SEE-SAW, Margery Daw,
Johnny shall have a new master;
He shall earn but a penny a day
Because he can’t work any faster.
See-saw, Margery Daw,
Sold her bed and lay on straw;
Was not she a dirty slut
To sell her bed and lie in the dirt?
See-saw, Margery Daw,
The old hen flew over the malt house;
She counted her chickens one by one,
Still she missed the little white one,
And this is it, this is it, this is it.
This song has been sung by children, past and present, as they play on a see-saw, its rhythm mimicking the rising and falling motion of the see-saw itself. And like so many rhymes, there’s more to it than first meets the eye. A seesaw in a metaphorical sense brings the low high and high low, and thus this rhyme explores what happens when family situations change for the worse.
The first verse clearly refers to child labour, something that up until the mid nineteenth century was completely taken for granted. When Charles Dickens’s father was imprisoned for debt in 1824, the middle-class twelve-year-old had to leave school and work ten-hour days in a boot-blacking factory to support his family. Resentment of his situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became a major theme in his later works. Whatever age you were, if you were poor you had to work. It is quite possible that the rhyme was used as a taunt to other children: that if they failed to work at a harder and faster rate, they would be sent to the workhouse, where life was guaranteed to be even worse for them than it was up the chimney or out in the fields.
The second verse takes the next step and is about poverty, destitution and perhaps even prostitution. After all, no young girl willingly sells her bed to lie on straw. The second half of the verse is about society’s negative reactions to sudden poverty (Was not she a dirty slut/To sell her bed and lie in the dirt?); no one helps, they just point the finger.
The third verse then takes a step back and looks at the family missing its ‘lazy’ child – the one who can’t work any faster. They are no longer part of the community, perhaps sent to the workhouse (the malt house), where they are scorned by society – emphasized by the singer of the rhyme suddenly pointing at the child being taunted (And this is it, this is it, this is it). Altogether, not a very pleasant little song.