Textual/Historical Information

Some Introductory Notes

Like the rhyme itself, the illustrations examined for Little Boy Blue would seem to address the general moral theme of industry and responsibility. Here is the boy who is supposed to be looking after the sheep and cows, but is instead curled up against a haystack “fast asleep.” Especially in those illustrations where the boy is depicted as being closer in age to adolescence than young childhood, there is the impression that he is stealing an afternoon nap, that he may be lazy, a young ne’er-do-well.

These views of Little Boy Blue as an older boy lack the dreamy, soft-focus, infantile quality common to many nursery rhyme illustrations. Many of the illustrations depict the Little Boy Blue as a very young child, scarcely more than a toddler, with long locks and a baby’s chubbiness. The child’s dress in these illustrations is that of a very young little boy: smocks, bloomers and buckle shoes. His sleep appears deeper, sweeter and more deserved, as if he is too young to have such enormous responsibility and has, understandably, dropped into sleep from exhaustion. The illustrations of Little Boy Blue as a very little boy are suggested by the extra lines sometimes added to the rhyme:

Will you wake him? No, not I,
For if I do, he’s sure to cry.

In the main, the depictions of Little Boy Blue as a baby seem to be the older illustrations, with the exception of the Frederick Richardson illustration of 1915, where the boy is older. 1

As with most of the nursery rhymes handed down through the generations, Little Boy Blue is believed by some scholars to have been created as a thinly veiled but safe form of political and social commentary. In this case, Little Boy Blue is commonly believed to be a direct derogatory and cautionary reference to Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, the archbishop of York and a trusted adviser of King Henry VIII, and the subject of a number of popular rhymes of his day, including Jack and Jill, Little Tom Tucker and Old Mother Hubbard.

Wolsey was called “the boy bachelor” after earning a degree from Oxford at the age of 15. Wolsey’s connection to Henry VIII earned him immense political power and wealth, hence the apparent reference to blowing his own horn and being “asleep” on the job – in his case maneuvering socially and politically – while his religious subjects wandered leaderless. 2 (Wolsey later fell spectacularly out of royal favor over his failure to secure papal approval of Henry VIII’s divorce from Katharine of Aragon and remarriage to Anne Boleyn).

In some versions, the words of the first line read, “Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn.” The term “blow up the horn,” according to the author of the entertaining 1930 treatise The Real Personages of Mother Goose, is an ancient Scottish saying “signifying excommunication and outlawry.” 3

1 Mother Goose: The Classic Volland Edition. Rearranged and ed. By Eulalie Osgood Grover. Illus. By Frederick Richardson. Chicago: P.F. Volland and Company, 1915.

2 Thomas, K.E. The Real Personages of Mother Goose. Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1930.

3 Ibid.