Little Jack Horner

"Little Jack Horner"
Roud #13027
Little Jack Horner, illustration by William Wallace Denslow
Song
Written	England
Published	1725
Form	Nursery rhyme
Writer	Traditional
Language	English

"Little Jack Horner" is a popular English language nursery rhyme. It has the Roud Folk Song Index number of 13027.

Lyrics and melody

The most common modern lyrics are:

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said 'What a good boy am I!'^[1]

1. ^ I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 234-7.

The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (1870).^[1]

Origins and meaning

In the chapbook The History of Jack Horner, Containing the Witty Pranks he play'd, from his Youth to his Riper Years, Being pleasant for Winter Evenings (1764), there is a mangled version of the nursery rhyme. However, it has been observed that the story is based on the much earlier tale of The Fryer and the Boy, and that this insertion is merely to justify the use of Jack Horner's name.^[2]

The earliest reference to the well-known verse is in Namby Pamby, a ballad by Henry Carey published in 1725, in which he himself italicised the original:

Now he sings of Jackey Horner

Sitting in the Chimney-Corner

Eating of a Christmas pye,

Putting in his thumb, Oh fie!

Putting in, Oh fie! his Thumb

Pulling out, Oh strange! a Plum.^[3]

This has been taken to suggest that the rhyme was well known by the early eighteenth century.^[2] Carey's poem is a satire on fellow writer Ambrose Philips, who had written infantile poems for the young children of his aristocratic patrons. Although several other nursery rhymes are mentioned there, the one about Little Jack Horner has been associated with acts of opportunism ever since. Just six years later it figured in another satirical work, Henry Fielding's The Grub Street Opera (1731). This had the prime minister Robert Walpole as its target and ends with all the characters processing off the stage 'to the music of Little Jack Horner'.^[4]

In the nineteenth century the story began to gain currency that the rhyme is actually about Thomas Horner, who was steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury before the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII of England.^[5] The story is reported that, prior to the abbey's destruction, the abbot sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie which had the deeds to a dozen manors hidden within it as a gift to try to convince the King not to nationalize Church lands. During the journey Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the manor of Mells in Somerset, which he kept for himself.^[6] It is further suggested that, since the manor properties included lead mines in the Mendip Hills, the plum is a pun on the Latin plumbum, for lead. While records do indicate that Thomas Horner became the owner of the manor, paying for the title, both his descendants and subsequent owners of Mells Manor have asserted that the legend is untrue and that Wells purchased the deed from the abbey.^[2]

Later cultural references

• Lord Byron mentions Jack in his Don Juan (Canto the Eleventh, stanza LXIX, 1823). It is the ancestor of numerous allusions since then, remembering him for little more than sitting in a corner.^[7]

William Wallace Denslow's illustrations for Little Jack Horner, from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose

• In his satirical novel Melincourt (1817), Thomas Love Peacock extends the political interpretation of the nursery rhyme. There five go-getting characters contribute to a song in which they describe how they misuse their trades to fleece the public. It begins with the recitative

Jack Horner's CHRISTMAS PIE my learned nurse

Interpreted to mean the public purse.

From thence a plum he drew. O happy Horner!

Who would not be ensconced in thy snug corner?

Each character then describes the nature of his sharp practice in a stanza followed by the general chorus

And we'll all have a finger, a finger, a finger,

We'll all have a finger in the CHRISTMAS PIE.^[8]

• In Fats Waller's Jazz Standard "Ain't Misbehavin" in the bridge section between verses three and four, the lyrics read "Like Jack Horner / in the corner / don't go nowhere / what do I care / Your kisses are worth waitin' for, believe me." Throughout the entire song the singer points out how well behaved he is and what a good man he is.

In 1904, cartoonist Bob Satterfield used the rhyme as the basis for this cartoon about Japanese forces sinking Russian ships in the Russo-Japanese War.

• There is also a politicised reinterpretation of the rhyme in a Chumbawamba lyric from their album The Unfairy Tale (1985). "Jack Horner" is put in the corner for resisting the racist and self-regarding interpretation of history given by his teacher. Eventually the children rise up to defend him:

But when the head walked in the children made such a din.

They said, 'Jack get up, you got to get out, don't let them push you about, you know they'll keep you in that corner till you're dead. Jack get out, don't sell out, don't compromise with christmas pies. Keep shouting back, you tell 'em Jack, don't swallow none of their crap. Calling Jack Horners everywhere, don't bend to authority which doesn't care, you know they'll keep you in that corner 'till you're dead.'

Jane got up, she helped Jack out, she said, 'Teachers, don't mess us about, we won't listen to your dirty lies. It's you who've got your fingers in the pie. People die, you don't question why, we won't study your lies, we won't eat your christmas pie, we won't eat dead animal pie, we won't eat nukiller pie, we won't eat your pie r squared, and if you really cared, neither would you.'^[9]

Media

Jack Horner was made a character in the Fables-based video game, The Wolf Among Us.

In his song 'Country Pie' (1969), Bob Dylan sings: "Little Jack Horner's got nothin' on me".

In an episode of the Cartoon Network series Adventure Time titled "Five More Short Graybles", the main characters Finn and Jake find this rhyme in an old book that they mistake for an ancient book of spells. After reading it, they spend the rest of the episode sticking their thumbs into pies trying to make the spell work.

Notes

References

• William S. Baring-Gould and C. Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Old and New, Arranged and Explained, New York: Bramhall House Publishing, 1962