Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
| "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" | |
|---|---|
 William Wallace Denslow's illustrations for Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater, from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose | |
| Nursery rhyme | |
| Published | c. 1825 |
"Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" is an English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 13497.
Lyrics
One of Peter's wives, according to Denslow
Common modern versions include:
- Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
- Had a wife but couldn't keep her;
- He put her in a pumpkin shell
- And there he kept her very well.
- Peter, Peter pumpkin eater,
- Had another and didn't love her;
- Peter learned to read and spell,
- And then he loved her very well.[1]
Origins
The first surviving version of the rhyme was published in Infant Institutes, part the first: or a Nurserical Essay on the Poetry, Lyric and Allegorical, of the Earliest Ages, &c., in London around 1797.[1] It also appears in Mother Goose's Quarto: or Melodies Complete, printed in Boston, Massachusetts around 1825.[1] A verse collected from Aberdeen, Scotland and published in 1868 had the words:
- Peter, my neeper,
- Had a wife,
- And he couidna' keep her,
- He pat her i' the wa',
- And lat a' the mice eat her.
This verse is also considered to be an older version of the rhyme Eeper Weeper.[2]
Notes
- 1 2 3 I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 2nd edn., 1997), p. 410.
- ↑ I. Opie and P. Opie, Children's games with things: marbles, fivestones, throwing and catching, gambling, hopscotch, chucking and pitching, ball-bouncing, skipping, tops and tipcat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 180.
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