Humpty Dumpty

History & Origin

"Humpty Dumpty" is perhaps the most famous riddle in the English nursery rhyme canon — a riddle whose answer has been so thoroughly forgotten that most people today simply take the character at face value as a large, fragile egg sitting on a wall.

The rhyme first appeared in print in 1797 in Juvenile Amusements by Samuel Arnold, and the original was a riddle: what, once broken, cannot be put back together? The answer, of course, is an egg. Humpty Dumpty was not originally described as an egg at all; that image was fixed later by John Tenniel's illustration for Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in 1871, which has been definitive ever since.

Several historical allegories have been proposed. One theory identifies Humpty as a large cannon used by Royalist forces during the English Civil War, placed atop a church tower in Colchester and knocked down by Cromwell's Roundheads — after which neither the King's men nor his horses could haul it back into position. Another theory holds that Humpty Dumpty represents Charles I himself, who "had a great fall" when he lost the Civil War and was executed in 1649. Neither theory has watertight contemporary proof, but both are taken seriously by historians of the period.

The irreversibility of Humpty's fall gives the rhyme a melancholy undercurrent that has made it resonant well beyond the nursery. The great fall that even power and resources cannot undo is a quietly powerful image.

Our arrangement rocks it up considerably, giving Humpty the dramatic send-off his great fall deserves.

For a deep analysis of the historical facts, read Andrés Ehmann's essay on the dark origins of nursery rhymes.