Social and Political Uses of Mother Goose

Mother Goose rhymes have always served as a form of social and political protest, commentary, and criticism. The thinly veiled references to the faults and foibles of British royalty in some of the original rhymes have inspired similar attacks on more recent government officials and on social and political policies.

In the 1930s, a well known political cartoonist joined forces with a satirical poet to create Mother Goose in Washington: A Story of Old King Cole and His Humpty Dumpty Court.

The social and political unrest of the 1960s stimulated a resurgence of Mother Goose rhymes as poems of protest. The best known and most censored of these verses are contained in Eve Merriam's The Inner City Mother Goose.

Another poet of the sixties who adapted traditional Mother Goose rhymes to protest war and nuclear destruction was Paul Dehn. His versions of "Hey Diddle Diddle" and "Little Miss Muffet" are chilling examples of the destructive powers of such violence.

Hey diddle diddle,

The physicists fiddle,

The Bleep jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed to see such fun

And died the following June.

Little Miss Muffet Crouched on a tuffet,

Collecting her shell-shocked wits.

There dropped (from a glider) An H-bomb beside her--

Which frightened Miss Muffet to bits.

Fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students in the Agnes Russell School at Teachers College, Columbia University in the early 1970s were familiar with Eve Merriam's The Inner City Mother Goose and with Paul Dehn's adaptations of Mother Goose rhymes and created their own rhymes in response to then-current events.

More recently a children's picture book, The House That Crack Built, used a familiar cumulative rhyme to draw attention to the problem of drug addiction in our society.

“Three Blind Mice” is, for obvious reasons, a popular nursery rhyme used for discussing, or ridiculing, the visionary policies of our elected officials. References to the “Three Blind Mice” rhyme are also frequently reflected in various popular media.

This book title needs no explanation. Auletta, Ken. Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way. New York: Random House, 1991. 642 pages.

Of course, there is always "Three Blind Mice," Agatha Christie’s novella that would go on to considerably greater fame when she adapted it to the stage as THE MOUSETRAP, which has the distinction of being the single longest running play in theatrical history.

See also the assassins in a James Bond film: http://www.jamesbondmm.co.uk/bond-villains/three-blind-mice.php

Jack and Jill and the Toxic Dump, included in a collection of graphic stories, uses this rhyme to draw attention to a very real social/environmental problem.. The use of comic conventions and the graphic novel to explore themes from nursery rhymes and to place them in a contemporary context has existed for centuries and continues today.

Undoubtedly the old dame Mother Goose will continue to hiss and fly at the politics and social concerns of the day.