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"There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" is a popular English language nursery rhyme, with a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19132. Debates over its meaning and origin have largely centered on attempts to match the old woman with historical female figures who have had large families, although King George II (1683–1760) has also been proposed as the rhyme's subject.
Old Mother Hubbard's Cottage, said to be where the rhyme's original lived Kitley House, residence of the Pollexfen Bastard family, in 1829. The first published version of The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her Dog is attributed to Sarah Catherine Martin (1768–1826) and associated with a cottage in Yealmpton, Devon, [1] close by where she was staying at Kitley House.
There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe: England: 1794 There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill: England: 1714 This Is The House That Jack Built 'The House That Jack Built' England: 1755 This Little Light of Mine 'This Little Light of Mine, I’m gonna let it shine' USA This Little Piggy 'This Little Pig' England: c. 1760 This Old Man
It was followed in 1910 by The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book, containing other rhymes too. This had coloured full-page illustrations: composites for lines 1-2 and 3–4, and then one for each individual line. [10] In America the rhyme was used to help young people learn to count and was also individually published.
In 1964, the National Film Board of Canada released the award-winning 5-minute cartoon I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, directed by Derek Lamb. [12] Meredith Tax used this poetic form in her 1970 feminist poem There Was a Young Woman Who Swallowed a Lie, in which the woman finally "throws up" the lies she swallowed. [13]
The rhyme was first recorded in print by James Orchard Halliwell in 1842: [2] There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile, He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile; He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse, And they all liv'd together in a little crooked house. It gained popularity in the early twentieth century. [3]
There was an old woman Liv'd under a hill, And if she ben't gone, She lives there still— appeared as part of a catch in The Academy of Complements. [2] In 1744 these lines appeared by themselves (in a slightly different form) in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, the first extant collection of nursery rhymes. [3]
Next, his twin Maclyn is shot in his bed, and the body is found with whip marks on his face next to a dish of broth. As Ellery postulates that the murders are somehow tied to the nursery rhyme, the next death is that of the Old Woman herself. She dies of heart failure and leaves behind a confession to the first two murders.