Before fairy tales stretched into chapters, they often arrived in lines you could carry with you, easy to remember, a little strange, and endlessly repeatable.
This week, we’re dipping into Mother Goose: Rhymes, Jingles and Fairy Tales, published in Philadelphia by Henry Altemus Company in 1896. This richly illustrated volume gathers together a wide assortment of traditional rhymes, playful, peculiar, and occasionally just a little bit dark, alongside hundreds of accompanying illustrations that bring their world to life.
The figure of Mother Goose herself is less a single author and more a kind of storytelling spirit, a name attached over time to a vast body of oral tradition. These rhymes were passed down across generations, spoken, sung, and shared long before they were ever printed, shaped by memory and repetition rather than any one definitive source.
What makes Mother Goose so enduring is its balance of rhythm and oddity. There are kings and cats, crooked men and runaway dishes, moments of nonsense alongside hints of something sharper just beneath the surface. For children, they’re catchy and curious; for adults, they sometimes feel like fragments of a much older world, tucked into deceptively simple verse.
By the time this edition was printed in the late 19th century, publishers were starting to gather these wandering rhymes into books, giving them a kind of permanence they’d never had before. Still, they don’t quite sit still. Even on the page, they feel like they’re meant to be spoken aloud.
---Melissa (who suspects the best rhymes are the ones that refuse to be forgotten), Distinctive Collections Library Assistant 🪶✨
-View previous Fairytale Friday posts
--View more from our Historical Curriculum Collection
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