verses, although modern works presented as “Mother Goose” tend to focus on the most popular or well-known verses in the attenuated forms in which they have survived—“Jack and Jill” and “Mary had a little lamb,” for example. These rhymes and songs are so familiar that it was possible for Janet Ahlberg to create Each Peach Pear Plum (1973), a picture book for wee ones based on the traditional game “I spy,” using just names of characters from the verses as well as traditional children's tales. While some nursery rhymes still have oral currency among children despite the onslaught of media on their culture, the abundant anachronisms and archaic words incorporated in the rhymes have caused many of them to fall into disuse. For instance, few now know what a “tuffet” or “whey” might be, and wordplay seems insufficient to fascinate a child who does not. Further, societal concerns about bullying, violence, and abuse mitigate against preserving “Georgie Porgie,” “Tom, Tom, the piper's son,” “The Old Woman who lives in a shoe,” and many more Mother Goose rhymes, no matter how humorous they might formerly have seemed. The strong element of nonsense and the ridiculous that courses through nursery rhymes is the source of the humor in them, but those very elements are targeted by many adults as stimulating more fear than pleasurable laughter in the contemporary child. Yet, modern scholars, such as the Opies from their canonical The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes (1951) to their later works, have made the same argument for nursery rhymes that J. R. R. Tolkien made for “Faerie” (in his frequently reprinted 1975 essay “On Fairy Stories”), and Bruno Bettelheim (in The Uses of Enchantment, 1976) argued for not only the value but also the necessity of fairy tales. Nursery rhymes “help children deal with the conflicts and complexities of real life” by presenting a nonsensical “world of kindness and cruelty, history and fantasy, morality and amorality, peace and aggression, and the multitude of paradoxical forces that permeate human life” (Rollin). Simply, nursery rhymes offer children access to the truth in a form that they can accept and handle. The apparently simple or nonsensical verses, then, bear powerful meaning for the young, whose obvious attachment to them has indicated that they are matters of consequence.Role in Children's Lives
Nursery rhymes serve various functions for the young far beyond any amusement value. They are a primary means of language acquisition; indeed, some researchers argue that they are central to language acquisition and should be a part of a child's life within the first eighteen months in order for the youngster to develop the necessary synapses to develop his or her full literacy potential. Nursery rhymes also fulfill the goal of enabling children to see themselves in literature, for the world seems to be nonsensical to children and they are thus gratified to identify with the many vulnerable characters to whom things happen in fairy tales. As children age, they are the first to put behind them “childish things,” and they frequently use variants on nursery rhymes to express their maturation. The result is an endless variety of parodies on familiar forms that have themselves, in recent years, become the basis for numerous books. Especially fine examples of this genre are the compilations by June Factor (with Gwenda Davey and others) of children's own submissions, starting with Far Out, Brussel Sprout (1983), in which one of the most popular of childhood verses appears as “Mary had a little lamb, Her father shot it dead. Now it goes to school, beneath two slices of bread.” Children mark their passage through childhood by rejecting what went before and declaring supremacy over it, as in the following “elevated” version of “Three Blind Mice” by a ten- year-old:Three rodents with defective vision, Three rodents with defective vision. Observe how they perambulate. They all perambulated after the agriculturalist's mate, Who severed their extremities with a kitchen utensil. Have you ever observed such a phenomenon in all your existence As three rodents with defective vision?The Opies' volume I Saw Esau: The Schoolchild's Pocket Book, illustrated by Maurice Sendak (1992), is a fine collection of older children's reactions of this nature to nursery rhyme. A substantial number of books have explored the way that nursery rhymes may be a means of instilling identity—most obviously national identity, but sometimes cultural or religious identity as well. Around the beginning of the 20th century, when nationalist movements were common and immigrants to new lands were searching for their identity, numerous nursery rhyme collections with overtly nationalist themes appeared—for instance, David Boyle's Uncle Jim's Nursery Rhymes for Canadian Children (1908), which was the first four-color illustrated Canadian work for children. Boyle, an avocational scholar of folklore, integrated his Argylleshire background with the Canadian environment to produce a work intended to promote a sense of Canadianness. Robert Holden has documented that around the same time in Australia, there emerged verses obviously involved with what we might now call “identity politics”—such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Southern Cross,” which played on the distinctiveness of the antipodes. There were also publications promoting American verse, as documented in the retrospective Yankee Doodle's Literary Sampler of Prose, Poetry, and Pictures: Being an Anthology of Diverse Works Published for the Edification and/or Entertainment of Young Readers in America before 1900, edited by Virginia Havilland and Margaret Coughlan (1974). Modern versions of the same type include Colin Thiele and Wendy DePaauw's The Australian Mother Goose (2d. ed., 1992), which enjoys success as a children's, as well as a tourist, book. Works attempting to manipulate nursery rhymes to fulfill overt agendas have seldom captivated significant audiences. Children continue today, as they undoubtedly have throughout the history of nursery rhymes, to engage with the rhymes directly and to make of them what matters to their understanding of the world and operation in it. See also Chapbooks; Fairy Tales and Folk Tales; Lullaby; Picture Books; Toy Books; and biographies of figures mentioned in this article.
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