The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.
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In 1842, James Orchard Halliwell published a collected version as:Īccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale in the seventeenth century. The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. The riddle may depend upon the assumption that a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, whereas an egg would be.
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The earliest known version was published in Samuel Arnold's Juvenile Amusements in 1797 with the lyrics:Ĭould not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before.Ī manuscript addition to a copy of Mother Goose's Melody published in 1803 has the modern version with a different last line: "Could not set Humpty Dumpty up again". It was published in 1810 in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland as:Ĭannot place Humpty dumpty as he was before. It is a single quatrain with external rhymes that follow the pattern of AABB and with a trochaic metre, which is common in nursery rhymes. The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs (London, 1870). The Roud Folk Song Index catalogues folk songs and their variations by number, and classifies this song as 13026. The most common modern text is:Īll the king's horses and all the king's men The rhyme is one of the best known and most popular in the English language. The rhyme is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as No. As a character and literary allusion, he has appeared or been referred to in a large number of works of literature and popular culture, particularly Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass (1872). The character of Humpty Dumpty was popularised in the United States by actor George L. Its origins are obscure and several theories have been advanced to suggest original meanings. The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth-century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs. He is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described so.
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Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world.