Oranges and Lemons

Textual Variations and Meanings

The text of different versions of this rhyme differ in three major ways:

- whether or not the first stanza appears (“Gay go up and gay go down/To ring the bells of London town”), whether or not the last stanza appears (“Here comes a candle to light you to bed/And here comes a chopper to chop off your head”), and how many verses appear. Minor variants also appear within the core text, or in the modification/repetition of the last line.

The most interesting of the above is the inclusion or exclusion of the last stanza. The game versions always include some version, since it forms the end of each round of the game. “ At the last line of the rhyme the 'choppers' bring their arms up and down in a chopping motion over each child that goes through...The child caught in the middle at the last word of the rhyme is out.”

Several newer, non-game oriented versions leave this stanza out, possibly to sanitize the rhyme by removing scary elements. (Since the stanza doesn’t fit either the rhythm or form of the rest of the rhyme, it seems in some ways more natural to exclude it than include it.) Such versions include those in Ian Penney’s Book of Nursery Rhymes illustrated by Ian Penney (1994) and Here Comes Mother Goose, edited by Iona Opie and illustrated by Rosemary Wells (1999)

Meanings

In this rhyme, each of a number of London church bells calls out a short phrase. Several different interpretations of the text are possible, including onomatopoeia, regional/historical character, practices of children’s games, and the sexuality of a wedding night. In the onomatopoetic interpretation, the phrase attributed to each bell represents the sound made by that bell (Green 180). A historical/regional interpretation takes the view that each bell’s words are characteristic of the area where the bell is found. For example, “oranges and lemons” may refer to a citrus market across the street from St. Clement’s church; the reference to a debt of “five farthings” (“five shillings” in some variants) may go back the medieval poverty of the Shoreditch area. As a game, this rhyme, like London Bridge, involves trapping the last child to pass through an arch, making the players scramble to avoid being caught in during the last stanza. Finally, the last stanza can be interpreted as the events of a wedding night: the bride leads her new husband to bed with a candle and loses her virginity to him as he “chop[s] off” her “head” (her maidenhead). The rest of the rhyme then becomes a list of wedding gifts such as fruit, “pancakes and fritters”, etc.