DING, dong, bell,
Pussy’s in the well.
Who put her in?
Little Johnny Flynn.
Who pulled her out?
Little Tommy Stout.
What a naughty boy was that
To try to drown poor pussy cat,
Who never did him any harm,
And killed all the mice in his father’s barn.
Tracing the origins of this nursery rhyme is relatively straightforward. It would have been composed as a cautionary tale for badly behaved children, to encourage them to be more compassionate – especially to defenceless animals. It is in a similar vein to other poems and rhymes with a moral message that were so popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see Little Bo Peep and Mary Had a Little Lamb).
However, the rhyme’s echo of Shakespeare’s famous song from The Tempest (1610), about a drowned sailor (rather than a drowned cat), has led some people to argue that the Bard himself may have written it:
Full fathom five thy father lies…
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Hark! now I hear them – Ding, dong, bell.
The refrain also appears in The Merchant of Venice (1596-8):
Let us all ring fancy’s knell;
I’ll begin – Ding, dong, bell.
Meanwhile, a contemporary rhyme goes:
Jacke boy, ho boy newes,
The cat is in the well,
Let us ring now for her knell,
Ding dong ding dong bell.
Appearing in 1609 in Pammelia, Musickes Miscellanie, this rhyme was therefore published after The Merchant of Venice, but further investigation shows that it in fact predates the play – going back to at least 1580. Which makes it look as though Shakespeare was simply quoting what was already a well-known rhyme. Ringing bells were clearly all the rage with the Elizabethans – or with Elizabethan poets, that is. One thing that all these related rhymes point to, is that the version we all know is a somewhat sanitized one –perhaps to avoid upsetting sensitive children. Ding, dong, bell is a knell, a bell rung to mark a death. Little Johnny Flynn had actually succeeded in drowning the poor pussy cat.