LITTLE Polly Flinders
Sat among the cinders,
Warming her pretty little toes.
Mother came and caught her,
And whipped her little daughter
For spoiling her nice new clothes.
The rhyme was first published in 1805 as ‘Little Jenny Flinders’. From this we see how Flinders is more significant than either Polly or ‘Jenny’ simply because it rhymes with cinders and thus ties into a whole series of fairy tales of the rags-to-riches variety. In each case, the beautiful and generally motherless heroine is oppressed by evil relatives and hidden away in the kitchen, her beauty disguised with soot and dirt, in order that someone else (usually an ugly sister) can steal her happy ending.
One of our most famous fairy stories (from a different ‘Mother Goose’ collection, that of the French writer Charles Perrault – see the Introduction) shows this clearly, Cinderella’s very name indicating the dirt she’s covered in. Like Polly, and indeed any aspiring princess, she needs clean and beautiful clothes to snare her Prince Charming and get out of the kitchen.
Unlike the story, however, the nursery rhyme is a cautionary tale, warning ordinary little girls not to dream of themselves as fairy-tale figures; that they need to keep their clothes clean because no fairy godmother is going to magically fix things for them and because, if they don’t, Mama will go mad and they’ll be for it.