The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

Importance of the Metaphor - The Meaning of the Shoe

It is the fascination with the depiction of the shoe in the illustrations of this rhyme that leads readers in many different directions. Some scholars believe that the shape of a shoe is representative of the shape of the British Isles.

The poem “The Big Shoe” (1882) accepts the interpretation of the old woman as representative of England (Britannia) and her treatment of her child-like colonies. Readers from the United States will be amused and proud to read of wayward son Sam who “cut loose from the throne,/and set about making/a shoe of his own.”

In 1899 L.Frank Baum, the author of the Oz books, expanded the old rhymes and provided logical explanations for them in Mother Goose in Prose. In Baum’s version, a woman whose four daughters had grown, married, and gone off to raise their own families lived alone in the relatively small family home. One by one the four daughters died and their sixteen children came to live with their grandmother. With each of the second, third, and fourth shipments of children, another addition was built onto the original.

It was a stranger passing by who noticed that house. These “lean-to” additions to the side of the house made the structure look like an old shoe surrounded by children.

Another longer story about “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” entitled “The Old Woman’s Christmas Tree” (1903) is found in Madge A. Bigham’s Stories of Mother Goose Village. In this story, Bo-Peep and Boy Blue decide to use the wool from their sheep to have clothing made for the old woman’s children. Mother Goose herself takes the wool to be woven into cloth and then to Mrs. Twitchett, the seamstress, to make the jackets, skirts, blouses, trousers, dresses, socks, caps, clocks, roundabouts and even mitts and socks. Bo Peep and Boy Blue then go to work. “Everything had to be wrapped in bundles, numbered and tied to the branches of the Christmas tree. The Old Woman has never named her children. She had so many she said it was easier just to number them.” (p.109) On Christmas day all the children are dressed in their new clothes and about to be sent out for a walk when the Old Woman leaves them, and us, with this final phrase “Remember, dears, pretty is as pretty does.”

Note: A modern child’s understanding of the word ”bars” might be very different without this illustration.

The references to illustrations above give some indication as to how visual interpretations of the rhyme may enhance or change meanings. Sometimes these changing meanings are based on the historical conjectures about the rhyme or the social issues embedded in the rhyme. Literary conjectures offer distinctly alternative interpretations of this rhyme. Visual interpretations for this rhyme are filled with all types of referents and changes over time.