Tim Devlin

C'mon, admit it, you know them too. "Ring Around the Rosie," "Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill," "Baa Baa Black Sheep." Everyone grew up with a selection of nursery rhymes and children's games, even if it's not always exactly the same list.

There have been many books attempting to explain these rhymes; this is one of the newest, taking twelve well-known rhymes and devoting ten or so pages to each, explaining what is known of their history and meaning.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this from Tim Devlin, not because he wanted a review (that was my idea) but because I'm a scholar in the field. But you'll see that I'm not going to be entirely complementary. I think this mostly good work, and well-written. Most of what it covers is well-trodden, but there are some original and rare insights, too; you will learn things that you wouldn't learn from just the standard catalogs such as Halliwell's Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England, Peter and Iona Opie's The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (still the mandatory book on the subject), and William and Ceil Baring-Gould's The Annotated Mother Goose. It's a good addition to a nursery rhyme library.

That doesn't make it perfect. There are some pretty severe typos and errors that a good fact-checker would have caught -- e.g. p. 117 refers to "Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Froud." I happen to know Steve Roud (although not Jacqueline Simpson), and I can assure you that there is no F in his name! I can also assure you that, if he says it, you'd better have an overwhelmingly strong reason if you're going to disagree; he is one of the greatest living scholars in the field of folklore and (especially) folk song studies. There are a smattering of wrong dates, too.

Also, for a century and more, there has been a tendency to insist on finding some deep, concealed historical explanation for nursery rhymes, a trait taken to the greatest extreme by Katherine Elwes Thomas (for whom Devlin and I share complete contempt). Some of these are probably true, as in, e.g., "I Had a Little Nut Tree." But, sometimes, a nursery rhyme is just a nursery rhyme. I am much more cautious than Devlin in assuming that any of the proposed explanations are true. But if you want to see what explanations have been proposed, and have many grains of salt at your disposal, this book is a good place to start.… (meer)