Old Nurse's Book of Rhymes, Jingles and Ditties

First published in 1858, this collection gathers the rhymes and jingles that British children had been chanting for centuries before anyone thought to write them down. Here are the old favorites: Humpty Dumpty's great fall, Little Bo-Peep and her wandering sheep, Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill. But also stranger verses, darker ones, the ones that made Victorian parents slightly uneasy and children delighted. These are the sounds that shaped generations of imaginations, the rhythmic verses whispered in nurseries and playgrounds, passed from nurse to child and child to child. The language is simple enough for a toddler to clap along, but the imagery vivid enough to haunt a adult's memory for decades. Whether you remember these from your own childhood or are discovering them for the first time, this book is a direct line to something ancient and irreplaceable: the oral tradition of comfort and mischief that has been sung to sleep in the English-speaking world for hundreds of years.