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.