Where did they all come fromthe familiar names and faces which populate the world's nurseries and schoolrooms: the Little Jack Homers, the Georgie Porgies, the old women who live in shoes? Last week Britain's grown-ups were getting the scholarly lowdown from an authoritative reference book: the Oxford University Press's new Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.
Editors lona and Peter Opie spent seven years looking through haystacks of diaries, letters, books and plays to find their needling rhymes & riddles. They dug into the histories of kings and queens, wits and wags, drunks and druids, consulted everyone from George Bernard Shaw to their...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
