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The rhyme first appeared in print in Songs for the Nursery. Little Robin Redbreast: Great Britain 1744 [60] First mentioned in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book. Little Tommy Tucker: Great Britain 1744 [61] First mentioned in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book. London Bridge Is Falling Down 'My Fair Lady' or 'London Bridge' Great Britain 1744 [62]
The rhyme is of a type calling out otherwise respectable people for disrespectable actions, in this case, ogling naked ladies – the maids. The nonsense "rub-a-dub-dub" develops a phonetic association of social disapprobation, analogous to "tsk-tsk", albeit of a more lascivious variety.
The earliest printed version of the rhyme is in Tommy Thumb's Little Song Book (c. 1744), but the rhyme may be much older. It may be alluded to in Shakespeare 's King Lear (III, vi) [ 1 ] when Edgar, masquerading as Mad Tom, says:
Print/export Download as PDF; Printable version; In other projects ... Pages in category "Nursery rhymes" The following 12 pages are in this category, out of 12 total
scan of Tommy Thumb's pretty song book. Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book is the oldest extant anthology of English nursery rhymes, published in London in 1744.It contains the oldest printed texts of many well-known and popular rhymes, as well as several that eventually dropped out of the canon of rhymes for children.
Once the rhyme entered the nursery repertoire it was frequently included in collections of such lore and tunes were then fitted to it. The Library of Congress preserves an 1885 round for four voices by the Canadian Sydney Percival (musical pseudonym of Joseph Gould ) in which Tommy is "singing for his supper.