LUCY Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
Not a penny was there in it,
Only ribbon ’round it.
The words to this rhyme involve real people living in London during the mid 1700s and the tune was later more famously used as the melody for another song (see Yankee Doodle Dandy). The real Lucy Locket was apparently a London barmaid working at the famous Cock Inn in Fleet Street during the eighteenth century, while the song itself, far from being a simple children’s rhyme, clearly challenges her virtue and suggests that she had a second job in another ‘profession’ – the oldest one of all.
The story goes that one of Lucy’s lovers (her pocket) had run through all his funds and consequently found himself out of favour with the young barmaid. It is said that he then took up with Kitty Fisher (d. 1767), a well-known courtesan – painted by Joshua Reynolds and encountered by Casanova, who refused to sleep with her, however, as she spoke only English whereas he ‘liked to have all [his] senses, even that of hearing, gratified’. She took in Lucy’s cast-off lover, despite his lack of wealth, and then taunted Lucy for her meanness. Kitty’s claim that she had found a ribbon ’round him was a regular insult in catfights of the day because common prostitutes were known to keep their money tied to an upper thigh with a ribbon. So one of our most famous children’s rhymes is not the innocent ditty that it first appears but a sordid exchange between two ladies of easy virtue.