The first association between Mother Goose and what came to be called nursery rhymes seems to have been made in late 1780¹ , when Thomas Carnan, an English publisher and a successor to John Newbery, entered the title Mother Goose's Melody; or Sonnets for the Cradle, at Stationer's Hall, in London (Opie 32)².

Anonymous popular and traditional verse had been published for children under various titles since 1744³, often beneath the name of a fictitious character judged sympathetic to the childish mind, such as Nurse Lovechild, Gammer [sic] Goodchild, Nancy Cock, Tom Tit and Tommy Thumb. The new attribution to Mother Goose may suggest that, by 1780, a loosely formed canon of such rhymes had already become nostalgically associated with an idealized past, so it is not a surprise that Mother Goose was adopted for this purpose.

Buoyed by the unprecedented growth of a marketplace for children's books, English and American printers continued to issue nursery rhymes into the nineteenth century. In the newly independent United States, Isaiah Thomas published the first American edition of Mother Goose's Melody: or Sonnets for the Cradle, a copy of the Newbery-Carnan edition, in 1786.

It proved popular enough to sustain three reprints over the next fourteen years, and spawned numerous imitations.⁴ Meanwhile, as English and American readers read and enjoyed Perrault's Contes, publishers tended to produce them in small chapbooks containing only one or two tales, without Perrault's poetic allusion. In the dawning moments of the nineteenth century, Mother Goose had all but shed her identity as la Mère Oye, a teller of tales, and reinvented herself as Mother Goose, the muse of the nursery.

¹ The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes suggest the book was compiled earlier, in 1765 or 1766, and therefore came from John Newbery (Opie 32).
² The earliest surviving copy is a 1791 ed. published by Francis Power.
³ "Tommy Thumb's Song Book is always reckoned to be the first collection of nursery rhymes. Though these had been sung to children for generations, nobody had thought of assembling them in print, until 'Nurse Lovechild', possibly Mary Cooper, the publisher herself, put out her little book in London. " (Avery, 59).
⁴ See d'alte Welch for a good collation of pre-1820 American publications of this title (p. 295-298).