Humpty Dumpty
Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world. He is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described as such. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth-century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs.[1] Its origins are obscure, and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings.
This article is about the nursery rhyme. For other uses, see Humpty Dumpty (disambiguation)."Humpty Dumpty"
1797
Humpty Dumpty was popularized in the United States on Broadway by actor George L. Fox in the pantomime musical Humpty Dumpty.[2] The show ran from 1868 to 1869, for a total of 483 performances.[3] As a character and literary allusion, Humpty Dumpty has appeared or been referred to in many works of literature and popular culture, particularly English author Lewis Carroll's 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, in which he was described as an egg. The rhyme is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as No. 13026.
Poster advertising a pantomime version at the Olympic Theatre in New York 1868, starring George L. Fox
The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg, possibly because it may have been originally posed as a riddle.[8] There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty". One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930[14] and adopted by Robert Ripley,[8] posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted as hunchbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare's play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485.
In 1785, Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue noted that a "Humpty Dumpty" was "a short clumsey [sic] person of either sex, also ale boiled with brandy"; no mention was made of the rhyme.[15]
Punch in 1842 suggested jocularly that the rhyme was a metaphor for the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey; just as Wolsey was not buried in his intended tomb, so Humpty Dumpty was not buried in his shell.[16]
Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine, an armored 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. This was on the basis of a contemporary account of the attack, but without evidence that the rhyme was connected.[17] The theory was part of an anonymous series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes and was widely acclaimed in academia,[18] but it was derided by others as "ingenuity for ingenuity's sake" and declared to be a spoof.[19][20] The link was nevertheless popularized by a children's opera All the King's Men by Richard Rodney Bennett, first performed in 1969.[21][22]
From 1996, the website of the 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.[23] In 1648, Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected by the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was 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 the cannon was so heavy that "All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty together again". Author Albert Jack claimed in his 2008 book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes that there were two other verses supporting this claim.[24] Elsewhere, he claimed to have found them in an "old dusty library, [in] an even older book",[25] 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 of the existing rhyme, and that they do not fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men.[23]