There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Drawing of the Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe by Kronheim, c.1875

William Wallace Denslow's illustration for There Was An Old Woman..., from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose

Folding Card, The Old Woman Who Lived in A Shoe, 6 April 1883. Noel Wisdom Chromolithograph Collection, Special Collections Department, The University of South Florida Tampa Library.

"There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe" is a popular English language nursery rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19132.

[edit] Lyrics

The most common version of the rhyme is:

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do;
She gave them some broth without any bread;
Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.^[1]

The earliest printed version in Joseph Ritson's Gammer Gurton's Garland in 1794 has the coarser last line:

She whipp'd all their bums, and sent them to bed.^[2]

There were many other variations printed. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[1]

[edit] Origins and meaning

Iona and Peter Opie pointed to the version published in Infant Institutes in 1797, which finished with the lines:

Then out went th' old woman to bespeak 'em a coffin,
And when she came back, she found 'em all a-loffeing. ^[1]

The term 'a-loffeing', they believed was Shakespearean suggesting that the rhyme is considerably older than the first printed versions. They then speculated that if this were true it might have a folk lore meaning and pointed to the connection between shoes and marriage, symbolised by casting a shoe when a bride leaves for her honeymoon.^[1]

Debates over the meaning of the rhyme largely revolve around matching the old woman with historical figures, as Peter Opie observed 'for little reason other than the size of their families'.^[1]. Candidates include:

• Queen Caroline, the wife of King George II, who had eight children.^[1]

• Elizabeth Vergoose of Boston, who had six of her own children and ten stepchildren.^[1]

• Margery Buttwhistle, a late eighteenth-century village drunk and prostitute. She is believed to have had numerous illegitimate children fathered by her various clients. Coming from a background of extreme poverty, it is claimed that the children formed the notorious “Shoe Gang” who stole the footwear of wealthy victims.^[3]

There is no evidence to identify any of these candidates with the unnamed subject of the rhyme.

[edit] In popular culture

There was an Old Woman was the title of a 1943 Ellery Queen novel.

The Old Lady in the Shoe appears as a character in the Shrek series of films.

[edit] Notes