Humpty Dumpty

Where it comes from

The earliest known printing is in Samuel Arnold’s Juvenile Amusements (1797). There, it isn’t the king’s horses and men who try to help, but “four-score men and four-score more”.

It was very probably a riddle to begin with. The rhyme never says what Humpty Dumpty is: you were meant to guess, and the answer was an egg, which can’t be put back together once it breaks. James Orchard Halliwell’s collection The Nursery Rhymes of England puts it in the chapter of riddles, with the answer “An egg” (and three score men in place of the king’s). Lewis Carroll knew the joke too: in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Alice meets Humpty Dumpty and finds him exactly like an egg. The old phrase “humpty dumpty” also meant a short, clumsy person.

You may have heard that Humpty Dumpty was a cannon on the walls of Colchester during the English Civil War, knocked off by enemy fire in 1648. There’s no good evidence for it. Nobody has found the story in print before the 1990s, and the oldest versions of the rhyme don’t mention the king’s horses or men at all.

These words and the tune in the player come from Our Old Nursery Rhymes (1911). Some old books have “Cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again”. Either works.

Old words

• the King’s men: the king’s soldiers.
• four-score and three score: eighty and sixty. A score is twenty.

Tips

• Keep the dip small and slow, and keep hold of your baby all the way down and back up. Knee rides are for babies who can hold their heads up steadily; never shake a baby.
• Pause before “had a great fall”. Babies soon learn the dip is coming, and the waiting is half the fun.
• Too young for knee rides? Say it with your baby on your lap, and give a gentle tickle for the fall instead.