A. Do the children's verses of Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc or the Ahlbergs count as nursery rhymes, or arc those something different altogether? What about playground rhymes, clapping or skipping games, football chants, pop songs or old music-hall songs? What about the work of Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, l.ouis MacNeice, even Wordsworth and Byron that uses the form and metre of nursery rhymes, often to hauntingly complex emotional effect. See, it's not as simple as it appears.
B. If this analysis of the strange phenomenon that is nursery rhymes resembles one of those maddeningly opaque riddles with which our rude forefathers used to amuse themselves around the fireside of a dark winter's evening, it is probably because the lineage of nursery rhymes occupies two quite separate and contradictory traditions--the oral and the written.
C. From this diminutive beginning (the book measured just 3in by in), and from A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, published in the same year by John Ncwbery, the first specialist children's publisher, an entire literature sprang. Suddenly, the random cacophony of the oral tradition--the lullabies, counting games, fragments of folk songs, mummer's plays, political squibs, doggerel, scurrilous adult ballads, riddles and whathaveyou began to be collected and codified into a formal canon, to which the name of "nursery rhymes" became attached in the early 19th century.
D. The satellite children's channel Nick Jr. is running a competition called Time for a New Rhyme. The channel is looking for a "modern nursery rhyme for the new millennium", which could be "about anything and everything from political and current events to family life". So, off you go. Except, what is a nursery rhyme, exactly? And how does it differ if, indeed it differs at all--from any other sort of children's poetry?
E. Collectors of anything tend to have obsessive, eccentric and proprietorial tendencies, and from the realm of nursery rhyme there emerged some magnificent specimens. Strangest of all was John Bellenden Ker, who developed a laborious theory designed to prove that English nursery rhymes had emerged from a kind of political protest literature composed in a form of early Dutch (which was in fact his own invention).
F. It is certain that the history of nursery rhymes is as old as the history of language. Rhythm and rhyme are not merely the foundations of language learning, but--together with their natural partners, the physical activities of skipping, clapping, jumping, dancing they are the great, free, unbreakable, ever-ready playthings of childhood. Iona Opie, the leading authority on children's lore and literature, and her late husband, Peter, in their introduction to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, note a fragment of a children's song in the Bible ("We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned unto you, and ye have not wept. ")
G. But on the whole, references to rhymes specifically intended for children are comparatively rare before the 18th century. All this changed swiftly in the mid-18th century, when the first book of nursery rhymes appeared: Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, published by a woman, Mary Cooper, and edited by "N. Lovechild', appeared in 1744 in two volumes, at 4d apiece. A single copy of volume two survives in the British Museum, containing rhymes that are as familiar to the modern as the Georgian nursery: "Bah, bah, a black sheep", "Who did kill Cock Robbin?" and "There was a little Man/And he had a little Gun."
H. The ambiguity of what is and isn't a nursery rhyme is compounded by the fact that every expert you consult seems to have a different theory. Nick Tucker, a former senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, comes up with the most enigmatic definition. "It's completely self defining," he says. "A nursery rhyme is something in a nursery rhyme book. Most anthologies are not interested in expanding the canon, because when people buy an anthology, they don't want a lot of change. At home, they are singing bits of Beatles songs or football chants to their children, which would once have got into the nursery rhyme canon, if a folklorist had come and collected them--but we have got past that stage now."
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