Original Ditties for the Nursery

Children will delight in this rare collection of little-known nursery rhymes and songs. Transcribed from digital images of a copy of the original volume. Nursery rhymes carry on the history and culture of earlier times, and these rhymes from the 18th and earliest 19th Century do so in a fresh and lyrical manner. Perfect for parents to read with their children, Introduction by The Hockliffe Project: "The title-page of Original Ditties announces it to be the third edition. No copies of either of the first two editions are known. Marjorie Moon has deduced from advertisements that the first was probably published in 1805, from when the Hockliffe copy's frontispiece, showing a witch on her broomstick, is dated. It would seem most likely that the second appeared in 1806 (Moon 1987: 87). "The nursery rhymes included here are in general less well-known than those to be found in that other early repository of children's rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody. The one great exception to this rule is 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee', the tale of two brothers fighting over a rattle which Lewis Carroll was to use so famously. Original Ditties is their first known appearance. There are many other interesting rhymes. 'The bells in London', for example, seems to parallel the more famous 'Oranges and Lemons' rhyme (p.25). The much longer 'Squire Frog's Visit' (p.69), according to Iona Opie who introduced a new edition of this work in 1954, 'was old when the first Queen Elizabeth was a child' (Opie 1954: 5)." Caution to parents: The nursery rhymes and songs in this book were written for the children of the 18th and 19th Centuries; 21st Century children may be unsettled or disturbed by some of the images in the rhymes. Parents should read these nursery rhymes with their children, and help them to understand the history, traditions, and cultures of those times.