These books, together with the rhymes of Gawler, and a collection of Old Nursery Rhymes with Tunes, issued by Rimbault in 1864, exhaust the collections of nursery rhymes which have a claim on the attention of the student. Most of their contents were subsequently collected and issued by the firm of Warne & Co., under the title Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes, Tales and Jingles, of which the issue of 1890 contains over seven hundred pieces. In the list which follows, I have arranged these various collections of rhymes in the order of their issue, with a few modern collections that contain further rhymes. Of those which are bracketed I have not succeeded in finding a copy.
(1719. Songs for the Nursery, or Mother Goose's Melodies. Printed by T. Fleet.)
1744. Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book.
c. 1760. The Topbook of all.
(1771. Tommy Thumb's Little Story Book. The nine rhymes which this contains are cited by Whitmore.)
(1780. Mother Goose's Melody, for which copyright was taken by John Carnan.)
c. 1783. Gammer Gurton's Garland.
1788. Tommy Thumb's Song Book, issued by Isaiah Thomas.
(1797. Infant Institutes, cited by Halliwell and Rimbault.)
1799. Mother Goose's Melody. Facsimile reprint by Whitmore.
1810.[Pg 12] Gammer Gurton's Garland. The enlarged edition, published by R. Triphook, 37 St. James Street, London.
1826. Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland.
1834-9. Ker, Essays on the Archaiology of Nursery Rhymes.
1842-3. Halliwell, The Nursery Rhymes of England.
1846. Halliwell, ditto. Enlarged and annotated edition.
1849. Halliwell, Popular Rhymes.
1864. Rimbault, Old Nursery Rhymes with tunes.
1870. Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland. Enlarged edition.
1876. Thiselton Dyer, British Popular Customs.
1890. Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes, Tales and Jingles. Issued by Warne & Co.
1892. Northall, G. F., English Folk Rhymes.
1894. Gomme, A. B., The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
In the studies which follow, the rhymes cited have attached to them the date of the collection in which they occur.
CHAPTER II
EARLY REFERENCES
INDEPENDENTLY of these collections of nursery rhymes, many rhymes are cited in general literature. This yields a further clue to their currency at a given period. Thus Rimbault describes a book called Infant Institutes, part the first, or a Nurserical Essay on the Poetry Lyric and Allegorical of the Earliest Ages, 1797, perhaps by B. N. Turner, the friend of Dr. Johnson, which was intended to ridicule the Shakespeare commentators (N. & Q., 5, 3, 441). In the course of his argument, the author cites a number of nursery rhymes.
Again, the poet Henry Carey, about the year 1720, ridiculed the odes addressed to children by Ambrose Philips by likening these to a jumble of nursery rhymes. In doing so he cited the rhymes, "Namby Pamby Jack a Dandy," "London Bridge is broken down," "Liar Lickspit," "Jacky Horner," "See-saw," and others, which nowadays are still included among the ordinary stock of our rhymes.
Again, in the year 1671, John Eachard, the divine, illustrated his argument by quoting the alphabet rhyme "A was an apple pie," as far as "G got it."[9] Instances such as these do not, however, carry us back farther than the seventeenth century.