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"There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" is a popular English language nursery rhyme, with a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19132. Debates over its meaning and origin have largely centered on attempts to match the old woman with historical female figures who have had large families, although King George II (1683–1760) has also been proposed as the rhyme's subject.
As with many nursery rhymes, attempts have been made to find origins and meanings for the rhyme, most of which have no corroborating evidence. [1] Katherine Elwes Thomas in The Real Personages of Mother Goose (1930) suggested the rhyme referred to resentment at the heavy taxation on wool. [ 6 ]
A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes.
Like most children's songs, there are geographic variations. In the United Kingdom, the first line is frequently changed to "The Farmer's in his den". The rhyme progresses through the farmer being in the dell or his den, his desire for a wife, hers for a child, its for a nurse, a dog, then a bone, and ending in: "we all pat the bone".
The climax of the first adventure of the British fantasy series Sapphire & Steel hinged on the recitation of the rhyme. [15] In Lars von Trier's The Element of Crime the prostitute Kim tells the poem to a child. Both are being kept in a cage at Frau Gerdas Whorehouse in Halbestadt.
"Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary" is an English nursery rhyme. The rhyme has been seen as having religious and historical significance, but its origins and meaning are disputed. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19626.
The first surviving version of the rhyme was published in Infant Institutes, part the first: or a Nurserical Essay on the Poetry, Lyric and Allegorical, of the Earliest Ages, &c., in London around 1797. [1] It also appears in Mother Goose's Quarto: or Melodies Complete, printed in Boston, Massachusetts around 1825. [1]
The Opies have argued for an identification of the original Bobby Shafto with a resident of Hollybrook, County Wicklow, Ireland, who died in 1737. [1] However, the tune derives from the earlier "Brave Willie Forster", found in the Henry Atkinson manuscript from the 1690s, [3] and the William Dixon manuscript, from the 1730s, both from north-east England; besides these early versions, there are ...