Goosie Goosie Gander: a familiar nursery rhyme

Goosie goosie gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady’s chamber.
There I met an old man
Who wouldn’t say his prayers;
I took him by the left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

A dangerous time for English Catholics

This English nursery rhyme has its origins in the 16^th century during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The country was now firmly Protestant and being a Catholic was against the law. With England under constant threat from Catholic Europe, a practising Catholic was regarded as a dangerous alien and therefore subject to political as well as religious suspicion, much as Muslims are regarded today by some paranoid westerners.

However, many families, although outwardly going along with the mood of the time, were secretly still Catholic and went to extraordinary lengths to continue to practice their faith.

Being Catholic, they could not remain faithful without the help of a Catholic priest. They believed, for example, that an unbaptised child was condemned to Hell, as was anyone who had not received the last rites before they died. They also needed to hear Mass on a regular basis.

Catholic priests therefore toured the country in disguise, visiting families who needed their services. The authorities had a pretty good idea who the Catholic families were and therefore kept a close eye on comings and goings in the neighbourhood. Elizabeth was served by a network of spies and informers, so there was a constant battle going on between the forces of law and order and the Catholic families as to who could outwit the other.

The rhyme describes a visit to a country house by an officer who suspects that a Catholic priest is on the premises. It is still possible to view houses of the period that contain what are known as “priest holes”, namely hiding places into which a priest could be secreted when there was a knock on the door. These could be under staircases, behind fireplaces, or in cupboards in bedrooms that could only be opened by activating a secret handle.

 

A closer look at the rhyme

The “goose” of the opening line could be a reference to a Roman Catholic priest, given the connection between Rome and geese in the legend of ancient Rome being saved by the honking of geese.

The officer searches all over the house, including the “lady’s chamber”. If he has any experience of such matters he will probably know most of the tricks for creating a priest hole, and so finding an “old man” would not be difficult. Many priests would be elderly because the only young priests in the country would be ones who had been smuggled in from aboard – the majority would be priests who had been ordained years before and had “gone underground” when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558.

If a suspected priest was found he would be challenged to recite the prayers prescribed by the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. As a Catholic he would be unable or unwilling to do this.

The punishment of being thrown down the stairs would only be the start of what a captured priest could expect. Since being a Catholic was a treasonable act, for which the penalty was death by the barbarous method of hanging, drawing and quartering, a priest could expect no less and would probably have to undergo many painful tortures as the officers tried to force him to reveal the names of his clients.

However, for a children’s rhyme, a rapid descent of the staircase was no doubt considered sufficient to get the message across!

© John Welford

Ring-a-ring of roses: a misunderstood nursery rhyme

Ring-a-ring of roses,

A pocketful of posies;

A-tishoo! A-tishoo!

We all fall down.

Everyone knows that this nursery rhyme has its origins in the Plague – either the Great Plague that afflicted London in 1665 or the much wider Black Death of the 1340s. The first and third lines describe two of the symptoms of the disease, the second refers to the practice of carrying pockets-full of sweet-smelling flowers to ward off infection, and the final line is a clear reference to the inevitable outcome.

Unfortunately, this is a case of “everyone has got it wrong”! There is no evidence that bubonic plague involved either red rings on the skin or sneezing as early symptoms, nor that anyone believed that they could ward off the disease by smelling flowers.

Another problem with this explanation is that there is no record of the rhyme existing any earlier than the 19^th century, and that would surely not be the case if it had its origins in either plague outbreak mentioned above.

Thirdly, the version quoted above is not the only one that has appeared in print, and various alternatives have completely different offerings for some of the lines that have no connotations to any supposed plague symptoms or results.

The conclusion must therefore be that this is a simple children’s game that uses easily remembered words that children can recite and link to the actions of walking in a circle, sneezing and falling over.

© John Welford

Little Jack Horner: a nursery rhyme explained

Little Jack Horner

Sat in a corner

Eating a Christmas pie.

He put in a thumb

And pulled out a plum

And said “What a good boy am I!”

This familiar nursery rhyme has its origins in the 16^th century and the Dissolution of the Monasteries during the reign of King Henry VIII.

The Abbot of Glastonbury in Somerset, Richard Whyting, was determined to resist the dissolution of his own monastery, which was an extremely wealthy one. He thought that he could get round King Henry by offering him a bribe, in the shape of twelve manor houses that were owned by the abbey.

Whyting therefore sent his steward, Thomas Horner, to Hampton Court Palace with the deeds of the manor houses. The law at the time stipulated that the holder of a deed was the owner of the property, so it was essential that the deeds did not fall into the wrong hands. They were therefore hidden in a large pie.

However, Thomas Horner was not as trustworthy as the abbot had imagined. During the journey Thomas Horner lifted the crust of the pie and removed one of the deeds, namely that of Mells Manor. King Henry was therefore offered eleven deeds, not twelve.

Whether the full bribe would have worked is a matter for conjecture, because the slightly reduced one did not. Glastonbury Abbey was dissolved, along with the rest, and Abbot Whyting was put on trial for having dared to set himself against the will of King Henry. One of the jurors at the trial was Thomas Horner, now the master of Mells Manor. Richard Whyting was found guilty and sentenced to death, being hanged, drawn and quartered at the top of Glastonbury Tor.

Interestingly, the slang word for £1000 in the 16^th century was “plum”, although any sum of money that an ordinary person would regard as being way beyond their reach could also be called a plum. We still use the term “plum job” to describe one that seems to offer a good return for doing very little. Thomas Horner’s plum was the large house that he now occupied.

The Horner family still owns Mells Manor, although they dispute the story of how it came into their possession, preferring to state that Thomas Horner acquired the deeds by purchase or as a gift from the king. However, the story of the pie clearly went the rounds at the time, in the form of the famous rhyme, and everyone prefers a tale of skulduggery to one of honesty, every time!

© John Welford

Darkness and light in A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” is a story about contrasts, as is evident from the very title. We are shown the two cities, namely London and Paris, in very different lights, with Paris being the city of revolution and danger and London as the place of peace and sanctuary. Along with this contrast are the themes of night and day, darkness and light, running through the book.

The tale begins at night, with Mr Lorry making his journey to Dover to catch the ferry to France, where he is to rescue Dr Manette. It ends in daylight, with the death by guillotine of the hero, Sydney Carton. However, to equate darkness with evil and light with good is to make too facile a judgment, and Dickens is far too clever a writer to make so obvious a distinction. In the examples given above, a good deed is performed at night and an evil one in daylight.

That said, Dickens is happy to make use of the conventional approach when it suits him. At the end of Chapter 16, darkness falls in Paris just before the Revolution starts. He writes:

“Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thunder cannon …”

The chapter that follows is entitled “One Night”, but it describes a peaceful moonlit evening in London, with Lucy Manette receiving reassurance from her father on the eve of her wedding day. Here, darkness and light are intermingled, as the full moon reminds Dr Manette of the sad times spent looking out of his former prison cell and thinking of the wife and daughter he believed he had lost forever.

The cover of darkness is used to perform deeds that are secret, sometimes they are evil, sometimes not. Jerry Cruncher robs graves at night, but Jerry is on the “good” side in the story, and his activities lead to the unravelling of one of the mysteries.

Sydney Carton is dissolute by day but works hard at night, producing brilliant legal defences that make the reputation of his employer, including the acquittal of the man who will become Lucy’s husband and for whom Sydney will sacrifice his life.

Charles Darney’s evil uncle, the Marquis St Evremonde, is murdered at night. However, the destruction of a cynical aristocrat who cares nothing for the peasants is a deed that we regard as good, although it also has evil consequences.

The focus of much of the action in Paris is the Bastille prison, which is a place of darkness at all times. When it is stormed by the revolutionaries, Dickens gives us the following:

“Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark dens and cages …”

The mob is described as a “sea of black and threatening waters”, and light is only supplied by the fires of burning chateaux and other property seized from the aristocrats.

The metaphor of darkness and light also appears in the creation of shadows, which are of course the result of light that is prevented from shining by obstacles placed in its way. The dark figures of the mob, particularly Madame Defarge, are often described in terms of shadow, and as being the creators of shadow. Lucy remarks at one point that “that dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes”.

As the story approaches its close, the reason for Dr Manette’s imprisonment is recounted in a chapter entitled “The Substance of the Shadow”, with the next two chapters entitled “Dusk” and “Darkness”. In the second of these, the darkness of Madame Defarge’s cruelty is contrasted with the light of Carton’s resolve to save his rival in love, Charles Darnay, and thus, through self-sacrifice, to end his life in service to Lucy Manette.

The interplay of darkness, light and shadow are therefore constant, and Dickens’s choice of chapter titles shows that this is no accident. However, the chaos of revolution is reflected in the uncertainties introduced by Dickens as good and evil deeds are associated sometimes with light and sometimes with darkness.

A Tale of Two Cities is not regarded by most critics as being one of Dickens’s greatest novels, but we know that he was very pleased with it. Perhaps later readers have misjudged it by not being aware of many of the subtleties that the author introduced, with darkness and light being one of the mechanisms used to great effect.

© John Welford

Pip in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Pip is the central character of “Great Expectations”, to the extent that all the events of the novel are seen through his eyes, he being the narrator throughout.

“Great Expectations” was Dickens’s 13^th novel, published in serial form between November 1860 and August 1861. Parallels can be drawn between this novel and his 8^th, “David Copperfield”, which appeared in 1849-50.  Both novels are first-person retrospective narratives that follow the main character from childhood to adulthood, but whereas David’s life can be matched to some of the actual events of that of Dickens, Pip’s progress can be regarded more in the light of an intimate spiritual autobiography.

Although both novels are among Dickens’s greatest achievements, the portrayal of Pip is more psychologically complex than that of David, with Pip being forced to deal with a wider-ranging set of moral dilemmas than David.

Pip is Dickens’s first working-class hero (even Oliver Twist had middle-class roots), which is central to the plot involving the “great expectations” of the title. The theme that runs through the novel is Pip’s consideration of self-worth at being raised up the social ladder, and whether the reader shares his opinion.

Pip consistently misunderstands his situation throughout the novel, not out of lack of intelligence but because the circumstances in which he finds himself are confusing and difficult to set in their proper context, mainly because Pip, and the reader, do not know what that context is.

The dramatic opening scene, in which Pip is accosted in a churchyard by Magwitch, the escaped convict, is a mixture of horror and comedy in which the young boy has little idea of what is going on, other than that a rough man is making demands of him and, at one point, holding him upside down by the ankles. However, Pip’s abiding memory is of how the church steeple suddenly points at the ground rather than the sky.

A vivid imagination

The verbal misunderstandings of childhood, which begin in the churchyard and which Dickens introduces as comic touches, set the scene for Pip’s much more serious miscalculations later in the book. Coupled with this theme is Pip’s vivid imagination, which takes every situation a stage beyond that which is initially presented. For example, he has no idea what the source of his “great expectations” might be, so he imagines that his benefactor must be the reclusive and eccentric Miss Havisham, who has befriended him and invited him to her house on many occasions, but with a very different motive.

Dreams

The portrayal of Pip, as a character of recurrent low self-esteem and guilt, is well presented by Dickens who at this stage of his writing career was a master in exploring the psychology of a character. It is interesting to note how Dickens uses Pip’s dreams to reveal aspects of his developing character, albeit in a different manner to that used, some 40 years later, by Sigmund Freud. Pip’s dreams bring his guilt home to him, and also multiply his fears, such as when he is harbouring Magwitch in London and the burden is becoming too much for him.

There is an interesting contrast between Pip’s daydreams of what being a gentleman will be like and his nightmares, some of which relate to his guilt at having turned his back on the honest people who brought him up but are now “beneath” him in his new snobbish persona.

Pip’s “doubles”

The psychological complexities of the book are partly worked through by Dickens’s use of “doubles” to draw attention to aspects of Pip’s character. Pip’s personality consists of conflicting elements, and these doubles often appear in pairs that contrast with each other. They also interact with Pip and thus provide symbolic representations of what is going on within the central character.

Several such pairs have been indicated by critics and analysts, but the most striking must surely be Orlick and Herbert Pocket. Orlick is the rough apprentice blacksmith whose response to Pip is always hostile and who eventually gives way to his violent nature by attacking (and essentially causing the death of) Pip’s sister and carer, Mrs Joe. As she had always been very stern in her treatment of Pip, Orlick’s attack on her could be seen as something that Pip might have been driven to, had the evil side of his personality been allowed to dominate.

On the other hand, Herbert can be seen as the “good angel” aspect of Pip who never allows himself to be turned aside from following the right course. Unlike Pip, Herbert appreciates the need for hard work in order to succeed, and also knows how to treat people of all classes with respect. He therefore gains the happiness that eludes Pip. However, he also stands by Pip in the latter’s lowest moments and, at the end of the book, provides the security that Pip had been unable to find for himself.

  

The fact that Herbert can be seen as a reflection of Pip is hinted at when they first meet, with the two looking at each other from either side of a window pane at Satis House (Miss Havisham’s home). The final realization of this joint nature is indicated at the end of the book when Pip says:

“… I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his [Herbert’s] inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.”

Pip’s earlier miscalculations and selfishness must, however, have long-term consequences, and these manifest themselves in the contrast between Herbert’s happy marriage and Pip’s failure to find a wife. Having treated his true benefactors so badly, he cannot expect to be rewarded with true happiness and the novel ends with Pip realising that his life is still a work in progress.

“Great Expectations” is a flawed masterpiece in several respects, but it is also one of Dickens’s most interesting works from the psychological aspect, especially as it concerns the central character. Dickens had achieved a “great expectation” of his own shortly before writing this novel, by moving into his house at Gad’s Hill, a fairly large mansion which, since his childhood in north Kent where that of Pip is also set, he had dreamt would one day be his.

However, it was also not long since he had abandoned his wife Catherine, preferring the society of an actress, Ellen Ternan. Catherine had borne him ten children and stood by him throughout their marriage of 22 years, so he might have had some lingering feelings of guilt for how he had treated her, although he would have denied this at the time. One wonders if Dickens preferred to let his character Pip deal with these emotions when he was unable to express them himself.

© John Welford

See also

Estella in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book

“Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong” can claim to be the world’s second top best-seller of all time (after the Bible) with more than 900 million copies having been printed since its publication in 1964. However, it is a matter of debate as to how many copies would have been printed had it not been compulsory for all Chinese citizens to have a copy on their person at all times when in public.


The Little Red Book

Strictly speaking, the “Little Red Book” was the pocket edition of “Quotations”, but both editions had the same purpose, namely to convey the thoughts of China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976).

All citizens were expected to read and learn the contents of the Little Red Book, even if they did not fully understand all the practical implications of the slogans contained in it. Time was set aside in schools and factories for people to study and recite passages from the book.

The Little Red Book became a symbol of oppression during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69 when armies of “red guards” held their copies aloft as they marched in support of Chairman Mao and were instrumental in ruthlessly crushing any signs of dissent.


The purpose and effect of the book

The book was a revolutionary idea in its own right, because the traditional way in which the Chinese people learned about what their leaders were thinking and doing was through a complex network of bureaucracy. By means of this book the supreme leader could speak directly to every one of his people and tell them what was expected of them as loyal followers of the Communist regime.

The quotations were a set of extracts from Mao’s many speeches and writings in which he outlined his interpretation of Marxist-Leninist thought as it applied to a Chinese context. As well as political slogans and dogmas, the book also contained Mao’s ideas on how Communism applied to the everyday lives of ordinary people.

It was important for the Communist leadership to gain the trust of the people, and one way of doing this was, as mentioned above, to tell them what the rules were. It was also, therefore, a tool for keeping everyone in line. If people knew where the limits were, in terms of what they were allowed to believe and say in public, then anyone who stepped beyond those limits could be spotted and singled out for “re-education”.

However, the symbolic power of the book as a direct link between the leader and his people was probably what had the greatest effect. It is therefore surprising that the idea has not caught on among the world’s other dictatorial regimes – the “Thoughts of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un”, for example (perhaps he doesn’t have any?). There have been plenty of examples of personality cults being copied and continued, but this particular feature does not seem to have caught anyone’s imagination – yet.

© John Welford

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: an overall view

Any attempt to provide a complete literary analysis of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in 1,000 words or so is doomed to failure. The book runs to some 17,000 lines of (mostly) verse, comprising 24 tales, a long introductory General Prologue and a number of other prologues to tales and other linking material. The analysis therefore has to be at a more general level, with examples brought in to illustrate the important points.

The first thing to be said is that the Canterbury Tales are incomplete. If we are to believe the original plan as described in the General Prologue, each of the 29 pilgrims was to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back, making 116 tales in all. As it happens, only 22 of the pilgrims get to tell a tale, with Chaucer himself being the only one to tell two. One of the tales, that of the Canon’s Yeoman, is told by somebody who turns up when the pilgrimage is well on its way and is therefore an “extra”.

Even then, a number of the tales we have are incomplete. On two occasions this is because the tales are interrupted by other pilgrims. Chaucer’s first tale, a piece of doggerel that is clearly a joke told against himself, is too much for “mine host” and he insists on Chaucer starting again with something else. The Monk is also interrupted. Other tales would appear to have fallen victim either to lost manuscripts or the poet running out of inspiration. Thus the Squire’s Tale is unfinished, and the Cook’s Tale, at only 58 lines, barely gets started.

However, even though the Canterbury Tales as we have them are only a fraction of what might have been expected, what we have is a remarkable and highly varied collection of medieval stories. There is everything here from classical romance (e.g. The Knight’s Tale) to bawdy romp (e.g. The Miller’s Tale) to fable (e.g. The Manciple’s Tale) to a long, involved sermon in prose (The Parson’s Tale).

Several of the tales are clearly re-tellings of those of other writers, such as Boccaccio and Petrarch. What Chaucer was doing was therefore taking some of the works of great European writers and making them available to an English-speaking audience. This was before the days of printing, so the audience would have been a small one, hearing the stories read to them by, for example, Chaucer himself. It is, however, notable that the Canterbury Tales was the first book printed at Westminster by William Caxton, in the 15^th century.

Some of the tales would appear to be original to Chaucer, or only very loosely based on others. The Miller’s Tale may be one of these, likewise the tales of the Friar and the Summoner.

What sets the Canterbury Tales on a different plane from being just a collection of stories is the “frame tale” within which they are set. The tales belong to their tellers, to whom we are introduced in detail before the first tale is told. The General Prologue is itself a masterpiece of 14^th century English poetry which can be read and enjoyed in its own right. After the opening scene-setting lines that explain the idea of the pilgrimage to the tomb of St Thomas A’Beckett at Canterbury, each pilgrim is described in turn. We get the impression that Chaucer has had a chat with each of them over a drink in the Tabard Inn on the night before they set off, and he has captured their characters from what they have told him.

Nearly all of them have a dark side, or a secret that is revealed thanks to a few pints of ale having been consumed. Chaucer is something of a Sherlock Holmes, spotting seemingly inconsequential details that go together to reveal the pilgrims’ true characters. We, the readers, are invited to read between the lines and appreciate that the apparent praise being heaped on these people by the poet has a very different purpose.

For example, the Prioress is a young lady who takes great pride in her appearance. She has smooth skin, is well-dressed, has excellent table manners, speaks French, and is clearly well used to polite society. But she is supposed to be in charge of a priory, having taken vows of poverty and chastity and responsible for the moral and spiritual welfare of her nuns. Clearly she is far more worldly than she should be, and presumably she is on this pilgrimage to flirt with whoever she may come across. Chaucer makes mention of how pained she is if she sees a mouse in a trap, and how she feeds her pet dogs with the choicest morsels. It is up to us to note that nothing is said about how she might react to a person in need, because clearly she stays as far away from the poor and needy as she can.

It is notable from the General Prologue just how many of the pilgrims make a living from the Church and how all of them, except the Parson, are thoroughly disreputable in their own way. The Pardoner is a conman, selling worthless pieces of paper to gullible people who believe that they will be saved from Hell by so doing. The Friar is similarly out for what he can get, and the Summoner’s job is to haul people before the Church courts unless they can buy him off instead.

As the pilgrimage proceeds, the characters interact with each other, notably the Friar and the Summoner who clearly loathe each other deeply. There is plenty of interplay in between their tales, and the tales they tell are aimed at each other, with the Friar telling a tale about a wicked Summoner and the Summoner returning the “compliment”.

Other pilgrims also tell tales that are in tune with their characters. The Knight’s Tale, although it has a classical background, is based on the medieval concept of “courtly love” which would have been familiar to its teller. This is followed by a parody of the courtly love story in the Miller’s Tale, a bawdy story in which a lively young woman gets the better of her husband and an unwelcome lover in a story that is very rude but also very funny. This is entirely in keeping with the character of the Miller as presented to us in the General Prologue.

There is a theme running through several of the tales that concerns the relative positions that husbands and wives should have in a marriage. Indeed, a sequence of the tales, beginning with that of the Wife of Bath, has been designated by critics as the “Marriage Group”. The feisty and much-married Wife (who is the only pilgrim not to follow a trade or profession) is an early exponent of “women’s lib” who believes that the woman should be the dominant partner in a marriage. She gives a long speech, saying just as much, before she even starts to tell a tale. This serves to make her the most complex and interesting of Chaucer’s characters, and the best-drawn female character in any work of literature before Shakespeare. Her Tale, which is a re-telling of the “loathly lady” fable in which a hag offers to be “fair or foul”, backs up her prologue by showing the wisdom of leaving the choice to the lady.

The Clerk tells a tale in which a husband has complete domination over an obedient wife, although the teller does not advocate such behaviour, and the Merchant then tells the story of January and May, which parallels the earlier Miller’s Tale with its story of a young wife cuckolding an older husband, but on this occasion not getting away with it. The Franklin’s Tale brings the group to a close by showing that dominance either way in a marriage is not to be recommended, but forgiveness and tolerance are the keys to married bliss.

As stated earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole of the Canterbury Tales in a short article. Suffice it to say that there is a whole wealth of humour, wisdom, adventure and morality in this collection, as well as a host of characters, both inside the tales and without, who serve to give the modern reader a very vivid picture of life in England more than 600 years ago.

© John Welford

See also:

The background to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales 
Sources used by Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales