Angel & Devil on Your Shoulder 1

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Morten # 17, 1999

My four year old grandson, Owen McLaughlin, recently told me that it is the devil who makes you do bad things. He sits on one of your shoulders, while an angel sits on the other. What are the origins of this concept? Biblical devils and angels seem to me to be human size. Biblical devils may be inside people (and hence can be cast out) but I can find no reference to one sitting on a shoulder.

Yet, the concept is a fairly familiar one to me. It can be found in popular culture. In the film, National Lampoon’s Animal House (directed by John Landis, 1978), Larry Kroger (Thomas Hulce) is in a bedroom with a girl who passes out drunk. A small devil figure (red, carrying a trident) appears on one side of the screen, encouraging him to have sex with her. An angel (with halo and harp) appears on the other side of the screen encouraging him to stop. Neither is strictly speaking “on his shoulder” but both could be said to be at his shoulder.

In the Oor Wullie comic strip annual (published by D.. C. Thomson, 1976) there is a story in which the schoolboy hero, Wullie, finds the answers to a forthcoming exam. His “Bad Self” and “Better Self” appear hovering in “clouds”, respectively inducing him to use and not use the answers. Although not called a devil and an angel, these figures are protrayed as such. “Bad Self” has horns, pointed ears and horns. “Better Self” has wings and a halo. As in the previous example, they are not actually on the hero’s shoulders.

There is film called Angel On My Shoulder (directed by Archie Mayo, 1946) which I have not seen. Although the title suggests a link with the concept Owen mentioned, this may be misleading. Synopses in reference books indicate that the story concerns a dead gangster given a “second life” on earth by the Devil.

Is there a connection with lines which occur near the end of Shakespeare’s Othello? Gratiano, seeing the body of the murdered Desdemona, expresses his satisfaction that her father is already dead. If the father had seen her, he would have cursed “his better Angel from his side” and committed suicide. If he had a “better Angel” by his side, does that imply he also had a “worse Angel”?

Can any reader more familiar with religious lore provide more background?

Children Working in Nursery Rhymes

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton? # 16, 1998

Having spent much of the last few months reading and writing about child labour it might have seemed an obvious question for me to ask: “Do children work in nursery rhymes?” However, the thought did not occur to me until one day recently I found myself mulling over:

Little Boy Blue
Come blow your horn,
The sheep’s in the meadow,
The cow’s in the corn;
But where is the boy
Who looks after the sheep?
He’s under a haystack,
Fast asleep.

Little Boy Blue is a shepherd. Perhaps this is an isolated example, I thought at first, but it isn’t a big step from Boy Blue to Bo Peep. She too looks after sheep, and although illustrations in nursery rhyme books sometimes give the impression that the sheep are pets, the long version of the rhyme cited in the Opies’ Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes explicitly employs the word “shepherdess” in the penultimate line.

Without any further prompting, I came to Jack and Jill. They went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. It may be objected that this is not “work” but a household chore. However, this touches a tricky question. What is work? Some writers distinguish between work (good) and labour (bad) but that is rather presumptuous. Apart from obvious extreme cases of exploitation and hazard, is it necessarily all that easy to say whether a child’s job is good or bad. Jim McKechnie and I have argued that it isn’t and I refer anyone interested in the point to our book on child work in Britain. Here, I shall just argue that it is interesting to look at all the jobs children do.

I set out on a quick trawl of the Opies’ book and soon realised that I faced another problem. How does one identify a child? Boy Blue is called a boy. Bo Peep is little. Jill has a mother who “whipt her”. If “little” is to be taken to indicate a child, then we have an example of another job in this verse:

Little maid, pretty maid, whither goest thou?
Down in the forest to milk my cow.
Shall I go with thee? No, not now,
When I send for thee then come thou.

However, the Opies suggest that asking a girl to go milking with her is a metaphor for a proposal of marriage, so that throws in question the notion that the maid is a child.

One of the several rhymes beginning “See-saw, Margery Daw” has another potential example. It carries on”

Jacky shall have a new master;
Jacky shall have but a penny a day,
Because he can’t work any faster.

So Jacky does work. But what is his job? “See-saw” is a children’s game. However, the phrase appears to precede the game and the rhyme might have at some earlier date been sung by sawyers. This then raises the question, would a boy be a sawyer. On the whole children are used in work that doesn’t require great physical strength. However a sturdy boy might have been capable of contributing to a two handed saw.

The rhyme about “My maid Mary” who “minds her dairy”, and does several other jobs as well, has something of the feel of a young man describing his sweetheart. Furthermore, she isn’t “little”, so I am inclined to exclude her. Unfortunately, I think the Saturday child in the rhyme about birthdays must be excluded too. The line states:

Saturday’s child works hard for a living.

However, the use of “child”s probably shorthand for “person born on” and the working is not necessarily implied to be before adulthood.

There seems little doubt about my final example:

Little pretty Nancy girl,
She sat upon the green,
Scouring of her candlesticks,
They were not very clean.
Her cupboard that was musty,
Her table that was dusty;
And pretty little Nancy girl,
She was not very lusty.

These examples have been culled from a not particularly thorough search through the Opies’ book. Even if a more careful scrutiny were to produce some more cases, it would still only be a small minority of nursery rhymes which refer to children working.
It might be asked, therefore, whether they have particular significance if there are so few of them. I am well aware of how easy it is to make a fool of oneself by speculative interpretations of nursery rhymes in terms of hidden sexual or political meanings. The interest of these few cases lies in the fact that the earliest traces of them in print appear at a time when big changes were taking place in children’s work. In traditional agricultural communities children often worked at home and in the fields, but in 18th century England changes appear to have taken place which culminated in the Industrial Revolution.
During his tour of Great Britain, an account of which was published between 1724 and 1726, Daniel Defoe came across a number of places where children were working, not in the traditional activities just mentioned, but in manufacture. In Taunton, for example, he met an informant whom he quotes, apparently with approval:
“There is not a child in the town nor any village round it, of above five years old, but if it is not neglected by its parents, and untaught, could earn its own bread.”
Defoe seems to suggest that it is the conscientious parent who puts his or her child to work. Such approval of child labour did not survive the changes in manufacturing processes which occurred in the Industrial Revolution. In the next century, controversy raged between the supporters and the opponents of employing young children for long hours in mills and mines. It is from this period that the notion of child labour as something evil seems to stem. Prior to that, little comment was made on children’s work, and it is for this reason that Defoe’s remarks interest historians.
If we consider the dates at which the nursery rhymes which do seem fairly clearly to refer to children working first appeared, we can see that they are contemporary with the new forms of child labour.

c. 1760 Little Boy Blue
c. 1765 Jack and Jill (with a woodcut depicting 2 boys).
c. 1765 See-saw, Margery Daw.
c. 1805 Little Bo Peep,
1820 Little Bo Peep (describing her as a “shepherdess).
c. 1820 Jack and Jill (with mother who whipped her).

Little pretty Nancy girl is an exception. All of the others appeared in print in books for children. Nancy Girl was collected from oral tradition and appeared first in 1901 in the journal, Folklore.
My case is simple and modest. Since we are poorly informed about popular attitudes to children’s work prior to the introduction of the factory system during Industrial Revolution, a more careful perusal of nursery rhymes may yield some more clues.

References:

Defoe, Daniel (1971) A tour through the whole island of Great Britain. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hobbs, Sandy and McKechnie, Jim (1997) Child employment in Britain: A social and psychological analysis. Edinburgh: Stationery Office.
Opies, Iona and Opie, Peter (1951, corrected edition 1952) The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Black Humour and Bad Taste

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 20, 1999

Lena Zavaroni died on Friday, 1st October 1999, at the age of 35. According to the Sunday Mail newspaper (3rd October 1999) she was “discovered” as a singer at the age of nine by the television programme Opportunity Knocks. She made a hit record, Ma, he’s makin’ eyes at me, and appeared before the Queen in the Royal Variety Show at the age of twelve, However, when 13 she developed anorexia nervosa. At 16 years of age she weighed only four stones. Her career faltered, a marriage failed and at the time of her death, according to the Sunday Herald (3rd October 1999) she was living in poverty in a council house. She died following surgery aimed at treating her anorexia.

On Tuesday 12th October, The Diary, a light-hearted column in The Herald newspaper published in Glasgow, contained the following brief item:

We hear that Lena Zavaroni has left £3m in her will. But it’s all in luncheon vouchers.

The Diary is credited to two journalists, Tom Shields and Ken Smith. The following day, 13th October, it contained a contribution signed by Tom Shields alone. It read in part:

The atrocious comment about Lena Zavaroni in yesterday’s Diary was my responsibility or, more accurately, irresponsibility. My colleague Ken Smith, expressed severe reservations. Others thought the reference frankly appalling and advised against putting it in print. I did not listen to them. I have worked on the basis that a good way of writing a Diary column is to tell the stories the way you might relate them to your pals in the pub. This wee item sounded fine in the pub. Obviously it should have been left in the pub. Or left unsaid. Perhaps I have been too long writing this Diary column.

He concluded by apologizing to the Zavaroni family “who will be burying Lina on Friday”. The following day, 14th October, the newspaper published four letters from readers criticizing it for carrying the joke. They were accompanied by an editorial apology. One of the letters referred to a previous “joke” in the Diary about the murder of the television presenter, Jill Dando.

However, on 15th October, a further letter in a somewhat different tone appeared:

The Lena Zavaroni item in Tom Shields’s Diary was in poor taste but he’s apologised and that should be the end of it. To be as consistently funny as the Diary you have to walk a thin line, and sometimes you’ll step over. But the predictable outcry from some of your correspondents is part of a worrying trend. It seems now that we are all supposed to fall in line with an emotional reaction to any news… We are expected to respond emotionally about people we have never met and know nothing about. Look at the ridiculous outpourings when Princess Diana died. Or the mounds of flowers which now descend at the scene of any public death, whether it’s a train crash or one person’s suicide off a motorway bridge.

There is much in this for the student of contemporary folklore to ponder. Tom Shields’s description of how he approaches the Diary work explains why his column is a rich source of modern lore and humour. He also reveals that the joke was being told in the pub within days of the death, This is a fact, pleasant or not. It was clearly objectionable to print it where friends and family could see it, but we cannot avoid the fact that people do exchange black humour in the aftermath of the death of famous people. I doubt whether the author of the last letter is right in referring to a “trend” in the treatment of prominent people. Consider past media accounts of the death of royalty, and the flowers placed at the scene of a tragedy are surely an example of a genuinely popular, or “folk”, response to being confronted by violent death.

Built on Seven Hills 6

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 12, 1997

Two friends of Ambrose Merton have met the “built on seven hills” claim while travelling in Europe. Marion Bowman writes that, when lecturing in Bergen in September, she was told by three different people that Bergen is built on seven hills. David Cornwell found the same being said about Lisbon.

Built on Seven Hills 5

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Sandy Hobbs | Letter to Ambrose Merton # 7, 1996

Delgates at the Fourteenth International Conference on Contemporary Legend, held at the University of Bath in late July, 1996, dined out one night at the George pub, Bathampton. Returning by minibus after the meal, a comment was made on how hills Bath was. The driver replied that Bath, like Rhodes, was built on seven hills.
Bath is already on our list of torns “built on seven hills” (see, for exaple Letters 5:13) but it is nice to have evidence that the idea isstill in common currency. “Rhodes” is more puzzling. Was it a slip for “Rome”?

Built on Seven Hills 4

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Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 5, 1996

In Dear Mr Thoms 25, 33 and 36, we noted the following cities are supposedly built on seven hills: Aberdeen, Bath, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lisbon, Plovdiv and Sheffield. Now we can add Bamberg in Bavaria. In “The Heart of Germany”, Glasgow Evening Times, Mark Thornton writes “Like Rome, Bamberg is built on seven hills crowned with churches”.

Built on Seven Hills 3

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mr. Thoms # 36, 1994

In DMT 25 and 33, we noted that a number of cases where towns were said, like Rome, to be built on seven hills. One of the was Aberdeen, Scotland, for which we can now provide a recent text. In 1994, the city of Aberdeen has been commemorating the two hundred anniversary of thelaying out of its main street, Union Street. A publicity brochure, News 200, carries the following passage:

“St Katherine’s Hill is variously claimed as one of the three hills of Aberdeen (for the three towers on the City Arms) and the seven hills of the city making Aberdeen the equivalent of Rome”.

To Aberdeen, Bath, Glasgow, Lisbon , Plovdiv and Sheffield can be added Edinburgh. The AA Touring Guide to Britain (1979), pp 218-219 has as Tour 100, “The City on Seven Hills”: “Seven hilltops guarded by a massive castle carry Edinburgh, the Athens of the North”.

After the comparison with Athens, the authors presumably thought it better not to add a comparison with Rome. However, they do add something which casts some doubt on the “seven hills” image:

“Until 200 years ago the great centre of culture and learning was little more than a cluster of houses along the Royal Mile, a cobbled slope that follows a windy ridge from Castle Hill to the Palace of Holyrood.”

Built on Seven Hills 2

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mister Thoms # 33, 1994

IN DMT 25, it was noted that a number of towns are said, like Rome, to be built on seven hills: Aberdeen, Glasgow, Sheffield and Plovdiv (Bulgaria). To the can be added:

Bath: Marion Bowman informs us that she became aware of this claim when a Japanese student asked for help in identifying the seven hills mentioned in the guide book. Marion suggests that it would be more accurate to describe Bath as built in a hollow.

Lisbon: A travel guide in The Observer newspaper Life section, 2 January 1884, pp 24-28, states that “Lisbon not only claims the statutory seven hills, but covers them with patterned and lumpy cobbles”. Reading this prompted me to check a copy of the Michelin tourist guide Portugal (Fifth Edition, Harrow, 1989) . There, on page 83, one finds that Lisbon is said to be built on seven low hills”.

Built on Seven Hills 1

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Sandy Hobbs | Dear Mister Thoms # 25, 1993

What do Sheffield, England, and Plovdiv, Bulgaria have in common? Consider the following: “Legend has it that Sheffield is built on seven hills…” (Richard Burns, “Sheffield the city of craft and graft”, The Guardian, 16 October 1991, page 21).

This caught my eye, not just because of the word “legend” but because I recalled being told that Aberdeen was built on seven hills. David Cornwell informs me that he has been told the same of Glasgow, Browsing in the Dictionnaire Universel des Noms Propres (Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1987), I discovered that Plovdiv was described as “construite sur sept collines”.

One of the problems with such a claim is that, if a town is built in a hilly area, and if it expands over the years as most towns presumably do, then many towns at some stage may be said to be built on seven hills. The reason for the claim is presumably to equate the town concerned with Rome, but how valid is the claim for Rome itself.

I would be interested to hear of other cases where towns have this claim made for them.