| "Humpty Dumpty" Roud #13026 |
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Humpty Dumpty as illustrated by W. W. Denslow in 1904 |
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| Written by | Traditional |
|---|---|
| Published | 1810 |
| Written | England |
| Language | English |
| Form | Nursery rhyme |
Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English language nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world.[1] He is typically portrayed as an egg and has appeared or been referred to in a large number of works of literature and popular culture. The rhyme has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 13026.
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The most common modern text is:
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.[1]
The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg because it probably was originally posed as a riddle.[1] The earliest known version is in a manuscript addition to a copy of Mother Goose's Melody published in 1803, which has the modern version with a different last line: "Could not set Humpty Dumpty up again".[1] It was first published in 1810 in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland as:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale in the seventeenth century.[1] The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.[3] The riddle may depend on the assumption that, whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, an egg would be.[1] The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.[1] Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French, or "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian; though none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.[1]
There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty". The suggestion that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine, an armoured frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War, was put forward in 1956 by Professor David Daube in The Oxford Magazine of February 16, 1956, on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected.[4] The theory, part of an anonymous series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes, was widely acclaimed in academia,[5] but was derided by others as "ingenuity for ingenuity's sake" and declared to be a spoof.[6][7] The link was nevertheless popularised by a children's musical first performed in 1969.[8] From 1996 the website of Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648.[9] In 1648 the town of Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. A huge cannon, colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground. The Royalists, or Cavaliers, 'all the King's men' attempted to raise Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but because the cannon was so heavy ' All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again.' In his 2008 book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes author Albert Jack claimed that there were two other verses supporting this claim.[10] Elsewhere he claimed to have found them in an "old dusty library, [in] an even older book",[11] but did not state what the book was or where it was found. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the style of the seventeenth century, or the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed version of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men.[9]
Another theory, advanced by Katherine Ewles Thomas[12] and adopted by Robert Ripley,[1] posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted in Tudor histories, and particularly in Shakespeare's play, as humpbacked and who was defeated, despite his armies at Bosworth Field in 1485. However, the term humpback was not recorded until the eighteenth century and no direct evidence linking the rhyme with the historical figure has been advanced.[13]
Humpty appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1872), where he discusses semantics and pragmatics with Alice.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be masterthat’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”[14]
This passage was used in Britain by Lord Atkin and in his dissenting judgement in the seminal case Liversidge v. Anderson (1942), where he protested about the distortion of a statute by the majority of the House of Lords.[15] It also became a popular citation in United States legal opinions, appearing in 250 judicial decisions in the Westlaw database as of April 19, 2008[update], including two Supreme Court cases (TVA v. Hill and Zschernig v. Miller).[16]
It has been suggested that Carroll's Humpty Dumpty had prosopagnosia on the basis of his description of his finding faces hard to recognize.
“The face is what one goes by, generally,” Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
“That’s just what I complain of,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Your face is the same as everybody has—the two eyes, so” (marking their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be some help.”[17]
American actor George L. Fox helped to popularize the character in 19th century stage productions of pantomime, music and rhyme.[18]
In addition to his appearance in Through the Looking-Glass, as a character Humpty Dumpty has been used in a large range of literary works, including L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose (1901), where the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the king, having witnessed Humpty's "death" and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him.[19] Robert Rankin used Humpty Dumpty as one victim of a serial fairy-tale character murderer in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse (2002).[20] Jasper Fforde included Humpty Dumpty in two of his novels, The Well of Lost Plots (2003)[21] and The Big Over Easy (2005),[22] which use him respectively as a ringleader of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike and as the victim of a murder.
The rhyme has also been used as a reference in more serious literary works, including as a recurring motif of the Fall of Man in James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.[23] Robert Penn Warren's 1946 American novel All the King's Men, the story of populist politician Willie Stark's rise to the position of governor and eventual fall, based on the career of the corrupt Louisiana Senator Huey Long, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film All the King's Men and which won the 1949 Academy Award for best motion picture.[24] This was echoed in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book All the President's Men, about the Watergate scandal, referring to the failure of the President's staff to repair the damage once the scandal had leaked out. It was filmed as All the President's Men in 1976, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.[25]
It has also been used as a common motif in popular music, including Hank Thompson's "Humpty Dumpty Heart" (1948),[26] The Monkees' "All the King's Horses", Aretha Franklin's "All the King's Horses" (1972).[27], Aimee Mann's "Humpty dumpty" and Travis' "The Humpty Dumpty Love Song".[28] In jazz, Ornette Coleman and Chick Corea wrote different compositions, both incidentally titled Humpty Dumpty (in Corea's case, however, it is a part of a concept album inspired by Lewis Carroll, called "The Mad Hatter").[29][30]