Humpty Dumpty: egg or cannon?

Everybody knows the “Humpty Dumpty” nursery rhyme, and some people will tell you that they know its origin, but are they right?

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Most people, on hearing this nursery rhyme, immediately think of Humpty Dumpty as being an egg that fell and broke and was therefore unable to be repaired. This image is largely due to the work of John Tenniel in illustrating Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”, in which he pictured Humpty Dumpty as an egg, as indeed the text implies.

One theory is that the original Humpty Dumpty was not an egg, or even a person, but a large cannon that was used during the siege of Colchester in 1648, during the English Civil War. The royalists were besieged by the parliamentarians, commanded by Thomas Fairfax, and were able to keep them at bay largely due to expert use of the cannon by a gunner named “One-Eyed Thompson”, who defended the town in this way for about ten weeks.

Humpty Dumpty, it is said, was positioned on top of the tower of St Mary’s Church, which was hard by the town walls. When the tower was eventually hit by enough cannonballs from the besiegers, the cannon fell over the wall into a boggy area from where it was found to be too heavy to raise.

However, many objections have been raised to this explanation of Humpty Dumpty, mainly on the grounds of lack of historical evidence, and it is not now generally accepted. Other originals have been proposed, including King Richard III with his hunched back (according to Shakespeare), but there is no reason to accept these explanations either.

It looks as though one has to take this nursery rhyme more or less at face value, namely as a riddle for children to guess at what Humpty Dumpty could be – and an egg would be an excellent answer! It might also be a “cautionary verse” - a warning to children not to sit on high walls for fear of the consequences should they fall off.

© John Welford

Who wrote the Pentateuch?

The Pentateuch is the name given to the first five books of the Old Testament – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. They are also referred to as the “Books of Moses”. But who actually wrote them? One thing we can be absolutely sure about is that it wasn’t Moses!

Leaving aside the distinct possibility that Moses is a figure from myth rather than history, there are many reasons why the books could not have been the work of a single person. Knowledge gained over the centuries that has been gleaned from intense textual analysis and investigation of source material makes it abundantly clear that the books were written over a period of time that was vastly greater than the lifetime of a single writer, even if we accept the absurdly long lifespans accorded to many figures in the Old Testament.

The actual dates of composition of the various parts of each book are matters of controversy, but it certainly appears that the earliest elements, in their written form, are no older than 930 BC and the youngest are as late as the 6^th century BC. The final assembly of the five books almost certainly took place in the 5^th century BC.

The obvious conclusion is that the books had multiple authors, and that applies within each book as opposed to stating that each book was separately authored.

It does not take much reading of Genesis – to take one example – to make one appreciate that different stories are being told that are in some respects in contradiction to each other. They are also stylistically different, which is an even stronger clue to the fact that more than one author was involved. The two accounts of Creation are a case in point – it is impossible for the hand that wrote Genesis Chapter 1 to have also written Chapter 2.

Scholars have identified five different sources for the Pentateuch, four of them being authors and the fifth an editor. The names of three of the authors are unknown, but the identities of one of them, and of the editor, are far less uncertain. 

The authors are generally referred to J, E, P and D. J is so-called because God is consistently referred to as Jahweh, whereas the E author uses the name Elohim. P is the “Priestly author” and D “the Deuteronomist”, who is quite likely to have been the prophet Jeremiah.

It does not take long to appreciate the different emphases of the various authors when it is known who wrote what. For example, the Priestly author was a stern authoritarian who was interested in laying down the law and stressing the need for implacable justice. Unlike the other authors he never uses the words “grace”, “mercy” or “repentance”.

By contrast, the J author is much more “human” and loves to tell stories. J was responsible for telling us about the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel and Moses in the bulrushes. There is a fascinating possibility that J might have been a woman, whereas the other authors definitely were not. If that is so, then it is to her that we owe the story in Genesis 38 of Judah and Tamar in which a woman takes the initiative and forces a man to admit that he is in the wrong.

And what about the mysterious fifth character, the editor? This was quite possibly Ezra, also responsible for the Book of that name, who in about 460 BC decided to take all the material to hand and compile a continuous narrative.

He would have been a Hebrew who was living in Babylon as one of the thousands of descendants of the exiles from Judah who had been captured after the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem in 587 BC. He wanted to revive the religion of his forbears, and the best way of so doing was to give all the people a document to which they could refer and which told their common story and gave them a blueprint for how they would live once they returned to their ancestral home.

Many Hebrews had returned to Jerusalem prior to 458 BC, when Ezra made the journey, but the early returnees had found life difficult and were often unable to agree among themselves on matters of doctrine and belief. When Ezra arrived, bearing his five books, he undertook a complete public reading of them, and it can be said that that was the moment when the Jewish religion was really born.

However, there was something very strange about the work that Ezra did. This is that his editing did not consist of making judicious cuts of passages that did not fit the general narrative. As far as we can tell, Ezra included absolutely everything of the four documents he had to hand.

In order to unite the Jewish diaspora – some of whom had fled to Egypt – he could not afford to antagonise any particular element among them. Each faction had its own favoured version of its texts - J, E, P or D - and they would expect to find that version in the completed work. 

So Ezra simply wove all the pieces together as best he could, while including very little writing of his own save for a few linking passages. That is not to say that he did not have a message of his own. He came from the Priestly tradition, and every one of the five books opens with a “P” passage.

So that is why the “books of Moses” had nothing at all to do with Moses, apart from telling the stories in which he was involved. That also accounts for why there are so many repetitions, some of them contradicting each other. This also means that it is unwise to try to make all the pieces agree with each other and pretend that they are a unified whole in which there are no contradictions. The fact is that Ezra’s intention was to unite the people by allowing them to disagree with the details but agree on the basics. It is only when texts such as these are seen in their true context that they can be properly understood.

© John Welford

The Brothers Grimm, tellers of tales

4^th January 1785 saw the birth of one of one of world’s greatest story-tellers, Jacob Grimm. Together with his younger brother Wilhelm (born in 1786) he collected and retold a large number of folktales that would almost certainly have been lost without their efforts.

The Grimms and their fairy tales

The first collection was published in 1812 as “Childrens and Household Tales”, which makes the point that they were not solely intended to be read by or to children. This is sometimes forgotten when it is complained that the tales are “Grimm by name and grim by nature”.

The collection was originally intended as an academic exercise looking into some of the more obscure aspects of the German language and its history, which was Jacob Grimm’s main interest in life. However, the collection simply grew and took on a life of its own. The original volume contained 86 stories, but a second volume published in 1815 added another 70. The seventh collected edition, published in 1857, comprised 211 tales.

The stories collected by the Grimms included many that have become familiar to generations of children ever since, including Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. Without the Brothers Grimm it is unlikely that Walt Disney would have had much material to work on! Unfortunately, a number of the stories have also been held to embody the ideals of Germanic racial purity, which is why Adolf Hitler was particularly attracted to them – and the same might also have applied to Walt Disney.

An unfinished dictionary

Jacob Grimm would not have regarded himself simply as a storyteller. His most important work, as he saw it, was in the fields of philology and linguistics. He was a professor of philology and the creator of a massive dictionary of the German language, on which he worked alongside his brother. Wilhelm died in 1859 when they were still working on words beginning with “D” and Jacob had only got as far as “F” by the time he died in 1863. The work was eventually completed by others but did not finally appear until 1960!

© John Welford

Charles Dickens, arguably Britain's greatest novelist

7^th February is a special day for the worldwide community of people who are proud to call themselves “Dickensians” (myself included) because this was the day in 1812 when Charles John Huffam Dickens was born in Portsmouth.

His father, John Dickens, was a naval pay clerk whose duties included taking wages to the crews of ships moored in the harbour. The Dickens family moved with the job, firstly to Chatham in Kent and then to London. Charles Dickens is therefore regarded as a “London novelist” because that is where he spent most of his life and all but one of his novels is set wholly or in part in London (the exception is Hard Times which is set in an imaginary northern industrial town).

Charles Dickens had some hard times of his own as he was growing up, mainly due to his father’s inability to manage money and support his growing family, but he discovered an ability to write amusing and incisive stories that were soon to prove immensely popular. By the end of his life (he died in 1870 at the age of 58) he was a wealthy man who was able to buy a substantial property (Gad’s Hill House) that he had admired while talking walks as a boy when living in Chatham.

Dickens is renowned for bringing the public’s attention to many of the evils of his time, particularly those associated with poverty. Although he sometimes lapsed into sentimentality, his general tone is a hard-headed one that recognises that good and evil deeds can be committed by members of all classes of society. Although many of the social problems mentioned in his novels and stories are only of historical interest today, Charles Dickens was a master at creating colourful and complex characters (not just caricatures, which is an accusation often levelled at him) whose failings and foibles are still very much with us. That is why Charles Dickens was a writer for all times and not just his own.

There are many fascinating aspects to the life of Charles Dickens, which I came to appreciate a few years ago when I was asked by the Dickens Fellowship to compile an index to 31 annual volumes of their journal “The Dickensian”. This involved me in reading and analysing some 6,000 pages of text devoted to the life and works of Dickens, so I ended up acquiring quite an encyclopaedic knowledge!

© John Welford

Miguel de Cervantes, author of "Don Quixote"

It is more usual to celebrate the birth dates of famous people than their baptism dates, but sometimes this is not possible. It is not known exactly when Miguel de Cervantes was born, but we do know that he was baptised on 9^th October 1547 in a small town about 20 miles from Madrid, Spain.

His claim to fame is that he penned the first prose work in Europe to which the name “novel” can reliably be assigned, namely “Don Quixote”. This is a tale that pokes fun at the traditional “knightly romance” in that its hero, a gentleman of mature years who reads too much, sets off on adventures that turn out to have consequences other than those intended. It is a “modern” novel in the sense that it contrasts the world of imagination with that of reality, a theme that has been a familiar one in literature ever since.

Although Don Quixote is not an autobiography, there is surely quite a lot of the creator in his hero. Unfortunately, the details of Cervantes’ early life are very sketchy. It is, however, known that he came from a very poor background and that he was a soldier at the age of 24, because this was when he fought in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and was seriously injured.

During the battle, which was fought at sea between the Christian nations of Europe and the Ottoman Turks, Cervantes received three bullet wounds, one of which disabled his left arm. Despite this handicap he continued his military career after he left hospital and, in 1575, was captured by Algerian pirates and held as a slave in north Africa for five years until his parents could raise the ransom that was demanded for his release.

On his return to Spain, Cervantes decided to use his functioning right hand as his means of earning a living and switched from soldiering to writing. His early works were mainly plays and poems, before he hit on the idea of Don Quixote.

The first part of his magnum opus appeared in 1605, when Cervantes was already 58 years old. It was a success from the start, which caused problems for Cervantes because pirated editions soon appeared (there being no copyright laws at the time), as did a spurious “second part”. This inspired Cervantes to continue Quixote’s adventures in an official Part Two, which was published in 1615, shortly before Cervantes died in 1616.

Don Quixote was soon translated into other languages, with the first English edition of Part One appearing in 1612. It became very popular across Europe and the wider world, and is widely regarded as one of the “all time greats” of world literature.

© John Welford

Anzia Yezierska, a writer who stayed true to her roots

Anzia Yezierska is probably a name unknown to most people, but there was a time when her novels and stories were extremely popular, and Anzia was all the rage not only in her home city of New York but Hollywood as well.

Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland in 1885, to a Jewish family that moved to New York when she was about ten years old. She grew up in one of the poorest districts of the city, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and earned a living in one of the many sweatshops that swallowed up the huge population of Jewish and other immigrants and spat them out more dead than alive.

Anzia wanted to follow the example of her brothers, who were being supported by her parents to get an education. She therefore studied at night and discovered that she had a talent as a writer.

However, before she could put those talents to good use she went through a tangled series of relationships that left her with a daughter after two failed marriages, and then with no daughter after she surrendered her parental rights. Left on her own, she turned to writing as a way of supporting herself, and she spent the rest of her life (she died in 1970) writing stories and novels.

The theme of her work was the struggle of immigrant women to find a voice for themselves and be able to make decisions independently of others. Her writings, based on her own experiences and those of the many women she knew and remembered from her sweatshop days, could be said to be about realising the “American Dream”, but this was expressed not just in terms of making oneself rich, but of using freedom from poverty as a stepping stone to a more fulfilled life in which real choices could be made, such as a woman being able to choose where she lived and who she should live with.

Anzia Yezierska made her name with her first collection of stories, “Hungry Hearts” (1920), although there was plenty more to come. The stories are about actual hunger and also the hunger for self-expression. This could take the form of the struggle of immigrant girls to get an education, or to escape the attentions of matchmakers who sought to control the futures of women who were without the means to resist.

The movie mogul Sam Goldwyn came across “Hungry Hearts” and paid Anzia $10,000 for the film rights. The movie was duly made (in 1922), being filmed on location in the Lower East Side, and Anzia became what appeared to be an overnight success. She was hailed as the “Queen of the Ghetto” and Goldwyn saw an opportunity to exploit this “rags to riches” American Dream story by offering her a hugely generous contract to become a Hollywood scriptwriter.

However, what Sam Goldwyn was doing was precisely what Anzia Yezierska had warned about in her stories. She realised that to accept Goldwyn’s offer would be to place herself back under the control of a wealthy man and limit her field of choice. She also appreciated the irony of growing rich by writing about women who would always be poor. She therefore left Hollywood behind and went back to her roots in New York.

One of her “Hungry Hearts” stories (entitled “The Fat of the Land”) seemed to sum up her own situation rather well, despite being written before Sam Goldwyn entered her life. In the story, a poor woman from the tenements finds wealth and is then dripping with diamonds in a big house, but is also desperately lonely and unable to communicate with her children. Her greatest joy is to leave the silks and diamonds at home and go down into the busy Lower East Side streets where she can haggle with traders over the price of vegetables, just as she used to in the old days.

© John Welford

Robert Browning, 19th-century British poet

On 12^th December 1889 the poet Robert Browning died in Venice at the age of 77.

It has to be admitted that Browning’s poetry is not read by many people today, and most people would be hard pressed to name any of his poems. Perhaps one that might come to mind is “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”, and others that deserve to be remembered are “My Last Duchess” and “Home Thoughts from Abroad”, but most modern readers have little patience with very long poems, which was the format in which Browning specialised.

It must also be admitted that some of Browning’s poetry is not easy to understand, and people today, if they read poetry at all, do not want the intellectual challenge that Browning sometimes poses.

Indeed, there is a story to the effect that Browning himself had problems with Browning’s poetry! In later life he was asked for the meaning of a particularly obscure passage in an early work, “Sordello”. He read the lines aloud and then said: “When I wrote that, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant – now only God does”.

Robert Browning is probably best known for the romantic story of how he wooed and won the poet Elizabeth Barrett. She was an invalid who was fiercely protected by her father, who refused to allow the love affair, deeply felt on both sides, to proceed. Eventually the lovers married in secret and escaped to Italy, where they stayed for 16 years until Elizabeth died and Robert returned to England.

On his return Browning wrote what is probably his best work, a dramatic monologue entitled “The Ring and the Book” that tells the story of a 17^th century murder and trial in Rome. Sadly, it has few readers today. It prompted the 20^th century writer Anthony Burgess to say: “We all want to like Browning, but we find it very hard”.

© John Welford