November 24, 2021 • 33 mins
Today’s episode is the next installment of our Six Impossible Episodes series, and our second one on nursery rhymes. This one explores the historical context of Jack and Jill, London Bridge, Cock Robin and others.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today's episode
is the next installment in our Six Impossible Episodes series.
(00:22):
If you are new to the show, sometimes I grouped
together six topics that for one reason or another can't
really work as a full episode, or sometimes they just
worked together as a group. And the last time we
did this we talked about mother Goose and nursery rhymes,
and I was not planning for the very next one
(00:42):
to be more nursery rhymes, but so many people wrote
in to say please do more of those that I
was like, sure, seems like fun. Last time we talked
about who this mother Goose person is anyway, along with
the Muffin man ring around, the Rosy Little Jack Corner,
(01:02):
Rockabye Baby, and Mistress Mary quite contrary. So if you
are curious about the origins of any of those and
have not heard that earlier episode that came out on
May three of this year, which is in Case to
Meet a Refresher, I sure do. And we kicked off
that previous Six Impossible Episodes with a caveat, and we're
(01:24):
going to do the same today. A lot of English
language nursery rhymes are more than three hundred years old.
Most of the ones we're talking about today appeared in
some form in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook that was first
printed in seventy four and is the first known English
language collection of nursery rhymes. Most but not all nursery
(01:46):
rhymes circulated orally for some time before being written down,
and many also have precursors or influences from other languages
that are at least as old as the ones that
are in English, so they have been around for a
long time. Aim but it was not until the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that people started really studying
(02:06):
these poems that came along with a rise in academic
interest in folklore. So for the most part, these purported
explanations for what these poems mean we're first proposed hundreds
of years after the poems were composed. Katherine Elis Thomas
published The Real Personages of Mother Goose in nineteen thirty,
(02:29):
and that became a pretty big source for a lot
of these interpretations. While that book does have very extensive
cross references to different pieces of literature and historical events,
all of which are very precisely footnoted. Some of them
do seem like kind of a stretch. Many historians in
(02:50):
folklorists argue that these kinds of interpretations are mostly conjecture.
You maybe have heard the term backronym. In an acronym,
a word is formed out of an abbreviation, like radio
detection and ranging, becoming the word radar. But a backronym
takes an existing word that was not created from an
abbreviation and makes up an abbreviation to go with it.
(03:13):
For example, there's the Apgar score, which was named for
Virginia Apgar, who we've covered on the show before, but
then people later turned this into a mnemonic for what
the score evaluates, and that is a list of the
newborn babies appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration, which of
course spell out the word Apgar. So it's possible, or
(03:34):
maybe even likely, that at least some of these interpretations
are more like backronyms than actual reflections of what the
people who made up the rhymes intended for them to mean,
If in fact, they intended for them to mean anything.
Sometimes it seems like they just meant to be silly.
At the same time, though, these are fun and they
(03:55):
give us a chance to take a quick look at
the various historical moments and people in places these poems
may or may not be related to. So first, up,
good old Jack and Jill, who went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and
broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. There is
a second and probably slightly newer verse that's maybe not
(04:15):
as well known, which is up Jack got and home
did trot as fast as he could caper to old
Dame daub who patched his knob with vinegar and brown paper?
Had you heard that before, Holly, I feel like I have,
but I couldn't tell you where because I remember having
a thought about like, wait, are they saying that he's uh,
(04:39):
some sort of pinata boy? Like I didn't understand that
the brown paper situation. It said like a little vinegar
paper Michie going on. I don't think I had, because
one of the things that we're going to get to
reference this vinegar and brown paper, And I was like,
what are you talking about? Where does this come from?
Because I had not actually found a second verse written
(05:01):
out yet so. Starting in the early nineteenth century, in
addition to those two verses, people started tacking on more
and more verses and using this as a template for
pantomimes and plays and illustrations of this nursery rhyme dating
back over the last couple of centuries. Sometimes Jack and
Jill are depicted as young children, but sometimes they are
(05:22):
teens or young adults. The earliest known version of this
poem was printed in Mother Goose's Melody in seventeen sixty five,
and there are several interpretations or explanations of where it
came from. First, Kilmursdon in North Somerset, England, is home
to a Jack and Jill Hill. The path up the
hill has a set of stone markers that contain lines
(05:44):
from the poem. Kilmursdon School is at the top of
the hill and there's a plaque on the side of
it that was placed in the year two thousand bearing
the full poem along with the inscription quote. It is
said that centuries ago Jack and Jill daily went up
the hill for water. One fateful day, Jack was hit
by a boulder from nearby Badstone Quarry. He tumbled down
(06:06):
and suffered a wound that not even vinegar and brown
paper could mend. Jill also died young, but not before
she had given birth to the couple's son, whom villagers
raised and called Jill's son. The surname Gilson still features
widely in this area. And that's when I was like,
what is this vinegar and brown paper thing on the
(06:28):
side of the school. Some sources pinpoint this story as
having been something that happened sometime in the fifteenth century,
and there are also variations in which Jack and Jill
in this story were a married couple, and then other
ones where they were going up the hill because they
were not married and their relationship was a secret and
(06:49):
they're fetching water was just the pretenses that they could
have some time alone together. There are also speculations that
this is a reference to King Louis the sixteen and
Maria Twinette being beheaded during the French Revolution. The problem
there is that the king and queen were beheaded in
sevente that's almost thirty years after this poem appeared in
print for the first time. Another speculation there is a
(07:14):
unit of measure that I sure do not use very often,
which is called the gill, also spelled the jill. This
unit of measure has been around since sometime in the
thirteen hundreds, and it was initially used to measure servings
of things like whiskey and wine. It still exists. It's
still typically used for liquids, and its exact volume has
(07:36):
varied over the years. Currently, in the United States it's
equivalent to half a cup, while in the UK it
is five British fluid ounces or a fourth of a pint.
Back in the reign of King Charles the first which
started in sixty five, a jill was half a jack,
and a jack was also known as a jackpot. King
Charles wanted to increase tax revenue, and one way to
(07:59):
do this was to make liquid measures smaller. People probably
wouldn't drink less if they were served a smaller portion.
They would just buy more of those smaller measures and
then have to pay a tax on each one. So
King Charles reduced the size of the jack. In other words,
jack fell down, and since a jill was half a jack,
jill came tumbling after. Another idea is that this is
(08:22):
an English language reference to the North myth of Jukie
and Bill, who are siblings who follow the moon, or
perhaps we're stolen away by the moon. They carry a
pail of water on a pole in between them. Sometimes
this is interpreted as the dark spots on the moon
that we see when we look at it from the earth,
(08:44):
representing Jukie and Bill. The names Jukie and Bill aren't
really all that far off from Jack and Jill, like
Jukie and Jack are a little different, but if you
turn Bill into the same first letter, it's basically the same.
So there's some speculation that they these are two versions
of the same story. William Stewart Baring Gould was probably
(09:04):
the first person to make this connection in Curious Myths
of the Middle Ages, which came out in eighteen sixty six.
On a completely different note, Catherine L. Was Thomas argues
that this poem is quote a fling at Cardinal Wolsey
and his coadjutor, Bishop tarb They were going up the
hill to arrange a marriage between Mary Tudor and the
(09:25):
French monarch. The pail of water in this interpretation is
holy water. Among Thomas's citations for this interpretation is a
poem from harleyan Miscellany published in sixteen sixty one, which
uses the names Jack and Jill in reference to Wolsey's
opposition to Henry the Eighth marriage to Anne Boleyn at
(09:46):
the same time, though the names Jack and Jill have
really gone together as a pair in English for centuries,
with the first use and writing dating back more than
a hundred years before that sixteen sixty one public a.
And we're going to take a quick sponsor break, and
then we will get to another poem that may or
may not have something to do with Cardinal Woolsey. Our
(10:17):
next rhyme, Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to
get her poor dog a bone. When she got there,
the cupboard was bare, and so the poor dog had none.
I think most folks are probably familiar with that bit
of the poem, but there is a whole whole lot
more of it than just that first bit. Uh And curiously,
(10:37):
the rest of the stanzas have fewer lines and a
slightly different cadence from that first bit. The next stanza
is she went to the baker's to buy him some bread,
and when she came back, the poor dog was dead. Okay,
that's troubling, but don't be alarmed. It's okay. Mother Hubbard
goes to the undertakers to buy the dog a coffin,
(10:59):
but when she comes back, he's a laughing. It works out,
that's fine. Uh. This poem becomes increasingly fanciful, with old
mother Hubbard bringing the dog some linen, hose, a hat,
some fruit, a coat, a wig, some tripe, some fish,
and some wine, and the dog, bless his heart, wearing clothes,
(11:22):
playing the flute, feeding the cat, riding the goat, dancing
a jake, smoking a pipe, washing a dish, and standing
on his head. It's a lot. Uh, it's really kind
of fun back and forth that way through many stanzas.
It starts out with me feeling like she's not the
best pet caretaker, but then by the end, I'm like, oh,
(11:43):
they're both bananas. It's okay, yeah, there they both have
a lot going on here. So in terms of nursery
rhyme authorship, this one's a little unusual, especially in terms
of what we've talked about in uh this couple of episodes,
we're actually pretty sure who wrote this and when, and
it has that in common with Mary Had a Little Lamb,
(12:05):
which Sarah Josepha Hale published in eighteen thirty. We have
talked about that on the podcast before Old Mother Hubbard
first appears as The comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard
and her Dog by Sarah Catherine Martin, published on June first,
eighteen o five. As the story goes, Martin was in
her thirties and she was visiting her sister, and her
(12:27):
future brother in law became really annoyed because she kept
trying to talk to him while he was trying to
do something else. So he told her in a really
insulting way to go write a poem or something. So
she did, and that poem became what's known as Old
Mother Hubbard. Even though the eighteen o five version is
the first printed version of the full poem we know today,
(12:47):
it may have had some earlier inspirations. Mother Hubbard was
already something of a stock character long before this, dating
back at least to Edmund Spencer's fifty nineties satire Prosopopoia
or Mother Hubbard's Tail. Although this piece features the name
Mother Hubbard, there is no dog and there's no bone
in a cupboard. There are also some parallels to a
(13:10):
poem that was published in Gammer Girton's Garland in four
This one references an old woman who quote lived upon
nothing but victuals and drink. When the woman in this
poem goes off to the baker to buy some bread,
and she comes home to find her husband dead, not
her dog. But then after she goes to the clerk
(13:30):
to toll the bell for him, she comes back home
again to find her husband. Well, that's not the only
indication that there may have been earlier versions of at
least the first few stanzas of Old Mother Hubbard. Coffin
doesn't rhyme with laughing, but it does rhyme with laffin,
which was used to mean laughing in the works of
such writers as William Shakespeare. So it is possible that
(13:52):
the first three stances are so already existed in some form,
and that Martin built on them at the start of
the nineteenth century. And as we said back before the break,
there's some suggestion that this circles back around to Cardinal
Thomas Wolsey. The interpretation here is that all those things
that Mother Hubbard brings to her dog, and all of
(14:13):
her dog's responses recreate the back and forth between Wolsey
and the Pope when Wolsey was trying and failing to
negotiate a divorce for Henry the eighth than Catherine of
Aragon and the real personages of Mother Goose Katherine Elis.
Thomas cites the tragedy of Cardinal Wolsey that was first
printed in the Mirror for Magistrates in seven and that
(14:36):
includes a reference to a dog and a bone, And
then there are also some other sixteenth century satires that
call the cardinal by the name Jack. Today, there is
a cottage in Devon known as Old Mother Hubbard's Cottage,
purportedly where Martin lived when she wrote the poem. Part
of the lore surrounding that cottage is that she was
working as a housekeeper at nearby Kittley House. But Martin
(15:00):
was also reportedly the daughter of a member of Parliament
and the one time love interest of King William the
Fourth while he was a prince, so there is some
question about whether she would have gotten a job as
a housekeeper. Yeah, so we will move on from there
to Bob Bob black Sheep. Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes,
their three bags full, one for the Master and one
(15:23):
for the Dame, and one for the little boy who
lives down the lane. That's probably the version of that
that most people are most familiar with. Sometimes people sing
it to the same basic tune as Twinkle Twinkle, Little
Star or the Alphabet song. This poem has stayed pretty
much the same for almost three hundred years since its
first appearance in Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book in se
(15:44):
except that version ends with but none for the little
boy who cries in the lane, so it's a little
bit sadder. Most of the purported historical meanings for this
poem have to do with taxes. One is the so
called Great Custom, which was a tax on wool that
Parliament granted to Edward the First of England in twelve
seventy five. So in this poem, the sheep is saying,
(16:08):
there's wool for the master, that being the King, and
the Dame that being the landlord, and none for the
poor child. Katherine Ellis Thomas puts forth the same basic
idea that connects it to a different era, that being
the reign of Edward the sixth and the Norfolk Rising
of fifteen forty nine, which was also known as Cat's Rebellion.
(16:30):
This rebellion was connected to landowners inclosing common land, which
meant that tenants no longer had space for grazing their animals,
including their sheep. Then the same basic idea is the same,
that the master and the Dame were the king and
the nobility, and that the little boy represented the common people.
Since about the nineteen eighties, various people have raised questions
(16:51):
about whether this poem has a racial component or a
connection to the Transatlantic slave trade. Since the sheep is
described as black, the term black sheep has been used
as an idiom meaning outcast or a disreputable person since
at least sixteen forty. The idea of black sheep is
somehow different from other sheep also appeared in English translations
(17:13):
of the Christian Bible at least a century before that.
All the black lambs in a flock are gathered up
as part of someone's wages in the Book of Genesis.
The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that this may be the
idioms origin, although the color is not always translated as
black in these verses and the animals are not always
translated as being sheep, but the word black has been
(17:38):
used to describe both people of African descent and things
that are thought of as evil or wicked for more
than a thousand years. Both of those meanings go all
the way back to early Old English. So while this
poem probably was not originally meant as a reference to
the Transatlantic slave trade, and the word black in there
(17:59):
might have just been for the sake of it being
alliterative with the bob bob heart, at this point those
connotations are pretty deeply entrenched in the English language. So
next another poem, London Bridge is falling down, falling down,
falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.
(18:20):
Early versions of this poem have London Bridge broken down
rather than falling, and there are a lot more verses
about what materials should be used to build it back
up again, and why all of those materials will not work,
like quote, build it up with wooden clay, wooden clay,
wooden clay, wooden clay will wash away, my fair lady.
From there it's bricks and mortar which will not stay,
(18:43):
and then iron and steel which will bend in bow,
and silver and gold which will be stolen away. The
states an even more nonsensical turn, because rather than finding
a more suitable bridge material than silver and gold, the
proposed solution is to set a man to watch all
night to make sure nobody steals it. But since there's
(19:04):
a chance that the man might fall asleep, that suggested
that he'd be given a pipe to smoke. Sure, it's
sort of like there's a hole in my bucket, Dear Liza,
but about structural engineering, um and smoking keeping people away.
This is another poem that was in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook,
(19:26):
and earlier versions have slightly different second and fourth lines
of each stanza, as in London Bridge is broken down,
dance over my Lady Lee, London Bridge is broken down
with a gay lady. It's possible that the Lady Lee
is meant to be the River Lee, which is a
tributary of the Thames. But there are also pieces of
this poem that date back even earlier than Tom Thumb's
(19:48):
Pretty Songbook and the London Shanta Clears, which was first
printed in sixteen fifty nine. There's some dialogue about dancing
the building of the London Bridge, and there are ref
princes to other London Bridge dances that date back to
the early eighteenth century, although the dances themselves don't survive.
There's also a seventeen twenty five satire called namby Pamby,
(20:12):
and in that there are the words Namby Pamby is
no clown, London Bridge is broken down. Now he courts
the gay lady dancing or the lady lee. There is
a lot of speculation that this rhyme references a real
destruction of London Bridge, or, if not London Bridge, some
other bridge in or near London, but it's usually not
(20:34):
identified as the damage that came from the Great Fire
of London in sixteen sixty six or the burning of
London Bridge in eleven thirty five that led to the
bridge being rebuilt with stone. Instead, it's usually proposed to
be an attack by King Olaf the second of Norway
in ten fourteen, something that is referenced in Norse accounts
(20:54):
but not in early English ones. We're gonna take a
quick sponsor break, and when we cut back, we're going
to talk about two more rhymes, both of which are
just a little bit more violent, one maybe a lot
more violent. We mentioned in our previous nursery rhyme Impossible
(21:21):
episodes that nursery rhymes can be really strange and scary
and violent. There's just so much falling down and a
lot of head injuries. It's like a precursor to every
short story that Flannery O'Connor wrote. Kind of Yeah, ify's
head breaks open, so we're gonna end onto more dramatic
(21:44):
examples of this. The first is Ladybird ladybird, which in
the US we usually called ladybug ladybug, because that's what
we call that insect. This is another poem that appears
in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, and this one goes, ladybird, ladybird,
fly away home. Your house is on fire and your
(22:06):
children are gone, or sometimes your house is on fire
and your children will burn. There's also a slightly longer
and probably newer version that offers some hope that not
all of Ladybird's children are burned, are gone, ending all
except one, and her name is Anne, and she hid
under the baking pan. There are some variations on this,
(22:26):
like in Yorkshire, England, ladybirds were known as lady cows,
or in Norfolk they were Bernie bee, and there was
a rhyme that went Bernie b Bernie beats. Tell me
when your wedding beat, if it be tomorrow day, take
your wings and fly away. I love that. The most
straightforward interpretation of this is that it's almost like saying
(22:47):
bless you or gazuntite when someone sneezes. In many parts
of Europe, ladybugs or ladybirds if that's where they're called
where you live, have been associated with the Virgin Mary
for centuries. That lady in ladybird is our lady. So
in that cultural and religious tradition, if a ladybug lands
on you, you you should take special care not to cause
(23:08):
it any harm. So you can recite this poem, gently
blow on the insect and send it on its way.
But there's also a BBC article that claims that this
poem is about quote sixteenth century Catholics and Protestant England
and the priests who were burned at the stake for
their beliefs. Uh. This article doesn't cite any sources for
(23:29):
that claim, but logically the connection that our Lady is
a common name for the Virgin Mary and Catholicism and
the poem involving fire is where that comes from. Of
all the things we have talked about today, this one
is like the least documented as far as how people
got from point A to point B, and lastly, the
(23:51):
most directly violent of the nursery rhymes, at least in
terms of what we're talking about today. It is who
killed cock Robin? And although that question an axe, as
both the first line and the title, there is no
mystery about who did it. The killer is named right away,
Who killed cock Robin? I said the sparrow with my
bow and arrow, I killed cock Robin. From there we
(24:14):
find out there were witnesses to this killing quote who
saw him die? I said the fly with my little eye,
I saw him die, and some versions the fly has
a little teeny. I also one of the animals caught
cock Robin's blood as he was dying. In some versions
this is the duck, which was just his luck, and
(24:36):
in others it was the fish with his little dish.
I'm not sure why you'd want to catch it, but okay, yeah.
It turns out this is secretly about vamporism among animals.
From there, the animals go on to plan cock Robin's funeral,
with the beatle making the shroud with a thread and needle,
the owl digging his grave with a pick and trowel,
(24:59):
the rook with this little book being the parson, the
dove acting as chief mourner, either because she'd previously mourned
for her love or because cock Robin was her love. Animals,
many of them birds, all have roles. Most of the
animals are small, although the bull is the one who
tolls the bell. Sometimes this is illustrated as a bull,
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but in others it is a bull finch. Some versions
of this poem and with all the animals sighing and
sobbing when the bell tolls for poor cock Robin, but
others have a few more lines after that quote, while
the cruel cock sparrow, cause of their grief, was hung
on a gibbet next day like a thief. So this
(25:42):
is such a weird poem for kids. Uh. It goes
beyond Jack and Jill falling down, or even a cradle
falling out of a treetop, to just straightforward murder. It's
first four verses were in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, with
the first line reading who did kill cock Robin? Since
that first publication there have been a lot of standalone
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books and chat books, many of them very dramatically illustrated.
Death and Burial of Poor cock Robin, printed in eighteen
sixty five, is illustrated with animal heads on fully dressed
mostly human bodies, but others have the animals simply as animals,
many starting off with a picture of a dead Robin
on his back pierced through with an arrow. For some reason,
(26:25):
I find that eighteen sixty seven illustration with the animal
heads on human bodies just profoundly disturbing. Oh, I love it.
We can talk more about this in the behind the scenes.
There are also other versions of this that build out
the back story with the courtship and a marriage between
cock Robin and Jenny Wren before a hawk ab ducts
(26:49):
Jenny Wren and then cock Robin gets murdered, and then
there are sequels as well which tell the story of
cock Robin's trial and execution. William Stewart baring Gould's The
Annotated Mother Goose speculates that this rhyme might be much
older than seventeen forty four, since the earliest versions read
I said the owl with my pick and a shovel,
(27:10):
which doesn't rhyme now, but it would have in earlier
eras it's the same sort of logic as that coffin
laughing rhyme from Old Mother Hubbard. Another possible clue that
it might be much older is the existence of a
stained glass window and Buckland Rectory, Gloucester, which dates back
to the fifteenth century. It depicts a robin that has
(27:30):
been shot through the heart with an arrow. There are
also some parallels to the Book of Philip Sparrow by
John Skelton, which dates back to fifteen o eight, but
even if this poem does date back to the fifteenth
or sixteenth century, it's possible that it saw renewed popularity
in the eighteenth century thanks to Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole
(27:50):
was hugely influential in British politics and effectively served as
Prime Minister from about seventeen one to seventeen forty two,
making him Britain's first prime minister, even though that term
was not formally used in Parliament yet. He became increasingly
unpopular starting in about seventeen thirty seven, and that downward
slide continued after Britain went to war with Spain in
(28:13):
the War of Jenkins ear in seventeen thirty nine. Walpole
finally resigned on February two, seventeen forty two, at which
point the King named him first Earl of Orford. He
remained influential after this point, but the heyday of his
time in the government was over. That period of more
than twenty years became known as the robin Ocracy, and
(28:35):
it ended just a couple of years before cock Robin
first appeared in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook. William Stewart Barren
Gould is one of the people who suggest that maybe
cock Robin is supposed to represent Walpole and this poem
is about his political downfall. Peter and Iona Opie make
the same suggestion in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.
(28:57):
There is also a totally different interpretation Shin, and that's
that this is a retelling of the death of the
Norse god Balder, son of Odin, who was killed when
Loki convinced Hodd to throw some mistletoe, mistletoe being the
only thing that could hurt Balder. Hodd was blind, so
he didn't know what he was throwing the mistletoe at,
or in some versions, what he was shooting with an
(29:19):
arrow tipped in mistletoe. Who killed cock Robin is described
as having some similarities to earlier versus recounting this tale,
but the ones that Tracy found all came along later. Yes,
I went on a search trying to figure out, like
what maybe eighteenth century version of this poem was there,
and I kept finding nineteenth century versions and I was like,
(29:40):
this doesn't help. Another speculation is that this is about
the death of Robin Hood, which I just found really
charming considering that Disney's nineteventy three Robin Hood film is
also anthropomorphins. Also, the death and Burial of cock Robin
was the first Exidermy tableau of past podcast subject Near
(30:03):
and Dear to my heart Walter Potter, we are bringing
that out as a Saturday classic, Okay. I thought that
would be a fun follow on to this particular episode.
Those are our six nursery rhymes for this time around.
I'm sure we will talk more about cock Robin in
the behind the scenes because um, I have just number
of thoughts. Uh until that points, I have listener mail
(30:28):
that is from Virginia, and Virginia wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly.
I've been leefully listening to the podcast since and have
wanted to write in for a long time. Then this
week Olivia Ward bush Banks episode, the moment came as
I listened to the episode on my lunch break around
the neighborhood. You mentioned a quote from the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper,
(30:49):
and I had a little embarrassing shuffle dance upon hearing
the name and one of my master's classes, I came
upon the Pittsburgh Courier as a reference for a paper
and simply fell in love with the new paper. For
the next sixteen months, I took every opportunity to research, read,
and write about this little known, historic black newspaper. Being
from Pittsburgh, I'm always going to look out to learn
(31:11):
more about my hometown and how this newspaper has played
several low key but still important parts in several important
events during the Double V campaign, the civil rights movement,
the integration of professional sports, and helping the middle class
African American community develop and display their identity. Some many
(31:31):
important names have been tied to this newspaper staff Wendel Smith, P. L. Prattus,
Frank E. Bolden, George Schiler, and cartoonists who depicted cartoons
that showed comical and commentary aspects of African American communities.
They also hired the wonderful Charles Teeny Harris, a photographer
whose photos have served as important depictions of everyday life
(31:53):
in the Pittsburgh black neighborhoods. Known for his charisma, Harris
could make his portrait subjects feel so at ease that
they would forget the camera was present. Then he would
take the picture to capture a truly beautiful moment. My
favorite picture is a little boy in extra large boxing
gloves sitting in his corner a single tier his rolled
down his cheek, but he has the sweetest smile on
(32:13):
his face and an impish twinkle in his eye. And
then Virginia had a link to that picture. His eighty
thousand collection of negatives and photographs were thankfully purchased by
the Carnegie Museum of Art and as part of their
digitizing project, along with a permanent exhibit of his works.
While there might not be enough information to do a
full episode on teeny Harris, I would wholeheartedly encourage you
(32:36):
to consider him for one of the impossible episodes you
may be planning in the future. I can promise you
that you'll get pulled down the delightful research rabbit hole
that I have happily hopped down myself, to a beautiful
land of nineties and fifties community photos. Please please keep
up all your amazing work. Thank you so much for
all you do, Virginia. Thank you so much for this email. Virginia.
(32:57):
I did indeed click on that link, and that photo
is beauty full, and then I lost some time in
the morning when I was meant to be researching instead
looking at these gorgeous, gorgeous photographs. So thank you so
much for sending this. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, we are
at History podcast that I heart radio dot com, and
(33:18):
we're all over social media at Missed in History. That's
why you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And
you can subscribe to our show on the I heart
radio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
(33:42):
visit the I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today's episode
is the next installment in our Six Impossible Episodes series.
(00:22):
If you are new to the show, sometimes I grouped
together six topics that for one reason or another can't
really work as a full episode, or sometimes they just
worked together as a group. And the last time we
did this we talked about mother Goose and nursery rhymes,
and I was not planning for the very next one
(00:42):
to be more nursery rhymes, but so many people wrote
in to say please do more of those that I
was like, sure, seems like fun. Last time we talked
about who this mother Goose person is anyway, along with
the Muffin man ring around, the Rosy Little Jack Corner,
(01:02):
Rockabye Baby, and Mistress Mary quite contrary. So if you
are curious about the origins of any of those and
have not heard that earlier episode that came out on
May three of this year, which is in Case to
Meet a Refresher, I sure do. And we kicked off
that previous Six Impossible Episodes with a caveat, and we're
(01:24):
going to do the same today. A lot of English
language nursery rhymes are more than three hundred years old.
Most of the ones we're talking about today appeared in
some form in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook that was first
printed in seventy four and is the first known English
language collection of nursery rhymes. Most but not all nursery
(01:46):
rhymes circulated orally for some time before being written down,
and many also have precursors or influences from other languages
that are at least as old as the ones that
are in English, so they have been around for a
long time. Aim but it was not until the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that people started really studying
(02:06):
these poems that came along with a rise in academic
interest in folklore. So for the most part, these purported
explanations for what these poems mean we're first proposed hundreds
of years after the poems were composed. Katherine Elis Thomas
published The Real Personages of Mother Goose in nineteen thirty,
(02:29):
and that became a pretty big source for a lot
of these interpretations. While that book does have very extensive
cross references to different pieces of literature and historical events,
all of which are very precisely footnoted. Some of them
do seem like kind of a stretch. Many historians in
(02:50):
folklorists argue that these kinds of interpretations are mostly conjecture.
You maybe have heard the term backronym. In an acronym,
a word is formed out of an abbreviation, like radio
detection and ranging, becoming the word radar. But a backronym
takes an existing word that was not created from an
abbreviation and makes up an abbreviation to go with it.
(03:13):
For example, there's the Apgar score, which was named for
Virginia Apgar, who we've covered on the show before, but
then people later turned this into a mnemonic for what
the score evaluates, and that is a list of the
newborn babies appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration, which of
course spell out the word Apgar. So it's possible, or
(03:34):
maybe even likely, that at least some of these interpretations
are more like backronyms than actual reflections of what the
people who made up the rhymes intended for them to mean,
If in fact, they intended for them to mean anything.
Sometimes it seems like they just meant to be silly.
At the same time, though, these are fun and they
(03:55):
give us a chance to take a quick look at
the various historical moments and people in places these poems
may or may not be related to. So first, up,
good old Jack and Jill, who went up the hill
to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and
broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. There is
a second and probably slightly newer verse that's maybe not
(04:15):
as well known, which is up Jack got and home
did trot as fast as he could caper to old
Dame daub who patched his knob with vinegar and brown paper?
Had you heard that before, Holly, I feel like I have,
but I couldn't tell you where because I remember having
a thought about like, wait, are they saying that he's uh,
(04:39):
some sort of pinata boy? Like I didn't understand that
the brown paper situation. It said like a little vinegar
paper Michie going on. I don't think I had, because
one of the things that we're going to get to
reference this vinegar and brown paper, And I was like,
what are you talking about? Where does this come from?
Because I had not actually found a second verse written
(05:01):
out yet so. Starting in the early nineteenth century, in
addition to those two verses, people started tacking on more
and more verses and using this as a template for
pantomimes and plays and illustrations of this nursery rhyme dating
back over the last couple of centuries. Sometimes Jack and
Jill are depicted as young children, but sometimes they are
(05:22):
teens or young adults. The earliest known version of this
poem was printed in Mother Goose's Melody in seventeen sixty five,
and there are several interpretations or explanations of where it
came from. First, Kilmursdon in North Somerset, England, is home
to a Jack and Jill Hill. The path up the
hill has a set of stone markers that contain lines
(05:44):
from the poem. Kilmursdon School is at the top of
the hill and there's a plaque on the side of
it that was placed in the year two thousand bearing
the full poem along with the inscription quote. It is
said that centuries ago Jack and Jill daily went up
the hill for water. One fateful day, Jack was hit
by a boulder from nearby Badstone Quarry. He tumbled down
(06:06):
and suffered a wound that not even vinegar and brown
paper could mend. Jill also died young, but not before
she had given birth to the couple's son, whom villagers
raised and called Jill's son. The surname Gilson still features
widely in this area. And that's when I was like,
what is this vinegar and brown paper thing on the
(06:28):
side of the school. Some sources pinpoint this story as
having been something that happened sometime in the fifteenth century,
and there are also variations in which Jack and Jill
in this story were a married couple, and then other
ones where they were going up the hill because they
were not married and their relationship was a secret and
(06:49):
they're fetching water was just the pretenses that they could
have some time alone together. There are also speculations that
this is a reference to King Louis the sixteen and
Maria Twinette being beheaded during the French Revolution. The problem
there is that the king and queen were beheaded in
sevente that's almost thirty years after this poem appeared in
print for the first time. Another speculation there is a
(07:14):
unit of measure that I sure do not use very often,
which is called the gill, also spelled the jill. This
unit of measure has been around since sometime in the
thirteen hundreds, and it was initially used to measure servings
of things like whiskey and wine. It still exists. It's
still typically used for liquids, and its exact volume has
(07:36):
varied over the years. Currently, in the United States it's
equivalent to half a cup, while in the UK it
is five British fluid ounces or a fourth of a pint.
Back in the reign of King Charles the first which
started in sixty five, a jill was half a jack,
and a jack was also known as a jackpot. King
Charles wanted to increase tax revenue, and one way to
(07:59):
do this was to make liquid measures smaller. People probably
wouldn't drink less if they were served a smaller portion.
They would just buy more of those smaller measures and
then have to pay a tax on each one. So
King Charles reduced the size of the jack. In other words,
jack fell down, and since a jill was half a jack,
jill came tumbling after. Another idea is that this is
(08:22):
an English language reference to the North myth of Jukie
and Bill, who are siblings who follow the moon, or
perhaps we're stolen away by the moon. They carry a
pail of water on a pole in between them. Sometimes
this is interpreted as the dark spots on the moon
that we see when we look at it from the earth,
(08:44):
representing Jukie and Bill. The names Jukie and Bill aren't
really all that far off from Jack and Jill, like
Jukie and Jack are a little different, but if you
turn Bill into the same first letter, it's basically the same.
So there's some speculation that they these are two versions
of the same story. William Stewart Baring Gould was probably
(09:04):
the first person to make this connection in Curious Myths
of the Middle Ages, which came out in eighteen sixty six.
On a completely different note, Catherine L. Was Thomas argues
that this poem is quote a fling at Cardinal Wolsey
and his coadjutor, Bishop tarb They were going up the
hill to arrange a marriage between Mary Tudor and the
(09:25):
French monarch. The pail of water in this interpretation is
holy water. Among Thomas's citations for this interpretation is a
poem from harleyan Miscellany published in sixteen sixty one, which
uses the names Jack and Jill in reference to Wolsey's
opposition to Henry the Eighth marriage to Anne Boleyn at
(09:46):
the same time, though the names Jack and Jill have
really gone together as a pair in English for centuries,
with the first use and writing dating back more than
a hundred years before that sixteen sixty one public a.
And we're going to take a quick sponsor break, and
then we will get to another poem that may or
may not have something to do with Cardinal Woolsey. Our
(10:17):
next rhyme, Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to
get her poor dog a bone. When she got there,
the cupboard was bare, and so the poor dog had none.
I think most folks are probably familiar with that bit
of the poem, but there is a whole whole lot
more of it than just that first bit. Uh And curiously,
(10:37):
the rest of the stanzas have fewer lines and a
slightly different cadence from that first bit. The next stanza
is she went to the baker's to buy him some bread,
and when she came back, the poor dog was dead. Okay,
that's troubling, but don't be alarmed. It's okay. Mother Hubbard
goes to the undertakers to buy the dog a coffin,
(10:59):
but when she comes back, he's a laughing. It works out,
that's fine. Uh. This poem becomes increasingly fanciful, with old
mother Hubbard bringing the dog some linen, hose, a hat,
some fruit, a coat, a wig, some tripe, some fish,
and some wine, and the dog, bless his heart, wearing clothes,
(11:22):
playing the flute, feeding the cat, riding the goat, dancing
a jake, smoking a pipe, washing a dish, and standing
on his head. It's a lot. Uh, it's really kind
of fun back and forth that way through many stanzas.
It starts out with me feeling like she's not the
best pet caretaker, but then by the end, I'm like, oh,
(11:43):
they're both bananas. It's okay, yeah, there they both have
a lot going on here. So in terms of nursery
rhyme authorship, this one's a little unusual, especially in terms
of what we've talked about in uh this couple of episodes,
we're actually pretty sure who wrote this and when, and
it has that in common with Mary Had a Little Lamb,
(12:05):
which Sarah Josepha Hale published in eighteen thirty. We have
talked about that on the podcast before Old Mother Hubbard
first appears as The comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard
and her Dog by Sarah Catherine Martin, published on June first,
eighteen o five. As the story goes, Martin was in
her thirties and she was visiting her sister, and her
(12:27):
future brother in law became really annoyed because she kept
trying to talk to him while he was trying to
do something else. So he told her in a really
insulting way to go write a poem or something. So
she did, and that poem became what's known as Old
Mother Hubbard. Even though the eighteen o five version is
the first printed version of the full poem we know today,
(12:47):
it may have had some earlier inspirations. Mother Hubbard was
already something of a stock character long before this, dating
back at least to Edmund Spencer's fifty nineties satire Prosopopoia
or Mother Hubbard's Tail. Although this piece features the name
Mother Hubbard, there is no dog and there's no bone
in a cupboard. There are also some parallels to a
(13:10):
poem that was published in Gammer Girton's Garland in four
This one references an old woman who quote lived upon
nothing but victuals and drink. When the woman in this
poem goes off to the baker to buy some bread,
and she comes home to find her husband dead, not
her dog. But then after she goes to the clerk
(13:30):
to toll the bell for him, she comes back home
again to find her husband. Well, that's not the only
indication that there may have been earlier versions of at
least the first few stanzas of Old Mother Hubbard. Coffin
doesn't rhyme with laughing, but it does rhyme with laffin,
which was used to mean laughing in the works of
such writers as William Shakespeare. So it is possible that
(13:52):
the first three stances are so already existed in some form,
and that Martin built on them at the start of
the nineteenth century. And as we said back before the break,
there's some suggestion that this circles back around to Cardinal
Thomas Wolsey. The interpretation here is that all those things
that Mother Hubbard brings to her dog, and all of
(14:13):
her dog's responses recreate the back and forth between Wolsey
and the Pope when Wolsey was trying and failing to
negotiate a divorce for Henry the eighth than Catherine of
Aragon and the real personages of Mother Goose Katherine Elis.
Thomas cites the tragedy of Cardinal Wolsey that was first
printed in the Mirror for Magistrates in seven and that
(14:36):
includes a reference to a dog and a bone, And
then there are also some other sixteenth century satires that
call the cardinal by the name Jack. Today, there is
a cottage in Devon known as Old Mother Hubbard's Cottage,
purportedly where Martin lived when she wrote the poem. Part
of the lore surrounding that cottage is that she was
working as a housekeeper at nearby Kittley House. But Martin
(15:00):
was also reportedly the daughter of a member of Parliament
and the one time love interest of King William the
Fourth while he was a prince, so there is some
question about whether she would have gotten a job as
a housekeeper. Yeah, so we will move on from there
to Bob Bob black Sheep. Have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes,
their three bags full, one for the Master and one
(15:23):
for the Dame, and one for the little boy who
lives down the lane. That's probably the version of that
that most people are most familiar with. Sometimes people sing
it to the same basic tune as Twinkle Twinkle, Little
Star or the Alphabet song. This poem has stayed pretty
much the same for almost three hundred years since its
first appearance in Tom Thumb's Pretty Song Book in se
(15:44):
except that version ends with but none for the little
boy who cries in the lane, so it's a little
bit sadder. Most of the purported historical meanings for this
poem have to do with taxes. One is the so
called Great Custom, which was a tax on wool that
Parliament granted to Edward the First of England in twelve
seventy five. So in this poem, the sheep is saying,
(16:08):
there's wool for the master, that being the King, and
the Dame that being the landlord, and none for the
poor child. Katherine Ellis Thomas puts forth the same basic
idea that connects it to a different era, that being
the reign of Edward the sixth and the Norfolk Rising
of fifteen forty nine, which was also known as Cat's Rebellion.
(16:30):
This rebellion was connected to landowners inclosing common land, which
meant that tenants no longer had space for grazing their animals,
including their sheep. Then the same basic idea is the same,
that the master and the Dame were the king and
the nobility, and that the little boy represented the common people.
Since about the nineteen eighties, various people have raised questions
(16:51):
about whether this poem has a racial component or a
connection to the Transatlantic slave trade. Since the sheep is
described as black, the term black sheep has been used
as an idiom meaning outcast or a disreputable person since
at least sixteen forty. The idea of black sheep is
somehow different from other sheep also appeared in English translations
(17:13):
of the Christian Bible at least a century before that.
All the black lambs in a flock are gathered up
as part of someone's wages in the Book of Genesis.
The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that this may be the
idioms origin, although the color is not always translated as
black in these verses and the animals are not always
translated as being sheep, but the word black has been
(17:38):
used to describe both people of African descent and things
that are thought of as evil or wicked for more
than a thousand years. Both of those meanings go all
the way back to early Old English. So while this
poem probably was not originally meant as a reference to
the Transatlantic slave trade, and the word black in there
(17:59):
might have just been for the sake of it being
alliterative with the bob bob heart, at this point those
connotations are pretty deeply entrenched in the English language. So
next another poem, London Bridge is falling down, falling down,
falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.
(18:20):
Early versions of this poem have London Bridge broken down
rather than falling, and there are a lot more verses
about what materials should be used to build it back
up again, and why all of those materials will not work,
like quote, build it up with wooden clay, wooden clay,
wooden clay, wooden clay will wash away, my fair lady.
From there it's bricks and mortar which will not stay,
(18:43):
and then iron and steel which will bend in bow,
and silver and gold which will be stolen away. The
states an even more nonsensical turn, because rather than finding
a more suitable bridge material than silver and gold, the
proposed solution is to set a man to watch all
night to make sure nobody steals it. But since there's
(19:04):
a chance that the man might fall asleep, that suggested
that he'd be given a pipe to smoke. Sure, it's
sort of like there's a hole in my bucket, Dear Liza,
but about structural engineering, um and smoking keeping people away.
This is another poem that was in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook,
(19:26):
and earlier versions have slightly different second and fourth lines
of each stanza, as in London Bridge is broken down,
dance over my Lady Lee, London Bridge is broken down
with a gay lady. It's possible that the Lady Lee
is meant to be the River Lee, which is a
tributary of the Thames. But there are also pieces of
this poem that date back even earlier than Tom Thumb's
(19:48):
Pretty Songbook and the London Shanta Clears, which was first
printed in sixteen fifty nine. There's some dialogue about dancing
the building of the London Bridge, and there are ref
princes to other London Bridge dances that date back to
the early eighteenth century, although the dances themselves don't survive.
There's also a seventeen twenty five satire called namby Pamby,
(20:12):
and in that there are the words Namby Pamby is
no clown, London Bridge is broken down. Now he courts
the gay lady dancing or the lady lee. There is
a lot of speculation that this rhyme references a real
destruction of London Bridge, or, if not London Bridge, some
other bridge in or near London, but it's usually not
(20:34):
identified as the damage that came from the Great Fire
of London in sixteen sixty six or the burning of
London Bridge in eleven thirty five that led to the
bridge being rebuilt with stone. Instead, it's usually proposed to
be an attack by King Olaf the second of Norway
in ten fourteen, something that is referenced in Norse accounts
(20:54):
but not in early English ones. We're gonna take a
quick sponsor break, and when we cut back, we're going
to talk about two more rhymes, both of which are
just a little bit more violent, one maybe a lot
more violent. We mentioned in our previous nursery rhyme Impossible
(21:21):
episodes that nursery rhymes can be really strange and scary
and violent. There's just so much falling down and a
lot of head injuries. It's like a precursor to every
short story that Flannery O'Connor wrote. Kind of Yeah, ify's
head breaks open, so we're gonna end onto more dramatic
(21:44):
examples of this. The first is Ladybird ladybird, which in
the US we usually called ladybug ladybug, because that's what
we call that insect. This is another poem that appears
in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, and this one goes, ladybird, ladybird,
fly away home. Your house is on fire and your
(22:06):
children are gone, or sometimes your house is on fire
and your children will burn. There's also a slightly longer
and probably newer version that offers some hope that not
all of Ladybird's children are burned, are gone, ending all
except one, and her name is Anne, and she hid
under the baking pan. There are some variations on this,
(22:26):
like in Yorkshire, England, ladybirds were known as lady cows,
or in Norfolk they were Bernie bee, and there was
a rhyme that went Bernie b Bernie beats. Tell me
when your wedding beat, if it be tomorrow day, take
your wings and fly away. I love that. The most
straightforward interpretation of this is that it's almost like saying
(22:47):
bless you or gazuntite when someone sneezes. In many parts
of Europe, ladybugs or ladybirds if that's where they're called
where you live, have been associated with the Virgin Mary
for centuries. That lady in ladybird is our lady. So
in that cultural and religious tradition, if a ladybug lands
on you, you you should take special care not to cause
(23:08):
it any harm. So you can recite this poem, gently
blow on the insect and send it on its way.
But there's also a BBC article that claims that this
poem is about quote sixteenth century Catholics and Protestant England
and the priests who were burned at the stake for
their beliefs. Uh. This article doesn't cite any sources for
(23:29):
that claim, but logically the connection that our Lady is
a common name for the Virgin Mary and Catholicism and
the poem involving fire is where that comes from. Of
all the things we have talked about today, this one
is like the least documented as far as how people
got from point A to point B, and lastly, the
(23:51):
most directly violent of the nursery rhymes, at least in
terms of what we're talking about today. It is who
killed cock Robin? And although that question an axe, as
both the first line and the title, there is no
mystery about who did it. The killer is named right away,
Who killed cock Robin? I said the sparrow with my
bow and arrow, I killed cock Robin. From there we
(24:14):
find out there were witnesses to this killing quote who
saw him die? I said the fly with my little eye,
I saw him die, and some versions the fly has
a little teeny. I also one of the animals caught
cock Robin's blood as he was dying. In some versions
this is the duck, which was just his luck, and
(24:36):
in others it was the fish with his little dish.
I'm not sure why you'd want to catch it, but okay, yeah.
It turns out this is secretly about vamporism among animals.
From there, the animals go on to plan cock Robin's funeral,
with the beatle making the shroud with a thread and needle,
the owl digging his grave with a pick and trowel,
(24:59):
the rook with this little book being the parson, the
dove acting as chief mourner, either because she'd previously mourned
for her love or because cock Robin was her love. Animals,
many of them birds, all have roles. Most of the
animals are small, although the bull is the one who
tolls the bell. Sometimes this is illustrated as a bull,
(25:21):
but in others it is a bull finch. Some versions
of this poem and with all the animals sighing and
sobbing when the bell tolls for poor cock Robin, but
others have a few more lines after that quote, while
the cruel cock sparrow, cause of their grief, was hung
on a gibbet next day like a thief. So this
(25:42):
is such a weird poem for kids. Uh. It goes
beyond Jack and Jill falling down, or even a cradle
falling out of a treetop, to just straightforward murder. It's
first four verses were in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook, with
the first line reading who did kill cock Robin? Since
that first publication there have been a lot of standalone
(26:02):
books and chat books, many of them very dramatically illustrated.
Death and Burial of Poor cock Robin, printed in eighteen
sixty five, is illustrated with animal heads on fully dressed
mostly human bodies, but others have the animals simply as animals,
many starting off with a picture of a dead Robin
on his back pierced through with an arrow. For some reason,
(26:25):
I find that eighteen sixty seven illustration with the animal
heads on human bodies just profoundly disturbing. Oh, I love it.
We can talk more about this in the behind the scenes.
There are also other versions of this that build out
the back story with the courtship and a marriage between
cock Robin and Jenny Wren before a hawk ab ducts
(26:49):
Jenny Wren and then cock Robin gets murdered, and then
there are sequels as well which tell the story of
cock Robin's trial and execution. William Stewart baring Gould's The
Annotated Mother Goose speculates that this rhyme might be much
older than seventeen forty four, since the earliest versions read
I said the owl with my pick and a shovel,
(27:10):
which doesn't rhyme now, but it would have in earlier
eras it's the same sort of logic as that coffin
laughing rhyme from Old Mother Hubbard. Another possible clue that
it might be much older is the existence of a
stained glass window and Buckland Rectory, Gloucester, which dates back
to the fifteenth century. It depicts a robin that has
(27:30):
been shot through the heart with an arrow. There are
also some parallels to the Book of Philip Sparrow by
John Skelton, which dates back to fifteen o eight, but
even if this poem does date back to the fifteenth
or sixteenth century, it's possible that it saw renewed popularity
in the eighteenth century thanks to Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole
(27:50):
was hugely influential in British politics and effectively served as
Prime Minister from about seventeen one to seventeen forty two,
making him Britain's first prime minister, even though that term
was not formally used in Parliament yet. He became increasingly
unpopular starting in about seventeen thirty seven, and that downward
slide continued after Britain went to war with Spain in
(28:13):
the War of Jenkins ear in seventeen thirty nine. Walpole
finally resigned on February two, seventeen forty two, at which
point the King named him first Earl of Orford. He
remained influential after this point, but the heyday of his
time in the government was over. That period of more
than twenty years became known as the robin Ocracy, and
(28:35):
it ended just a couple of years before cock Robin
first appeared in Tom Thumb's Pretty Songbook. William Stewart Barren
Gould is one of the people who suggest that maybe
cock Robin is supposed to represent Walpole and this poem
is about his political downfall. Peter and Iona Opie make
the same suggestion in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.
(28:57):
There is also a totally different interpretation Shin, and that's
that this is a retelling of the death of the
Norse god Balder, son of Odin, who was killed when
Loki convinced Hodd to throw some mistletoe, mistletoe being the
only thing that could hurt Balder. Hodd was blind, so
he didn't know what he was throwing the mistletoe at,
or in some versions, what he was shooting with an
(29:19):
arrow tipped in mistletoe. Who killed cock Robin is described
as having some similarities to earlier versus recounting this tale,
but the ones that Tracy found all came along later. Yes,
I went on a search trying to figure out, like
what maybe eighteenth century version of this poem was there,
and I kept finding nineteenth century versions and I was like,
(29:40):
this doesn't help. Another speculation is that this is about
the death of Robin Hood, which I just found really
charming considering that Disney's nineteventy three Robin Hood film is
also anthropomorphins. Also, the death and Burial of cock Robin
was the first Exidermy tableau of past podcast subject Near
(30:03):
and Dear to my heart Walter Potter, we are bringing
that out as a Saturday classic, Okay. I thought that
would be a fun follow on to this particular episode.
Those are our six nursery rhymes for this time around.
I'm sure we will talk more about cock Robin in
the behind the scenes because um, I have just number
of thoughts. Uh until that points, I have listener mail
(30:28):
that is from Virginia, and Virginia wrote, Hello, Tracy and Holly.
I've been leefully listening to the podcast since and have
wanted to write in for a long time. Then this
week Olivia Ward bush Banks episode, the moment came as
I listened to the episode on my lunch break around
the neighborhood. You mentioned a quote from the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper,
(30:49):
and I had a little embarrassing shuffle dance upon hearing
the name and one of my master's classes, I came
upon the Pittsburgh Courier as a reference for a paper
and simply fell in love with the new paper. For
the next sixteen months, I took every opportunity to research, read,
and write about this little known, historic black newspaper. Being
from Pittsburgh, I'm always going to look out to learn
(31:11):
more about my hometown and how this newspaper has played
several low key but still important parts in several important
events during the Double V campaign, the civil rights movement,
the integration of professional sports, and helping the middle class
African American community develop and display their identity. Some many
(31:31):
important names have been tied to this newspaper staff Wendel Smith, P. L. Prattus,
Frank E. Bolden, George Schiler, and cartoonists who depicted cartoons
that showed comical and commentary aspects of African American communities.
They also hired the wonderful Charles Teeny Harris, a photographer
whose photos have served as important depictions of everyday life
(31:53):
in the Pittsburgh black neighborhoods. Known for his charisma, Harris
could make his portrait subjects feel so at ease that
they would forget the camera was present. Then he would
take the picture to capture a truly beautiful moment. My
favorite picture is a little boy in extra large boxing
gloves sitting in his corner a single tier his rolled
down his cheek, but he has the sweetest smile on
(32:13):
his face and an impish twinkle in his eye. And
then Virginia had a link to that picture. His eighty
thousand collection of negatives and photographs were thankfully purchased by
the Carnegie Museum of Art and as part of their
digitizing project, along with a permanent exhibit of his works.
While there might not be enough information to do a
full episode on teeny Harris, I would wholeheartedly encourage you
(32:36):
to consider him for one of the impossible episodes you
may be planning in the future. I can promise you
that you'll get pulled down the delightful research rabbit hole
that I have happily hopped down myself, to a beautiful
land of nineties and fifties community photos. Please please keep
up all your amazing work. Thank you so much for
all you do, Virginia. Thank you so much for this email. Virginia.
(32:57):
I did indeed click on that link, and that photo
is beauty full, and then I lost some time in
the morning when I was meant to be researching instead
looking at these gorgeous, gorgeous photographs. So thank you so
much for sending this. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, we are
at History podcast that I heart radio dot com, and
(33:18):
we're all over social media at Missed in History. That's
why you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And
you can subscribe to our show on the I heart
radio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
(33:42):
visit the I heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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