Mother Goose
Despite being the most classic of classic children’s literature, it was not until the nineteenth century that the Mother Goose stories and rhymes came to be seen, in the words of folklorist Henry Bett, as more than “childish trifles.” Another admirer, James Orchard Halliwell—an English antiquarian who, in 1842, published the first major anthology of the Mother Goose nursery rhymes—remarked that the verses’ unknown authors had never been “favored with any vindicating critic” but were nevertheless “an ancient series of bards.” Recognizing that it can be as interesting to study history, language, and literature from the bottom up as from the top down, Halliwell added: “That [these poets’] works have at one time been in everyone’s mouth is, I presume, a sufficient proof of their genuine right to fame.”
What is it about these simple and yet not-so-simple rhymes that led them to become perhaps the most familiar poems in the English language? Part of the answer may be that Mother Goose bridges both of the two major historical “schools” of children’s poetry. Over the years, some have tried to show that like Aesop and his followers, Mother Goose teaches serious moral lessons. That said, the rhymes are also the forerunners of Victorian (and later) nonsense poetry, deliberately ridiculous verses that celebrate play and imagination for their own sake and reject the idea that children’s poetry must have an instructional purpose.
Like the Bible, the Mother Goose rhymes may owe much of their popularity to a characteristic they have in common with scripture: they are multivalent. In other words, the texts are ambiguous enough that they can have more than one legitimate meaning. Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum believed that “much reflection” lay beneath Mother Goose’s silly wordplay, and in 1897 he published a book, Mother Goose in Prose, which unpacked what he saw as the poems’ larger significance. But it was another American, Adeline D. T. Whitney, who scooped the yolk out of Mother Goose’s eggs like no one else.
Mother Goose for Grown Folks (1860) contains Whitney’s brilliant and funny explications—themselves written in rhyming verse—of twenty-eight Mother Goose rhymes. With the skill of a poet, preacher, psychoanalyst, and professor of comparative literature, she set out to show that the great English poets, from Shakespeare to Tennyson, merely returned to ideas that Mother Goose had already explored. “They use my quills, and leave me out, / Oblivious that I wear the wings; / Or that a Goose has been about, / When every little gosling sings.”
As Whitney saw it, Mother Goose offered “deep counsels in a foolish guise, / That come as warnings, even to the wise.” “Little Miss Muffet,” to her, was about tempering our expectations of happiness and not letting life’s metaphorical “black spiders” scare us away. The moral of “Humpty Dumpty” is that some things just don’t work out, and the famous line “What a big boy am I!” in “Little Jack Horner” is a coded way of saying: stop thinking you’re more important than others.
The Prelutsky Collection also contains pastiches of Mother Goose—works that imitate the poems’ style and introduce new subject matter while still paying homage to the original work. A good example is Ben Aronin’s New Mother Goose Book (1944), which advertised itself as having “new rhymes, new characters, new everything.” Mother Goose Rhymes for Jewish Children (1945) by Sarah G. Levy is similar in nature.
Not everyone has viewed Mother Goose positively. Some have seen “her” as out of synch with modern liberal values and in need of revision. In the introduction to Father Gander Nursery Rhymes (1985), an attempt to make Mother Goose more inclusive, author Doug Larche asserted that “A study of one hundred of our most popular rhymes reveals a male-dominated, able-bodied, monocultural fairyland filled with sexism, anger, violence, environmental and nutritional ignorance, and insensitivity to the human condition.” Frank Scully, author of Blessed Mother Goose (1951), agreed that some of the poems were morally questionable and rewrote them, in his case from a Christian point of view.
A few titles in the Prelutsky Collection overhaul Mother Goose for a very different reason: as social satire. Eve Merriam’s The Inner City Mother Goose, first published in 1969, is about urban poverty and the many issues associated with it. The book was widely banned because of its provocative subject matter and illustrations. The Liberated Mother Goose (1974) by Tamar Hoffs, in comparison, was intended to be funny, but also offers biting social critique from feminist, anti-war, and pro-Native American rights perspectives. Both works use Mother Goose as a way of saying that we shape the world by what we teach our children.
