In Britain and America, and wherever the English word is spoken, the children become joyful and wise listening to the same traditional verses. In the New World as in the Old their first poetic memory is of ‘Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’, ‘A slipkin, a slopkin, a pipkin, a popkin’, ‘Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man’, and ‘Over the hills and far away’. Almost the only point of difference is that in England the verses are known as ‘nursery rhymes’, and in America as ‘Mother Goose songs’. The term ‘nursery rhyme’ seems to have sprung up in the third decade of the nineteenth century; no use of the name has been found earlier than in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for July 1824, when an anonymous writer, possibly John Wilson, parodied Hazlitt with an essay ‘On Nursery Rhymes in General’. Previously the rhymes had been known as ‘songs’ or ‘ditties’, and in the eighteenth century usually as ‘Tommy Thumb’s’ songs, or ‘Mother Goose’s’, the title retained in America.
IONA AND PETER OPIE: Introduction to The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951)
Admired by Scott and Browning, Jane Taylor and her sister Ann (1782–1866) were the authors of several books for children that once enjoyed enormous popularity. Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804) was translated into German, Dutch and Russian and ran into fifty editions in England. It was followed in 1806 by Rhymes for the Nursery (twenty-seven editions by 1835), a collection that included ‘The star’ (‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’), which Iona and Peter Opie in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes call ‘one of the best-known poems in the English language’. This celebrated nursery rhyme was set to music by J. Green in c.1860, and appeared in Little Songs for Me to Sing (1865), illustrated by Sir John Millais.
The melody, known as ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’, originally appeared (without the words) in 1761 in ‘Les Amusements d’une Heure et Demy’ by M. Bouin (Paris). The French rhyme first occurred with the melody in volume two of Recueil de romances in 1774, under the title ‘La Confidence – Naive’ (page 75). There are several versions of the French lyrics, but the best known is probably:
Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman,
Ce qui cause mon tourment.
Papa veut que je raisonne
Comme une grande personne.
Moi, je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.
There have been numerous parodies of Jane Taylor’s poem, including the one recited by the Hatter during Chapter VII (‘A mad tea-party’) in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
Many classical compositions have been inspired by the tune, including Mozart’s Variations on ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’, K.265/K.300e; Haydn’s Symphony 94 in G (‘The surprise’); Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals (twelfth movement); Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Tune, Op. 25, for piano and orchestra, subtitled ‘For the enjoyment of humorous people and for the annoyance of others’; and Liszt’s Album Leaf: ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman’ (1833) (S.163b).
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveller in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye,
’Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the traveller in the dark –
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.