The name, Mother Goose, precedes by at least a century its intimate attachment to nursery rhymes and its long unchallenged reign as a nonpareil symbol of childhood. Iona and Peter Opie cite its French antecedent, La Mère Oye, in a poem La Muze historique, published in 1650. Some two generations later, in 1697, Charles Perrault incorporated La Mère Oye into the frontispiece of his collection of fairy tales, Histoires, ou Contes du temps pass?¹.

Perhaps it suggested to him the right mix of historical authority, childlike invention and eerie elusiveness for an elegant and amusing retelling of common tales. While Perrault intended his labors to flatter the refined tastes of the French aristocracy, Histoires, ou Contes du temps pass? incidentally marked the first pairing of Mother Goose with a body of literature suitable for children. Through Perrault's tales, history spoke to children, not as a textbook, but as the voice of inspiration, albeit it spoke in a confidential whisper.

Perrault's Contes also served as a source for what is probably the first appearance of Mother Goose in English. Robert Samber's translation of Perrault, Histories, or Tales of Past Times, published in 1729, repeated the placard Perrault depicted in his frontispiece, "Mother Goose's Tales."

During the nineteenth century, counterclaims were asserted for a different genealogy. One of the most tenacious and intriguing was John Fleet Eliot's mid-century argument that Mother Goose had been the invention of Thomas Fleet, a colonial American printer. In a letter the Boston Transcript published on January 14, 1860, Eliot asserted that Fleet had printed a collection of nursery rhymes in 1719--ten years before Samber's translation--under the title, Songs for the Nursery; or, Mother Goose's Melodies for Children.

Oblivious to Perrault's tales, Fleet had invented Mother Goose spontaneously, modeling her after his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Foster Goose (var. Vergoose). Eliot wrote that Dame Goose had serenaded Fleet's toddlers with snippets of ballads, popular songs, and brief rhymes of her own composition, in order "to excite them to sleep" (to put it in the language of the time). Thus Fleet, a colorful character in a rather monochrome period, intended Mother Goose as a gentle caricature of a sturdy New-England matron.

Although colonial records confirm Goose's existence, no hard evidence exists for Fleet's publication. Tantalizingly, Isaiah Thomas, Fleet's contemporary, cited Songs in his The History of Printing in America (1810), although Thomas based his own publication of Mother Goose's Melody (see below) on an English edition, probably prepared by John Newbery. Further, neither Eliot nor any of the writers who supported his hypothesis could locate a copy of Fleet's book. And, none has turned up since. Despite its persistence in legend (many beguiling stories have grown up detailing the transformation of Goose's family members into nursery rhyme figures) , Eliot's claims have ceased to be of interest to scholars. (See Codman Hislop's "The Old Woman Who Lives In A Book" for the fullest exposition of Eliot's theory and its aftermath.)⁴

¹ Perrault, Charles. Histoires ou contes du temps pass?. A. Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697.
² For this reference in the contemporary ed., see Thomas, 290.
³ Indeed, Elizabeth Foster Vergoose did have a brother who practiced medicine, a certain Doctor Foster, and Gloucester, Mass. is not too distant from their home, in Boston.
⁴ Hislop's rendition is weakened by his unfamiliarity with the 1697 edition of Perrault's Contes, or the English translation, both of which include Mère l'Oye in the frontispiece. See also Opie, 36-27.