Mother Goose telling tales, from the frontispiece of Perrault’s Histoires.

The dark mystery behind the tales and rhymes that today we attribute to Mother Goose is something most people don’t notice now, because taken for granted that they were written for children in the nursery– and who today would entertain the littlest of us with violence and nightmares? Her image first appears in Perrault’s Histories, published in 1697, as an old woman telling stories to children, but her name and role as storyteller already existed in France. In Halls of Fame, Olive Beaupre Miller writes that John Newbery, the first publisher to concentrate on children’s books, was the first to publish an edition of Mother Goose rhymes in 1786,  and that in the preface, the editor writes that the rhymes  “are of great antiquity… some as old as the time of the ancient Druids”.  Miller was writing in 1921, and she wrote to educate small children, but recent research bears this out.

Apparently Americans’ puritan tastes led to “refinement” of the rhymes, although overseas, children were purchasing chapbooks of Mother Goose rhymes and fairytales in unexpurgated form. Gillian Avery notes that originally, few of them were written for children at all, but were “wrenched” out of adult contexts by children, and were “ruthless” and “often violent” until adult writers and illustrators toned down the content to what modern audiences recognize as Mother Goose rhymes today (to the objections of those who prefer the violent, political, and sexual nature of some of the originals). Samuel Goodrich, who later became the popular American children’s author, Peter Parley, was sheltered from these rhymes and tales until the age of ten, and outraged by them when he finally encountered them. Avery quotes Goodrich as saying,

“Little Red Riding Hood, Puss In Boots, Jack the Giant Killer, and some of the other tales of horror,[are] commonly put into the hands of youth, as if for the express purpose of reconciling them to vice and crime. Some children, no doubt, have a ready appetite for these monstrosities, but to others, they are revolting; until by repetition and familiarity, the taste is sufficiently degraded to relish them.”

Goodrich made a career of writing nonfiction and realistic, moral fiction for children, in a mostly successful effort to drive works of imagination and fantasy underground (for several decades, at least), and once the rhymes emerged, there continued to be censors who criticized and edited them (Geoffery Handley Taylor’s 1952 catalogue of the dangers in nursery rhymes is notable) but as this story shows, in the end, especially in the age of the Internet, you can’t keep Mother Goose down.

Sources not available online:

Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children And Their Books, 1621-1922. London: The Bodley Head, 1994.

Miller, Olive Beaupre.  “The Interesting History of Old Mother Goose”. Halls of Fame. Chicago: The Book House For Children, 1953.