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Nursery Rhymes and Children's Games

44797 Establishing Boundaries, Defining Cultures
Mother Play and Nursery Songs

Mother Play and Nursery Songs, originally written in German by Friedrich Froebel, was translated to English and published in Boston, MA, by Lee and Shepard Publishers in 1896. This book is a collection of nursery songs, complete with music and “fac-similies of over fifty engravings from the author’s edition” (title page). The Rare Book Room’s edition is unique because of the overwhelming surplus of marginalia completed by at least one previous owner in pencil and pen. Unfortunately, the marginalia do not include any provenance information, but the information recorded includes everything from a translation of the title into German, publishing information of the original German edition, history of the book, and commentary analyzing the nursery songs.

Each page is rife with commentary from a previous owner, to the point that some blank pages are completely filled with faded cursive. Throughout the book, much of the commentary is on the nursery songs. In regards to the book’s entry of “Pat-a-Cake,” for example, the previous owner has written on the blank page before the rhyme, “O can it be that a higher thought / Lies in this little game of Pat-a-Cake?” (48).
Many of the other notes on “Pat-a-Cake” suggest different lessons that might be learned from the song, including punctuality, reverence, and responsibility. While the analysis of nursery rhymes for underlying moral and ethical lessons may be more rare today, people continue to be interested in nursery rhymes, exploring their histories and finding, or possibly assigning, a greater, often more sinister meaning to them. Either way, for centuries, people have been concerned with the lessons children directly and indirectly learn as they grow.

Interestingly, Froebel gives a different song named “Pat-a-Cake” instead of the version more popular now. In fact, the former owner records a much more recognizable version of “Pat-a-Cake” on the page before. More research would be needed to discover the origin of the song Froebel gives, or if there were any major changes during the process of translating the work.

 

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