Geppetto wishes on a star in Disney's Pinocchio

Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight.
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight.

With its gently cantering rhythm and alliteration, ‘Star Light, Star Bright, commemorates and propagates the ancient tradition of wishing to the stars. The tradition takes many forms, variously invoking the power of the first star; nine stars; a shooting star. The most enduring myth is that shooting stars are caused by the Roman gods peering over the clouds into the mortal realm, and they will hear you (and perhaps heed you) when you speak your wish aloud.

Theshootingstar notes the same tradition in other cultures:

Even contemporary culture is abound with superstitions related to shooting stars. In Chile, for instance, when you spot a shooting star, you must pick up a stone in the same moment, while making a wish. (Quick thinking, I must say.) If you’re in the Philippines, you must tie a knot in your handkerchief instead. (Too bad if you don’t carry one around.)

The tradition is recalled in The Ladies Treasury for 1882: a household magazine:

I am trying to find a star,” replied the child, artlessly, ” so that I may wish. Jenny Brooks taught me how.

and here it is collected orally in volume four of Current Superstitions, 1896:

To wish on a star, when you see the first star come out, say : Star light, star bright, First star I see to-night, I wish I may, I wish I might Have the wish I wish to-night. Wish what you please and it will come true[.]

The rhyme does not appear in Opie, so it’s difficult for me to give you a certain first publication date for the rhyme, but the first reference that I can find is in Swallows on the wing o’er garden springs of delight: a medly of prose and verse (Will de Grasse, 1866) where it is rendered thus:

Star light,
star bright,
The first star I have seen to-night;
I wish I may,
I wish I might,
Have the wish I have wished to-night.

‘Star Light, Star Bright’ is an elusive rhyme of the type that might turn out to be a spy. References to the rhyme and the superstition abound but none can provide a definite point of origin; those that do suggest theories rarely cite reliable sources. I think this one may remain a mystery.

TreasuryIslands is one year old today. I haven’t got any proper branding yet (due to being not at all arty), the about me page still says ‘coming soon’ and no one can remember if TreasuryIslands has got a space in it (it hasn’t) but nevertheless I’ve managed to post 105 articles, all but two of which I’ve written myself. I have conformed entirely to stereotype by ineffectually ranting about such things as feminism, gender representations, feminism, queer issues, fat acceptance, feminism and child reading habits all padded out by brief witterings about nursery rhymes, some reviews of new publications and re-assessments of classic texts.

Over my first year of blogging I’ve been called a communist and a feminazi (both of which were meant as insults and neither of which I consider insulting), I’ve been invited on to national television (sorry, wrong country) and gained one of two Actual Proper Fans who are not my parents. It’s been a good year. Every now and then, though, a post gets started which never sees the light of day. In celebration of the first anniversary of TreasuryIslands, I present to you my failures.

Red Sky in the Morning; Elizabeth Laird

1. Title: Blog Against Disablism – Disability in Kidlit
Started in: May 2011
Unpublished because: Irony is like that.

There are a lot of Days for and against stuff in blogging. You can blog against theocracy, racism, and any number of other causes. I participated wholeheartedly in Banned Books Week, and had every intention of picking out a couple of books that deal with disability in a thoughtful and non-patronising way. Unfortunately, my own disability got in the way. I suffer chronic depression, coupled with anxiety and my head chose May 2011 to explode spectacularly. I did manage to blog that month, but the chief of my energy was spent on not melting into a puddle of self-hating goo and summoning the energy to clean my teeth. Next year, I promise.

2. Title: Re-reading a classic: Five Children and It
Started in: September 2011
Unpublished because: Abandoned.

I’m pretty sure as a kidlit blogger I’m not meant to say things like this, especially about the classics, but – whisper it – Five Children and It is dull. Dee You Double Ell dull. I have fond memories of the book, as well as the BBC adaptation in the early 1990s, but sitting down to read Five Children and It felt like, having an absinthe spoon dug into my brain by a poorly trained baboon and I couldn’t bring myself to rip apart a book I had once loved.

Hello, I Lied; M.E. Kerr

3. Title: Bisexuality in Children’s Literature
Started in: July 2011
Unpublished because: I’m not clever enough.

This is such a nebulous topic that I can’t do it justice here. There are a number of bisexual characters in Young Adult lit (superstar activist Robin Ochs maintains a list). I imagine at some point, when I’ve managed to organise my thoughts into some semblance of coherence, the subject will be broached. But for now I lack the time and the resources.

4. Title: Where do Babies Come From?
Started in: December 2011
Unpublished because: I was just a smidge busy

In December I took an unintended sabbatical from blogging. For around three weeks life decided to throw two horrendous and entirely unrelated events at me and, for this reason bloggery took a back seat. There’s no way I won’t cover this one at some point, though. I have a lot to say.

5. Title: Origins: Christmas is Coming
Started in: December 2011
Unpublished because: Uh… um…

You know the one, Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat… Yeah. I don’t really know what happened there. One minute it was 1st December, the next it was January. We’ll have it this year, I suppose.

Not in Front of the Children; Margorie Heins

6 & 7 Title: (provisional) A case against the bowdlerization of Nursery Rhymes and Why Censorship Sucks
Started in: August 2011
Unpublished because: Time, time, you wretch, release me!

I aimed to provide a post a day for Banned Books Week 2011. I did, but not to the extent that’d I’d intended. These posts, not specifically about banned books but about censorship in general, were dropped when I came to my senses and dropped the word count for the week. Both subjects deserve more attention than I could properly afford them if I wanted to keep to the word limit I had, by necessity, set myself. Since BBW’11 I’ve readf a lot more about censorship in kidlit, so when these posts does eventually appear I hope they’ll be better argued than I could have offered back in August. In the meantime I heartily recommed Margorie Heins’ Not in Front of the Children: Indecency, Censorship and the Innocence of Youth.

So there we go. Some of these posts may well emerge to the front bit of the internet over the next year. One of them definitely will. In the last year I’ve had a lot of fun, made a friend or two and learned a lot. Thanks for sticking with me, islanders!

promotional poster

Reviewed performance: Saturday matinée, 4th Feb. 2012. Festival Theatre, Edinburgh. Swallows and Amazons tours nationally until My 2012.

One of the joys of attending theatre for children as an (admittedly rather short) adult is that one generally has a clear view of the action. So it was that on a chilly, windy day in Dùn Èideann, I found myself warm  and with an uninterrupted view of the stage as National Theatre’s touring production of Swallows and Amazons began.

I had been apprehensive – I just wasn’t sure that Swallows and Amazons would work as a musical – but, the score is perfectly acceptable, if nothing particularly special. Provided by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy (no, really) the songs are not numbers, they’re not (with one exception) set pieces, and as such the show would do perfectly well without them. Only John’s solo adds to the narrative; from it we glean a deeper understanding of the boy’s motives, a move which makes the character infinitely more likeable. Even this song is instantly forgettable, though – you won’t be humming the tunes as you leave the auditorium.

Adapted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Tom Morris, Swallows and Amazons sticks fairly closely to Arthur Ramsome’s 1930 classic (with one glaring omission to which I will attend later). Ransome’s child characters, aged between 7-13, are portrayed ably by actors aged 22-38. Roger, aged seven, sports knee-pads and a five o’clock shadow, but such incongruencies can be overlooked when the talent on stage so completely inhabit their characters. Titty is mischievous and bouncing, Susan is the Angel in the House, John is Captain Sensible. But Roger, oh Roger. Roger is an utter joy to behold. He is seven, short-trousered and sharp. So utterly consumed by his seven-ness that it seems not at all odd to see a grown man throw himself face down on the floor in childish despair. There’s no high dramatics, though. Despite the pantomimic elements the show takes on part way through the second act, there’s no cartoonishness, no overwrought theatrics. Instead, we are treated to myriad subtleties, performances that have been, one feels, heavily workshopped but that shine.

John, Titty, Susan & Roger Walker (Richard Holt, Akiya Henry, Katie Moore & Stewart Wright)

While the playscript largely sticks to the detail of Ransome’s novel, and entirely sticks to its spirit, some changes are introduced. Through the Blackett sisters Edmundson introduces an element of class difference that is absent in the thoroughly middle-class world of Arthur Ransome. The sisters are raucous, boisterous in a way that we don’t expect girls in 1929 to be. This is, of course, one of the pleasures of the original text and one which transfers to the stage beautifully. The Amazons in this incarnation have the effect of knocking the Swallows down a peg or two, lambasting their sense of middle class entitlement. But not all Edmundson’s changes are as welcome.

No mention is made of the charcoal burners as gypsies, a distinction that is made clear in the book. Adults and parents, whom Ransome designates ‘natives’ are here made ‘barbarians’; hints of British colonialism are erased in favour of apologetic reference to Spanish conquistadors, distancing the British young in both language and in time from the truth in their game. They are invading forces, undoubtedly, but they identify with a movement removed from their modernity by centuries, not mere decades. This is no accident of scripting; it is a concerted effort towards the politically correct and it’s not necessary. The action, lest we forget, takes place over a single summer in 1929, a world where PC hasn’t been invented, and, even if it has, children don’t much care about it. It’s necessary for our youngsters to be made aware of the less savour aspects of  the history of this Island Nation. We might hope that they are appalled by it, and they may well be. But how are they supposed to learn critical reasoning skills if we sanitize the unsavoury away? This is our history, and we ought to be ashamed of it. But we ought not make a secret of it.

Titty suffers most from changes to the plot. A scene in which Titty (alone on Wildcat Island) is visited by Mother, is deleted. This scene is integral to the character’s development and informs the action that follows. Thus Titty’s overhearing of the thieves conversation becomes a dream sequence which she cannot quite trust to be accurate. The dream sequence has shades of Dumbo’s horrendous (and mentally scarring) pink elephants, and is the only real low point of the show.

Aside from this, though, the design is lovely. A feather duster and a pair of secateurs are transformed into a parrot; the sea is ribbon, agitated by the cast. The world on stage is one of childhood games and one into which the audience is willingly dragged. We are in cahoots with the children; when Roger learns to swim there is a spontaneous round of applause.

Celia Adams and Sophie Waller as Nancy & Peggy Blackett

Though the Amazon pirates, played by Celia Adams and the distractingly beautiful Sophie Waller, are riotous good fun it is Stewart Wright’s Roger that steals the show. He will charm your socks off, and then he’ll charm them back on again. Swallows and Amazons is a story about the joys of childhood and the fallibility of adults. This production is a celebration of both. Were it in my power, I’d insist you go immediately to your nearest box-office and beg, buy or steal a ticket for every one you’ve ever met.

Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book (c. 1744) has the first printed version of ‘Mary, Mary’, as follows:

Mistress Mary, Quite contrary,
How does your Garden grow?
With Silver bells,
And Cockle Shells,
And so my Garden grows.

The final line of the verse went through a a number of permutations in the first half-century of publication:

Nancy Cook’s Pretty Song Book for all Little and Misses and Masters, c.1780, Sing cuckolds all on row.
Gamer Gurton’s Garland, 1784, Cowslips all arow.
Tom Thumb’s Song Book, 1788, With Lady bells all in a row.
Tom Tit’s Song Book for all Little Masters and Misses, c.1790, With Lady bells all in a row.
Infant Institutes, 1797, And cuckolds all in a row.

There are a number of competing theories as to the identity of contrary Mary.

Our Lady

According to Opie, Catholics view the rhyme as a lament for the persecution of the Catholic church and Protestants as a lament for the reinstatement of the Catholic church. This belief is predicated on the interpretation of the verse as a pen portrait of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where the ‘silver bells’ represent sanctus bells, the cockleshells Pilgrim badges and the ‘pretty maids’ nuns.

Bloody Mary

Mary Tudor (Mary I, 1516-1558) was a staunch Catholic. This interpretation of the rhyme suggests that Mary’s garden is her figurative personal graveyard, ever growing as it was filled with the bodies of Protestant dead.  The rhyme appears to be a celebration of Mary’s torturous ways: the sliver bells are said to represent thumbscrews; the cockleshells a (male) genital torture device which crushed the penis, and the maids a colloquial abbreviation of referring to either the Iron Maiden or Scottish Maiden, devices of torture and beheading respectively.

Mary, Queen of Scots.

In the case of Mary Stewart (Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542 – 1587) the pretty maids are said to refer to the Four Marys, her ladies-in-waiting. In this case, the silver bells and cockleshells are said to be decorations on the womens’ dresses.

Victorian publications including the rhyme – Kate Greenway’s 1881 offering Mother Goose, Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England (1842) and Rusher’s Poetic Trifles (1840) – in keeping with the Victorian tradition of outward prudence, inward pervery, bowdlerizes the mention of cuckoldry in some earlier versions, referring instead to flowers.

No evidence has been found that the rhyme pre-dates the eighteenth century, which makes any links to the Queens Mary spurious at best. It’s worth mentioning, though, that a ballad called ‘Cuckolds all a row’ was registered in 1637, which may have provided the basis for the rhyme.

Tweedledum & Tweedledee as reimagined by Tim Burton in 2010's Alice in Wonderland

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle,
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
Just then flew by a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel,
Which frightened both the heroes so
They quite forgot their quarrel.

Often attributed to Lewis Carroll, this verse was included in an Original Ditties for the Nursery, edited by John Harris, in 1805, almost 70 years before Carroll published Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

The names Tweedledum and Tweedledee also appear in a rhyme of 1725. Smithsonianmag.com takes up the story:

Free-spirited musical entrepreneurship was more than possible in London, to which Handel moved permanently in 1710. [...] Adding zest to the London music scene were rivalries that split the audience into two broad musical camps. On one side were defenders of the more conventional Italian opera style, who idolized the composer Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747) and brought him to London. Enthusiasts of Handel’s new Italian operas cast their lot with the German-born composer. The partisanship was captured in a 1725 verse by poet John Byrom.

There is some contention over the final couplet, which may have been added by Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift:

Some say, compar’d to Bononcini
That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny
Others aver, that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle
Strange all this Difference should be
‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!

Some say that John Byrom coined the words tweedledum and tweedledee. Still others say that although the version we know well does not appear in print until 90 years after this verse appeared, it is likely to have been the inspiration for Byrom’s satire. It is likely that only one of these assertions is correct, but I wouldn’t like to wager on which one.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

Fairy tales suffer a lot. They undergo constant revision, both by design and by accident; by people purposely seeking to subvert the traditional tales (a la James Thurber), and by misrememberings and chinese whispers of oral storytelling.

Little Red Riding Hood may well be the most reinterpreted of the classic Tales of Mother Goose: Roald Dahl’s comic verse; Angela Carter’s twisted tales in The Bloody Chamber; Toby Forward’s POV swappage. There’s a plethora of retellings available on Amazon, from  board books for toddlers to long YA tomes that Freud would be proud of. In its lifetime, the story of the hooded one has been a morality tale, a metaphor for sexual awakening, a love story. It has been a thriller and a creature feature, a revenger’s tragedy and a modern satire.

Hollywood has taken the story to heart, with the character having been portrayed on-screen in at least 117 features. The The Weinstein Company‘s Hoodwinked! was released in 2005 to a lukewarm reception, and the latest take on the tale comes from Twlight director Catherine Hardwicke.

Perrault’s Le Petit Chaperon Rouge is the simplest and most well-known version of the story. In it Red is beat to Grandmother’s house by the wolf because she stops to pick wildflowers, and after running through the ‘what big arms/legs/ears/eyes/teeth you have’ schtick, is eaten up by the wolf. There’s no rescue, no redemption, and the tale ends with a moral:

Little girls, this seems to say,
Never stop upon your way.
Never trust a stranger-friend;
No one knows how it will end.
As you’re pretty, so be wise;
Wolves may lurk in every guise.
Handsome they may be, and kind,
Gay, or charming never mind!
Now, as then, ‘tis simple truth—
Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!

Rotkäppchen (or Little Red Cap) by the Grimms differs slightly from Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Split into two parts, the first half mirrors the Perrault text but has Red rescued by the Huntsman after she’s been eaten. Once bitten, twice shy, the Grimm’s add a second part to the story that sees Red and Grandmother foil further similar attempts to gobble them up by a second wolf.

Little Red Riding Hood, John Everett Millais. 1865. Oil on canvas.

These tales find their ancestors in much older stories. The Grandmother (from France),  Little Red Hat (from Italy/Austria), The False Grandmother (from Italy) and Little Red Hood (from Germany/Poland), The Wolf and Three Girls (also Italy) – some of which date from the medieval period – all contribute to the tale. Perrault (and later Grimm) removed the most unpleasant elements from these tales – they don’t have the cannibalism of The False Grandmother and The Grandmother, or the overt sexuality of The Grandmother or Little Red Hat – and introduced them to the mass market*.

Catherine Hardwicke’s film adaptation of Red Riding Hood is, apparently, ‘sexy & stylish’ (that is, according to Marie Claire); she’s expanded Perrault’s anthropomorphized wolf into a  fully-fledged lycanthrope and chucked a love triangle into the mix for good measure. You may note here the similarities to Carter’s The Company of Wolves: lust and lycanthropy in a  lush gothic narrative. There are certainly parallels to be drawn.

Promotional poster for Red Riding Hood

The film begins with a sweeping panorama of the forest, the mood is dark and sultry as Hardwicke desperately tries to convince us that this movie is going to be SEXY and EDGY. And look! Here’s Red, aka Valerie, wearing trousers and killing a rabbit even though it’s the 1300s. She must be a Strong Female Character! In fact, she is one, sort of. She’s ballsy, but makes some shocking decisions; she has a certain amount of agency, but she’d give it all up for her man. The film passes the Bechdel Test, but that is just about its only concession to feminism.

It sounds good, the story of a Good Girl with a wild streak, betrothed to one but in love with another. But Red’s wild streak only exists because of a man (“He always had a way of making me want to break the rules”, she declares breathlessly), and since we know who that man is the drama of the conflict is nil.

Hardwicke just doesn’t seem to have her heart in it with this supposed feminist retelling. Her Strong Female Character is indeed Stong and Female, but she’s also submissive and irrational. All this is too much description of a character so without substance, so vapid that if she’d contracted TB and died a phlegmy death half way through the movie I might not have noticed. But still, Red is a contradictory mess. And not in that normal pubescent sort of way, but in a ‘I have no idea where I’m going with this’ sort of way. Similarly the village, Hardwicke’s beacon of conformity, is painted as conventional and restrictive and then throws a Bacchanalian dance party and has practically everyone who lives there in some kind of love triangle. There’s no consistency in the world and as a result it’s difficult to suspend disbelief.

Amanda Seyfried does this face a lot. A lot.

Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, provides a reading of Red Riding Hood as a rape narrative; Francesca Lia Block, in Wolf (available in The Rose and the Beast), works the tale as one of child abuse. Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves, reads the story as a warning for us to keep our wild sides in check and in 2003 a low-budget Italian horror movie saw Little Red Cap clash with Fight Club to produce a Red encompassing the wolf and turning vigilante serial killer. Red Riding Hood has been around since the 14th Century, and in that time it’s had just about every available spin put on it. This latest film returns to the themes present in the early European tales (the werewolf is a throwback to  The False Grandmother) while broadly sticking to the narrative structure of Perrault.

The cannibalism of both …Grandmother stories and stones in the belly of Little Red Cap are there as the film acknowledges the various morals and motifs each retelling offers.  Mainly, though, the film tends towards Estés interpretation of the narrative:  a warning not to stray from the path**.  That the werewolf is Red’s father is a new twist added here, which, given the eventual lycanthropy of her One True Love, smacks of Electra.

"'O Grandmother, what big ears you have got,' she said". Arthur Rackham. From The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. trans,Mrs. Edgar Lucas, 1909

It is this love story that forms the primary plot (and not as it should be, Valerie’s encounters with the wolf). If I’d been playing drink-along-a-romcom I’d've been incoherent before the titles rolled. Caught between a rock and a were-place, Valerie floats doe-eyed between her lupine True Love, Peter, and her betrothed, Henry, spouting feminine clichés and generally being a bit of a sop while Men stomp around doing Manly things with torches. It’s not just her, either, it’s most of the village – even her Mother has a story to tell, apparently because it is a Rite Of Passage women must go through. This village is all about unrequited love.

Hardwicke spends most of the movie throwing buckets of sex over the characters, so it’s sort of surprising that Red doesn’t get to Do It. The red cloak is handed over with the words “I was making it for your wedding…” in case we weren’t sure of the symbolism. But her seductions are, inevitably, interrupted by the metaphor wolf.

The influence of  The Company of Wolves is clear. Hardwicke evokes the ‘remove a paw, look for a handless person’ trope as The Company of Wolves does***, as well as channeling some of the eroticism of the Red/Wolf relationship. But Red Riding Hood is not a feminist retelling of the classic tale. It wants to be, assuredly so, but there’s something missing. The protagonist has too much Bella Swan about her, her sexuality belongs to someone else. In fact, she’s a lot like Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights, projecting on to her relationship with Heathcliffe her own identity crisis.

If all of that wasn’t enough, Valerie, most of the time, isn’t the one questing to unmask and kill the wolf. Nope, it’s Gary Oldman doing that. Nope, our Valerie is bitching and whining and inexplicably not knowing who the werewolf is****. This wolf hunting Oldman character adds a little neo-colonialism to the mix, toting round his multi-ethnic hench-slaves and Doing the Right Thing as only a white Christian man who keeps slaves can*****.

The only thing that redeems Red Riding Hood is its nod to earlier versions, but this alone is not enough to make the film worth a second of your time. 3/10

—————————————–

* Worth mentioning too, is Charles Marelles The True History of Little Golden-Hood which found its way into Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book:

You know the tale of poor Little Red Riding-Hood, that the wolf deceived and devoured, with her cake, her little butter can, and her grandmother. Well, the true story happened quite differently, as we know now. And first of all the little girl was called and is still called Little Golden-Hood; secondly, it was not she, nor the good grand-dame, but the wicked wolf who was, in the end, caught and devoured.

In this version Red is saved from the wolf by the magical protective qualities of her golden cloak.

** As has been pointed out elsewhere, the point of view from which Valerie is shot, especially when she’s alone)  exploits the concept of the  ‘male gaze’ to the extent of becoming predatory (which only reinforces the film’s dire warning that we shouldn’t stray). There’s even a superfluous pseudo-lesbian scene. The story may be called Red Riding Hood, but it’s all about the wolf.

*** This bit of werewolf mythology was introduced by Sutherland Menzies in Hugues the Wer-Wolf  [pdf], and not really gone away.

**** Despite the ridiculous red herrings, it’s quite clear who woolfy is from the outset.

*****Just to up the ne0-collonialism, the multi-ethnic hench-slaves are seen at the end of the movie traipsing around after the new boss after usurping of the white male Christian demon hunter by, er, a white male Christian demon hunter.

This is probably not what he meant

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her;
He put her in a pumpkin shell
And there he kept her very well.

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had another and didn’t love her;
Peter learned to read and spell,
And then he loved her very well.

‘Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater’ was first anthologised in the UK in 1797 in Infant Institutes and in 1825 in North America in Mother Goose’s Quarto: or Melodies Complete. The Opie’s posit that ‘Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater’ is a variant of this verse collected in Aberdeen and its Folk in 1868,

Peter, my neeper,
Had a wife,
And he coudna’ keep her,
He pat her i’ the wa’,
And lat a’ the mice eat her.

and this one from around the same time,

Eeper Weeper, chimbly sweeper,
Had a wife but couldn’t keep her.
Had another, didn’t love her,
Up the chimbly he did shove her.

A psychoanalytical reading of the rhyme suggests that Peter’s treatment of his first wife exemplifies fear of (and desire to control) women. Lucy Rollin explains in Cradle and All: A Cultural and Analytical Study of Nursery Rhymes:

“Keep” here carries the meaning of “provide for” and suggest that Peter was a practical man who used his resources cleverly. But the image of the wife in the enclosed shell certainly implies “keep” in the more sinister modern sense (sinister even when the “shell” is an elegant suburban home).

p. 46

Peter clearly didn’t keep her that well though, as by the second stanza he seems to have remarried. In the most common version of the rhyme ‘Peter learned to read and spell, / And then he loved her very well’.

The association of marriage and learning to spell might have a strong unconscious appeal for the child just repressing  its unsatisfied curiosity about sexual matters in favour of the knowledge that adults offer instead – in this case the knowledge of the alphabet.

p. 111

In a version collected later (1918) the rhyme ends ‘Had another, didn’t love her / Causing instantaneous bother’. Rollin doesn’t mention this alternate ending, which provides a warning to learn from your mistakes, in her psychoanalytical reading, but would perhaps note the lack of companionate marriage is not unusual in nursery rhymes, where Jack Sprat is an anomaly.

More recently Dr Doug Larche has re-written the rhyme to appear in his non-racist, non-sexist, non-violent 1986 collection Father Gander’s Nursery Rhymes: The Equal Rhymes Amendment (which is also incredibly gender essentialist and heteronormative, from what I’ve read so far). His version sees Peter keep his wife:

Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and wished to keep her.
Treated her with fair respect,
She stayed with him and hugged his neck!

This version has not yet caught on.

The Diabolical Mr Tiddles; Tom McLaughlin

Published January 2012, Simon and Schuster. List price, £5.99.

Appropriate for ages 3-10.

From the cover;

Fearsome dinosaurs, whooshing jetpacks, rockstar guitars, a horse called Alan…

Just a few of the things that Harry unexpectedly finds in his bedroom. Where are they coming from

It couldn’t have anything to do with Harry’s furry-purry new pussycat Mr Tiddles… could it?

We’ve decided, as a nation of cat lovers, that when puss arrives through the catflap with a gob full of recently deceased small mammal, they’re bringing a gift for us. We’ve decided this without much in the way of evidence – could not mousey be abandoned on the kitchen floor simply because puss has grown tired of it? But no, we humans have summoned all our intellect and come to the most egotistical conclusion possible. It must be a gift! For us! For they luuurrrrve us!*

Tom McLaughlin’s debut picture book riffs off these ruminations and comes up with Mr Tiddles: cat burglar. It’s not a brand new concept (see The Clever Clever Cats, for a lovely subversion of the trope) but it’s not been done to death, either.

Mr Tiddles, confused by his human’s reaction to the lovely fresh mouse brought home for him, sets out each night to find an appropriate gift, but when his human, Henry, wakes up to find a horse in his bedroom, something has to be done. Before he knows it, he’s in the Queen’s bedroom…

TreasuryIslands loves a picture book with the Queen in** (preferring her Maj as a 2D irreverency to a symbolic figurehead) which is another point in McLaughlin’s favour. She’s granny-like, with tight rolls of gray hair and fleecy slippers, friendly despite her crown. McLaughlin’s characters are his strong suit. His rock star reeks of Bowie, his royal guards of heavy menace, and though these characters each appear once they are as fully formed as Henry and Mr Tiddles.

The Diabolical Mr Tiddles is a story about friendship and the ways we show our love that will raise a giggle in adults and children alike.

The illustrations are – and this is no criticism – childish and colourful, with verve and movement. There are visual jokes for read along parents and there’s plenty of interest for younger eyes, with addenda to the text narrative hidden among them. The Diabolical Mr Tiddles wholeheartedly deserves a 9/10.

*A brief look in Cat!Bible reveals this is not the case:

Yea verrily, spake the LORD; She who holdeth the can opener deserveth the love. Speaketh unto her in trills, and rubbeth thy white fur upon her black trousers.

** The Queen’s Knickers is wonderful.

Cock-a-doodle-do.

Higgledy-piggledy, my black hen
She lays eggs for gentlemen,
Sometimes nine and sometimes ten,
Higgledy- piggledy, my black hen.

Also known with the following lyric:

Higgledy piggledy, my black hen
She lays eggs for gentlemen,
Sometimes nine and sometimes ten;
Gentlemen come every day
To see what my black hen has laid.

Albert Jack, whose book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Ryhmes is accurate as often as it is not, claims the rhyme is the narration of a brothel keeper or procuress, advertising the services of her girls.  Jack  notes the similarity to a more overtly lascivious rhyme:

Little Blue Betty lived in a den,
She sold good ale to gentlemen;
Gentlemen came every day,
And little Blue Betty hopped away.
She hopped upstairs to make her bed,
And she tumbled down and broke her head.

Which first appeared in Gamer Gurton’s Garland in 1810, and concerns a girl working ‘under the sign of The Golden Can’. Opie lists a number of similar examples which refer to women  providing allegorical services to “gentlemen”, so a precident is set. ‘Higgledy-Piggledy’ is the only rhyme of the set that refers to an aimal.

Latterly Ogden Nash has used the rhyme as the basis for a poem, as has Dorothy Parker, who gave her version a decidedly more political bent;

At a party where she was seated with Somerset Maugham, the author asked if she would write a poem for him. “I will if you like,” Miss Parker said, and scribbled out:

Higgledy Piggledy, my white hen;
She lays eggs for gentlemen.

“Yes, I’ve always liked those lines,” Mr. Maugham commented.

Miss Parker bestowed a cool smile and without an instant’s hesitation added:

You cannot persuade her with a gun or lariat;
To come across for the proletariat.

from Parker’s obituary in the New York Times, 1967

There are great numbers of permutations of ‘Higgledy-Piggledy’ – rhymes of a similar metre that reference trade and which begin  an assonant nonsense phrase.  They appear from the late eighteenth century onwards – even Beatrix Potter got in on the act. The version I began with seems to be the most popular, but competition is strong.

Startled cat is startled

I love little pussy,
Her coat is so warm,
And if I don’t hurt her,
She’ll do me no harm.

So I’ll not pull her tail,
Nor drive her away,
But pussy and I,
Very gently will play.

I’ll sit by the fire
And give her some food,
And Pussy will love me
Because I am good.

A rhyme that’s fallen out of favour in recent years (because pornographic slang they’ve never heard and certainly don’t associate with anything untoward apparently corrupts our children), I Love Little Pussy is a simple didactic poem for youngsters reminding them to be kind to animals. First published with an additional three stanzas in Melvin Lord and John C. Holbrook’s A Child’s song book, for the use of schools and families : being a selection of favourite airs, with hymns and moral songs, suitable for infant instruction in 1830, a copy of which is available online. The book is described by its publishers as,

[An] attempt to combine pure religious and moral sentiment with innocent hilarity [...] dedicated to those benevolent ladies who devote their time and talents to the cause of infant education, with the hope that it shall be in some degree auxiliary to their meritorious enterprize.

The poem appeared anonymously, but has been attributed to Jane Taylor, famous for Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. A Child’s Song Book was published five years after Taylor’s death, which does not rule out her authorship, but does suggest more reasearch should be done.

Recently the poem has been bowdlerised to “I Love Little Kitty” by some. Needless to say, I think this is ridiculous.