What we think of as rhymes for children, were really the political cartoons of their day.
Many of them refer to actual events. ( )

I read this one over the course of a single day home sick from work. It is lots of fun and quite informative. I feared that the author might put forth the theories of the rhymes as fact but he did not; he was very fair and balanced and simply presented the best and most interesting theories, understanding that the true origins of most of the verses are lost in the mists of time. This was an enjoyable read. ( )

Get ready for a wild ride.

Nursery rhymes often mean more than we realize, and there is an honorable tradition of collecting them and trying to figure out what they mean. Some of these books -- notably Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes -- are excellent pieces of scholarship. Some -- like the word of Katherine Elwes Thomas -- are closer to drug dreams.

This book is somewhere in the middle, but leaning toward the wild side. Take "Jack Sprat." Jack-the-author suggests that this was inspired by the reign of King Richard the Lion-hearted, who was imprisoned in Austria, forcing the English to scrape up a huge ransom -- i.e. to "lick the platter clean." This is historical enough, and England was indeed scraped bare to get back their hard-fighting nitwit of a king. But Richard I was king from 1189 to 1199 -- the early Plantagenet period. Richard -- who spend only six months of his reign in England -- spoke no English, and even if he had, the English of the time was early Middle English, not Modern English. "Jack Spratt" could not have been composed in Middle English.

So there is a lot of material here that is purely speculative or, in some cases, wrong. Of course, some of it is right as well. It's not a bad book; it simply needs to be controlled. The Opie book would be a good start. But this is a lot cheaper.... ( )

Somewhat Interesting, but filled with a ton of British nursery rhymes I'd never heard of before. Also the author makes it clear that there is no way to know for sure the meaning of any of these rhymes - he just gives possibilities and tells you which is his favorite. ( )

The premise of this book is fabulous. I'd love to know more about the history of nursery rhymes. However, practically every entry in this book is speculation on the part of the author. There are few hard facts. I appreciate that it's hard to identify the sources of many rhymes, but I won't want to read four pages of wild guesses for each rhyme. If I want fiction, I'll go read fiction. Did not like this. ( )