Was Humpty really a cannon?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, children's verse, history

Almost from birth, we hear rhymes and ditties of all sorts. Many are so-called "nursery rhymes". Later on, we may hear or read that many of these have a hidden meaning: how "Ring around the rosy" describes the effects of plague, or that "Contrary Mary" was good old "bloody Mary", perhaps that Humpty Dumpty was really a cannon that blew up. Or not...later still, everything we thought we knew about hidden meanings seems to get more hidden and more ambiguous. Most folks quit paying attention, even when they recite the rhymes for their own grandkids.

Many popular rhymes of past generations were riddles. Some were explicitly so:

When I was walking to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks.
Each sack had seven cats.
Each cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, wives,
How many were walking to St. Ives?

The answer is either one (myself) or nine (me + man + wives), assuming in the latter case this large family was walking! If you respond with a number greater than 2,400, you've counted a lot of creatures not walking!!

Here's a more typical example:

Little Nanny Etticoat,
In a white petticoat,
And a red nose;
The longer she stands,
The shorter she grows.

Answer: a Candle. Now, for the MOST familiar rhyming riddle of my childhood:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Answer: an Egg...that is, until I was told there was a great cannon in Colchester that blew up about 1645. However, as Chris Roberts reports in Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, the egg version predates the cannon story by centuries. A humpty-dumpty was an ale-and-brandy drink, and was also used to refer a clumsy oaf (of either sex), presumably under its influence. For children, the many falls of the drunk (and subsequent cracked skulls) were sanitized as the dreaded fall of an egg.

Roberts, a librarian, has put together forty nursery rhymes that are almost universally known among English speakers everywhere. Though one of the most "very British" of Brits, he has included a few items of American descent, including Yankee Doodle.

Yankee Doodle's is a lovely story of a slur being turned to a taunt by those slurred, a simpler version of the conversion of "God Save our Queen" into "Let Freedom Ring (America)".

It ought to be no surprise that many childhood ditties are, often openly, steeped in cruelty and sex. Prior to the 20th Century, few children escaped exposure to the full range of human experience. Kids slept in the same beds as their parents (regardless of what the parents were up to), went to the taverns and dogfights with them (and drank the ale and placed bets), and on occasion observed public hangings and the rotting corpses of those left up after the more heinous crimes. In much of the world, little has changed. Less than 1/10th of humanity is "civilized" to the extent that "certain things" are hidden from youngsters.

That last makes me wonder: in cultures where kids aren't kept so "innocent", do they create as many nursery rhymes? Probably, even more so. They need SOME way to express the overpowering things going on around them. But for our at-least-partly sanitized culture, we need a Chris Roberts to tell us what we were talking about, singing Baa Baa Black Sheep or Jack and Jill.