For those of you that enjoyed the Mother Goose illustrations in our previous post, here's another antique item containing cute artwork and excerpts from 3 very old, and somewhat forgotten nursery rhymes. I say "forgotten" because (I must admit), I'm not even remotely familiar with any of these, and all of which are nicely fired into a stoneware sectional, child's dinner plate from the 1930's. So who here has heard of Little Polly Flinders, See Saw Margery Daw, and / or The Old Woman Lived Under the Hill? Click each one for more info-- find out which one got whipped, and which one was actually a dirty slut (--??!!) Neither of which, turn out to be the old witch, fyi...
3 comments:
Thanks for the links to the original rhymes; the Polly Flinders one is really changed when you include the other verse!
The old woman one seems sad to me; I get the humor concept of the obviousness of it but it's still reads "is she dead yet?" Who will feed the chickens!
I like the printing here. It's bright, and the lines are fine but bold at the same time. Also: Lady, don't take the baby up the tree!
I recall two of these from a nursery rhyme book from many years ago, the two I recall went like this-
There was an old woman who lived under a hill, and if she isn't dead she lives there still, she sold apples and home made pies, and was known to never tell lies.
Little Polly Flinders, sat among the cinders, warming her pretty toes, her mother came and caught her, and whipped her little daughter, for ruining her Sunday clothes.
I might have misremembered them, or the writer of the nursery rhymes might have written them as they heard it. Nursery rhymes, much like urban legends, change over time from place to place, modern spelling, etc.
This is super neat. I'm familiar with the Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill, but only so far as the plate goes. I don't think I've ever come across the second stanza they have at the site you linked. The other two or totally new to me.
A note on "slut": Maybe everyone is aware of this already, but I'd like to point out that the original definition--lasting for centuries--of the word indicated a person who was dirty, poorly dressed, or simply poor, in a classist and derogatory sort of way. Slovenly; a slattern. Sometimes it even referred to a kitchen maid (another comment on a girl's sootiness, I guess?). It did not develop its modern sense of sexual promiscuity until much later, though I can't quite put my finger on just when in five minutes of internet searching. This rhyme about a woman being stolen by pixies for selling her bed may bridge the two concepts, however.
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