In fact, no one has found a hint of the rhyme before the late eighteenth century. Scholars said the earliest print appearances occurred in the 1880s:
- Kate Greenaway's Mother Goose, or the Old Nursery Rhymes (Routledge, 1881—University of California Press edition above).
- William Wells Newell's Games and Songs of American Children (Harper, 1883), which dates one version (without source) to New Bedford around 1790 and another version to Connecticut in the 1840s.
- Georgina F. Jackson and Charlotte Sophia Burne’s Shropshire Folk-Lore (Trubner, 1883).
- Sidney Oldall Addy’s A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield (English Dialect Society, 1888).
- Henry Carrington Bolton’s The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children (Appleton, 1888).
Her epigraph for chapter 23, “The Festival of Roses,” reads:
A ring—a ring of roses,Later in that chapter, Stephens writes:
Laps full of posies;
Awake—awake!
Now come and make
A ring—a ring of roses.
Then the little girls began to seek their own amusements. They played "hide and seek," "ring, ring a rosy," and a thousand wild and pretty games...This version offers no more support for the plague theory.
(This is the second time this week I’ve found a word or phrase used earlier than what a standard reference book says about it. Google Books's keyword search is changing the world.)
No comments:
Post a Comment