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BEED3
ACTIVITY 2.2
The Origins of Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes
Over the last fifty years, various people have tried to trace the mother goose rhymes back to
their origins. What they’ve found is that the nursery rhymes, songs and stories which have for
the last two hundred or so years been associated with Mother Goose had their origins in much
older stories and rhymes.
These stories and rhymes were handed down orally from one generation to the next but,
because they were never written down, they changed quite a lot over the years. Sometimes the
changes were accidental and sometimes the stories were intentionally adapted to suit the
purposes of the storyteller, to suit his audience or to reflect events that were happening at the
time.
Some of the rhymes weren’t written for children at all but for adults. Some of the tales were
blended with parts of other stories to form new ones so that it's almost impossible to work out
where the original tale began and what format it took.
The Mother Goose nursery rhymes we know today come from two main sources: a book
published in France in 1697 and a book published in England in about 1765.
There's also a claim that an American woman was the real Mother Goose and that her son-in-
law published a book of her stories back in the early 1700s. This claim has been discredited by
those who have studied the Mother Goose nursery rhymes and stories and no record or trace
has ever been found of the so-called 'ghost book'.