mother goose

Finally! I've done enough on the page(s) about literature in the "Little House" books to have just uploaded it. I should have included newspapers; I should have included Godey's; I probably missed a few things. But I'm tired of working on this and I need to move on to something else for a while, because - as usual - what I thought would take an afternoon, I've already spent five days on.

In On the Banks of Plum Creek, at Nellie's "Town Party" (Chapter 22), Mrs. Oleson gives Laura two books to look at. One is a Mother Goose book, and Laura Ingalls Wilder describes the cover picture as being of "an old woman wearing a peaked cap and riding on a broom across a huge yellow moon."

You wouldn't believe the information out there about Mother Goose! Books and books and books... What I discovered was that there aren't that many LH-era cover illustrations of Mother Goose with her actually riding on a broom. Sometimes she's riding on a goose and holding a broom, though, and the illustration above is about the closest I could find to what I think Laura is describing, especially since it has a large moon in the picture, too.

There is a common illustration for one of the Mother Goose rhymes, though, that does show an old woman with a peaked hat and a broom (no goose) above a large moon. It's the illustration for "Old Woman, Old Woman," which goes: There was an old woman tossed in a basket, / Seventeen times as high as the moon; / But where she was going no mortal could tell, / For under her arm she carried a broom. 'Old woman, old woman, old woman,' said I / 'Whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?' / 'To sweep the cobwebs from the sky; / And I'll be with you by-and-by.' Of course, in this drawing, the old woman isn't actually riding the broom...

Was Laura looking at a particular copy of Mother Goose when she wrote her manuscript for On the Banks of Plum Creek? She doesn't mention the cover at all in the manuscript, only that Mrs. Oleson gave her "Mother Goose, just full of pictures and funny rhymes. Some of them Laura could read."

The manuscript also mentions a book about Aladdin's Lamp, "telling about a man with a wonderful lamp that would cause whatever he wished for to come true." It also mentions "a magazine for little folks." I'm not quite sure what this magazine could have been, because there were a lot of possibilities. Gina has just about convinced me that it was a copy of "St. Nicholas."

One has to wonder, too, if young-Laura knew that it was a magazine she was given, or was author-Laura merely putting those words in her mouth because she, of course, knew what one was? Laura would have had to have seen actual magazines prior to the one Mrs. Oleson showed her in order to name them correctly, right?
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:58 AM