A New Historicist Reading of Selected Children’s Nursery Rhymes

The aim of this study is to provide a New Historicist reading of British children’s nursery rhymes. The paper aims at investigating the different factors that went into the making up of such rhymes. These include the personal, the social, the political, the religious and the economic aspects underlying selected nursery rhymes side by side with the literary value of texts of the rhymes themselves.
The poems selected for study will be investigated through the lenses of New Historicism because of the importance the latter gives to the text’s backgrounds. The paper tries to relocate the rhymes properly on the map of English literature. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”, “Jack Sprat”, “When Adam Delved”, “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” and “Three Blind Mice” are among the poems discussed in this study.
One of the important conclusions of this study is that many nursery rhymes were originally commoners’ verses, composed to address and express the common people’s cares and worries. The apparent simplicity and naivety of the poems are guises under which commoners concealed their ideas. This made the poems easy to memorise since the majority of the people were illiterate.