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Home / Cant Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again

Cant Put Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again

Nursery rhyme character

Plant nursery rhyme

"Humpty Dumpty"
Denslow's Humpty Dumpty 1904.jpg

Illustration past Westward. W. Denslow, 1904
Nursery rhyme
Published 1797

Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and 1 of the best known in the English language-speaking world. He is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is non explicitly described as such. The first recorded versions of the rhyme engagement from late eighteenth-century England and the melody from 1870 in James William Elliott'due south National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs.[1] Its origins are obscure, and several theories have been advanced to propose original meanings.

Humpty Dumpty was popularised in the United States on Broadway past actor George Fifty. Play a joke on in the pantomime musical Humpty Dumpty.[2] The show ran from 1868 to 1869, for a total of 483 performances, condign the longest-running Broadway bear witness until information technology was surpassed in 1881 by Hazel Kirke.[3] As a character and literary allusion, Humpty Dumpty has appeared or been referred to in many works of literature and popular culture, especially English author Lewis Carroll'due south 1871 volume Through the Looking-Glass, in which he was described equally an egg. The rhyme is listed in the Roud Folk Song Alphabetize as No. 13026.

Lyrics and melody [edit]

The rhyme is one of the all-time known in the English language. The common text from 1954 is:[4]

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a slap-up autumn.
All the king'southward horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together over again.

It is a single quatrain with external rhymes[5] that follow the design of AABB and with a trochaic metre, which is common in nursery rhymes.[6] The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (London, 1870), as outlined below:[vii]

\new Staff << \clef treble \key bes \major { \time 6/8 \partial 2. \relative d' { d4 f8 es4 g8 | f8 g a bes4. | d,4 f8 es4 g8 | f8 d bes c4. \bar"" \break d8 d f es es g | f8 g a bes4. | d8 d bes es es d | c8 bes a bes4. \bar"" \break } } %\new Lyrics \lyricmode { %} >> \layout { indent = #0 } \midi { \tempo 4. = 56 }

Origins [edit]

Illustration from Walter Crane's Mother Goose'due south Nursery Rhymes (1877), showing Humpty Dumpty as a male child

The earliest known version was published in Samuel Arnold'south Juvenile Amusements in 1797[1] with the lyrics:[4]

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a neat fall.
Four-score Men and Four-score more,
Could non make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.

William Carey Richards (1818–1892) quoted the verse form in 1843, commenting, "when we were five years quondam ... the post-obit parallel lines... were propounded every bit a riddle ... Humpty-dumpty, reader, is the Dutch or something else for an egg".[eight]

A manuscript addition to a re-create of Mother Goose's Melody published in 1803 has the mod version with a different last line: "Could not ready Humpty Dumpty upwards over again".[iv] It was published in 1810 in a version of Gammer Gurton'south Garland.[9] (Note: Original spelling variations left intact.)

Humpty Dumpty sate on a wall,
Humpti Dumpti had a swell fall;
Threescore men and 60 more,
Cannot place Humpty dumpty every bit he was before.

In 1842, James Orchard Halliwell published a collected version every bit:[10]

Humpty Dumpty lay in a brook.
With all his sinews around his neck;
Twoscore Doctors and twoscore wrights
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty to rights!

The modern-day version of this nursery rhyme, as known throughout the UK since at least the mid-twentieth century, is as follows:

Humpty Dumpty sabbatum on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the Rex'south horses
And all the King's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together once more.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 17th century the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale.[4] The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a curt and clumsy person.[eleven] The riddle may depend upon the assumption that a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, whereas an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is at present so well known. Similar riddles take been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such every bit "Boule Boule" in French, "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian, and "Runtzelken-Puntzelken" or "Humpelken-Pumpelken" in different parts of Deutschland—although none is as widely known equally Humpty Dumpty is in English.[4] [12]

Meaning [edit]

The rhyme does not explicitly country that the subject is an egg, possibly because information technology may have been originally posed as a riddle.[4] There are also various theories of an original "Humpty Dumpty". One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930[13] and adopted past Robert Ripley,[four] posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted every bit humpbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare's play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485. All that is known for sure, is that the line, "all kings horses and all the kings men couldn't put humpty together over again" did not mean the horses physically assisted humpty. But rather, was a metaphor for the crowns resource.

In 1785, Francis Grose's Classical Lexicon of the Vulgar Natural language noted that a "Humpty Dumpty" was "a short clumsey [sic] person of either sex, also ale boiled with brandy"; no mention was fabricated of the rhyme.[14]

Punch in 1842 suggested jocularly that the rhyme was a metaphor for the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey; simply as Wolsey was not cached in his intended tomb, so Humpty Dumpty was not buried in his vanquish.[15]

Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine, an armoured 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 footing of a contemporary business relationship of the attack, merely without evidence that the rhyme was continued.[16] The theory was part of an bearding series of articles on the origin of nursery rhymes and was widely acclaimed in academia,[17] simply it was derided by others as "ingenuity for ingenuity'due south sake" and alleged to exist a spoof.[18] [xix] The link was yet popularised by a children's opera All the King's Men past Richard Rodney Bennett, showtime performed in 1969.[20] [21]

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.[22] In 1648, Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches and was protected past the city wall. The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially chosen Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from a Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty, which acquired the cannon to tumble to the basis. The Royalists (or Cavaliers, "all the King's men") attempted to heighten Humpty Dumpty on to another part of the wall, but the cannon was and so heavy that "All the King'southward horses and all the Rex'southward men couldn't put Humpty together again". Writer Albert Jack claimed in his 2008 book Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Plant nursery Rhymes that there were two other verses supporting this merits.[23] Elsewhere, he claimed to take found them in an "old dusty library, [in] an fifty-fifty older book",[24] but did not state what the volume was or where information technology was plant. It has been pointed out that the two additional verses are not in the mode of the seventeenth century or of the existing rhyme, and that they do non fit with the earliest printed versions of the rhyme, which do not mention horses and men.[22]

In popular culture [edit]

Humpty Dumpty has become a highly popular nursery rhyme character. American actor George L. Fox (1825–77) helped to popularise the character in nineteenth-century phase productions of pantomime versions, music, and rhyme.[25] The character is also a common literary allusion, particularly to refer to a person in an insecure position, something that would be difficult to reconstruct once broken, or a short and fat person.[26]

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass [edit]

Humpty Dumpty appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Drinking glass (1871), a sequel to Alice in Wonderland from half dozen years prior. Alice remarks that Humpty is "exactly like an egg," which Humpty finds to exist "very provoking." Alice clarifies that she said he looks like an egg, not that he is ane. They discuss semantics and pragmatics[27] when Humpty Dumpty says, "my proper noun means the shape I am," and afterward:[28]

"I don't know what y'all mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of form you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'in that location's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"
"But 'celebrity' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-downwards statement'," Alice objected.
"When I employ a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means but what I choose it to mean—neither more than nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you tin can make words mean and then many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be principal—that's all."

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began once again:

"They've a temper, some of them—peculiarly verbs, they're the proudest—adjectives you tin exercise anything with, but non verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That'southward what I say!"

This passage was used in Britain by Lord Atkin in his dissenting sentence in the seminal instance Liversidge v. Anderson (1942), where he protested almost the distortion of a statute past the bulk of the House of Lords.[29] It likewise became a pop citation in United states of america legal opinions, appearing in 250 judicial decisions in the Westlaw database as of 19 April 2008[update], including ii Supreme Court cases (TVA five. Hill and Zschernig v. Miller).[30]

A. J. Larner suggested that Carroll's Humpty Dumpty had prosopagnosia on the footing of his description of his finding faces hard to recognise:[31]

"The confront is what ane goes by, generally," Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone. "That'due south just what I mutter of," said Humpty Dumpty. "Your face is the same equally everybody has—the two eyes,—" (marking their places in the air with his pollex) "nose in the centre, mouth under. It'southward e'er the same. Now if you had the two optics on the aforementioned side of the nose, for example—or the rima oris at the top—that would be some help."

James Joyce's Finnegans Wake [edit]

James Joyce used the story of Humpty Dumpty as a recurring motif of the Fall of Homo in the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.[32] [33] Ane of the most easily recognizable references is at the end of the second affiliate, in the first poesy of the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly:

    Have you heard of 1 Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a whorl and a rumble
And curled upwardly like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the barrel of the Magazine Wall,
(Chorus) Of the Magazine Wall,
Hump, helmet and all?

In movie, literature and music [edit]

Robert Penn Warren'southward 1946 American novel All the King's Men is the story of populist politician Willie Stark'south rise to the position of governor and eventual fall, based on the career of the infamous Louisiana Senator and Governor Huey Long. It won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and was twice made into a moving-picture show in 1949 and 2006, the former winning the Academy Award for best motion pic.[34] This was echoed in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book All the President's Men, almost the Watergate scandal, referring to the failure of the President's staff to repair the damage one time the scandal had leaked out. It was filmed as All the President'south Men in 1976, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.[35]

In 1983, an advertizing for Kinder Surprise featuring a realistic version of the Humpty Dumpty character (designed past Mike Quinn, who worked at the Jim Henson's Creature Store) and directed by Mike Portelly, was banned shortly after release, due to existence highly unsettling. The advertising aired only on ITV and its franchises.

In 2021, American band AJR released a song, titled Humpty Dumpty, for their album, OK Orchestra. The song uses the nursery rhyme as a parallel for hiding one's truthful emotions as things, typically unpleasant, happen to the singer.

Jasper Fforde's 2005 British novel The Big Over Easy ISBN 978-0-340-89710-2 is an exercise in absurdity, in which Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty 3 has been murdered, and Detective Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Partition is set the task of solving the mystery.

In scientific discipline [edit]

Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics. The police force describes a process known as entropy, a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be bundled, often taken to be a measure out of "disorder". The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. After his fall and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together over again is representative of this principle, every bit it would exist highly unlikely (though non incommunicable) to return him to his earlier land of lower entropy, as the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.[36] [37] [38]

See also [edit]

  • List of plant nursery rhymes

References [edit]

  1. ^ a b Emily Upton (24 April 2013). "The Origin of Humpty Dumpty". What I Learned Today. Retrieved 19 September 2015.
  2. ^ Kenrick, John (2017). Musical Theatre: A History. ISBN9781474267021 . Retrieved xvi May 2020.
  3. ^ Humpty Dumpty at the Cyberspace Broadway Database
  4. ^ a b c d eastward f g Opie & Opie (1997), pp. 213–215.
  5. ^ J. Smith, Poetry Writing (Instructor Created Resource, 2002), ISBN 0-7439-3273-0, p. 95.
  6. ^ P. Chase, ed., International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), ISBN 0-203-16812-7, p. 174.
  7. ^ J. J. Fuld, The Book of World-Famous Music: Classical, Pop, and Folk (Courier Dover Publications, 5th ed., 2000), ISBN 0-486-41475-ii, p. 502.
  8. ^ Richards, William Carey (March–April 1844). "Monthly chat with readers and correspondents". The Orion. Penfield, Georgia. II (v & 6): 371.
  9. ^ Joseph Ritson, Gammer Gurton'due south Garland: or, the Nursery Parnassus; a Choice Collection of Pretty Songs and Verses, for the Amusement of All Little Good Children Who Can Neither Read Nor Run (London: Harding and Wright, 1810), p. 36.
  10. ^ J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, The Nursery Rhymes of England (John Russell Smith, 6th ed., 1870), p. 122.
  11. ^ E. Partridge and P. Beale, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Routledge, 8th ed., 2002), ISBN 0-415-29189-5, p. 582.
  12. ^ Lina Eckenstein (1906). Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. pp. 106–107. OL 7164972M. Retrieved 30 Jan 2018 – via archive.org.
  13. ^ East. Commins, Lessons from Mother Goose (Lack Worth, Fl: Humanics, 1988), ISBN 0-89334-110-X, p. 23.
  14. ^ Grose, Francis (1785). A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. S. Hooper. pp. 90–.
  15. ^ "Juvenile Biography No IV: Humpty Dumpty". Punch. 3: 202. July–December 1842.
  16. ^ "Nursery Rhymes and History", The Oxford Magazine, vol. 74 (1956), pp. 230–232, 272–274 and 310–312; reprinted in: Calum M. Carmichael, ed., Collected Works of David Daube, vol. 4, "Ethics and Other Writings" (Berkeley, CA: Robbins Collection, 2009), ISBN 978-1-882239-15-three, pp. 365–366.
  17. ^ Alan Rodger. "Obituary: Professor David Daube". The Independent, 5 March 1999.
  18. ^ I. Opie, 'Playground rhymes and the oral tradition', in P. Hunt, S. G. Bannister Ray, International Companion Encyclopedia of Children'southward Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), ISBN 0-203-16812-7, p. 76.
  19. ^ Iona and Peter Opie, ed. (1997) [1951]. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford Academy Press. p. 254. ISBN978-0-19-860088-half-dozen.
  20. ^ C. M. Carmichael (2004). Ideas and the Human: remembering David Daube. Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte. Vol. 177. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann. pp. 103–104. ISBNthree-465-03363-nine.
  21. ^ "Sir Richard Rodney Bennett: All the King'southward Men". Universal Edition. Retrieved 18 September 2012.
  22. ^ a b "Putting the 'dump' in Humpty Dumpty". The BS Historian. Retrieved 22 Feb 2010.
  23. ^ A. Jack, Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Plant nursery Rhymes (London: Allen Lane, 2008), ISBN 1-84614-144-3.
  24. ^ "The Real Story of Humpty Dumpty, by Albert Jack". Archived 27 February 2010 at the Wayback Automobile, Penguin.com (Usa). Retrieved 24 February 2010.
  25. ^ L. Senelick, The Historic period and Phase of George L. Fox 1825–1877 (University of Iowa Press, 1999), ISBN 0877456844.
  26. ^ E. Webber and One thousand. Feinsilber, Merriam-Webster's Lexicon of Allusions (Merriam-Webster, 1999), ISBN 0-87779-628-nine, pp. 277–8.
  27. ^ F. R. Palmer, Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Printing, 2nd edn., 1981), ISBN 0-521-28376-0, p. 8.
  28. ^ Fifty. Carroll, Through the Looking-Drinking glass (Raleigh, Due north Carolina: Hayes Barton Press, 1872), ISBN 1-59377-216-5, p. 72.
  29. ^ G. Lewis (1999). Lord Atkin. London: Butterworths. p. 138. ISBN1-84113-057-5.
  30. ^ Martin H. Redish and Matthew B. Arnould, "Judicial review, constitutional interpretation: proposing a 'Controlled Activism' culling", Florida Law Review, vol. 64 (6), (2012), p. 1513.
  31. ^ A. J. Larner (1998). "Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty: an early report of prosopagnosia?". Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry. 75 (7): 1063. doi:ten.1136/jnnp.2003.027599. PMC1739130. PMID 15201376.
  32. ^ J. S. Atherton, The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1959, SIU Press, 2009), ISBN 0-8093-2933-half-dozen, p. 126.
  33. ^ Worthington, Mabel (1957). "Plant nursery Rhymes in Finnegans Wake". The Journal of American Sociology. lxx (275): 37–48.
  34. ^ Chiliad. L. Cronin and B. Siegel, eds, Conversations With Robert Penn Warren (Jackson, MS: Academy Printing of Mississippi, 2005), ISBN 1-57806-734-0, p. 84.
  35. ^ M. Feeney, Nixon at the Movies: a Book About Conventionalities (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), ISBN 0-226-23968-3, p. 256.
  36. ^ Chang Kenneth (30 July 2002). "Humpty Dumpty Restored: When Disorder Lurches Into Club". The New York Times . Retrieved two May 2013.
  37. ^ Lee Langston. "Part III – The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics" (PDF). Hartford Courant. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 May 2008. Retrieved 2 May 2013.
  38. ^ West.Due south. Franklin (March 1910). "The 2d Law Of Thermodynamics: Its Basis In Intuition And Common Sense". The Popular Science Monthly: 240.

External links [edit]

  • Humpty-Dumpty themed instruction
  • Humpty-Dumpty themed educational and arts and crafts pages
  • Library of Congress' Facsimile of the 1899 illustrated edition of Through the Looking-Glass
  • Loyal Books: Female parent Goose in Prose by L. Frank Baum
  • Loyal Books: Through the Looking Drinking glass past Lewis Carroll
  • The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly

sadliertorned.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty