Origins of Humpty Dumpty

Is this more than a bizarre nursery rhyme?

When I was a kid, Humpty Dumpty was still a rhyme that was often sang, or chanted, in the playground as well as as an odd verse frequently appearing in various anthologies. I grew up in the sixties and at that time a popular kid’s soft toy was called a gonk. Although it was the creation of English inventor, Robert Benson, with its round egg shape and large eyes, it seemed to closely resemble the vastly older figure of Humpty Dumpty. The rhyme of Humpty Dumpty reaches down the centuries and is a simple enough ditty.

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Although the rhyme has gone through a variety of changes over the years, both in word content and length, this single quatrain stanza is the most familiar, with two rhyming couplets of AABB.

But what are its origins?

Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue published in 1785 refers to Humpty Dumpty as ‘a short and clumsy person of either sex, also ale baked with brandy.’ Although it makes no reference to the rhyme itself.

Many of us would have first encountered the anthropomorphic egg in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, published in 1872, as a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. In fact, the portrayal of Humpty Dumpty as an egg is first imagined by Carroll along with the actor George L Fox in his Broadway pantomime called Humpty Dumpty. In Carroll’s story, Humpty Dumpty declares:

My name means the shape I am.

He launches into a discussion with Alice on semantics, the study of meaning in language, and pragmatics, the related study of how context contributes to meaning. Carroll’s character was a very erudite egg, indeed.

But the origins of Humpty Dumpty, along with the rhyme, may go back further than this, perhaps as far as the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. This was the moment when Richard III was defeated and killed by Henry Tudor’s invading army. According to the victorious Tudor…