Who Was Mother Goose? The Real History of the Name

Open almost any book called Mother Goose and the first rhyme you meet will be something like Humpty Dumpty or Hey Diddle Diddle. Neither of them is in the first book that carried the name in print. That book appeared in Paris in 1697, it held eight prose fairy tales, and it did not contain a single nursery rhyme.

So who was Mother Goose? Nobody in particular. The name started as a French way of describing a storyteller, was printed on a book of fairy tales, crossed the Channel in English translation, and only about eighty years later got attached to rhymes. The rest of this post follows it in time order, and it keeps what the documents show apart from the stories people have told since.

Before the book: a phrase

The oldest written trace is a phrase, not a person. In 1650 the French writer Jean Loret, in his weekly verse newspaper La Muse historique, compared something to a tale of the "Mère Oye".

"comme un conte de la Mère Oye" (Jean Loret, La Muse historique, 1650)

Loret uses it in passing, with no explanation, which tells us his readers already knew what a "Mother Goose tale" was: a story of the kind an old woman tells at a fireside. Earlier French writers in the 1620s and 1640s are reported to use similar wording. None of them points to a single woman.

1695 and 1697: a book with a sign on the wall

In 1695 Charles Perrault wrote out five tales in a manuscript titled Contes de ma mère l'Oye and dedicated it to Élisabeth-Charlotte d'Orléans, the young niece of Louis XIV, known as Mademoiselle. That manuscript survives and is held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which bought it in 1953.

Two years later, in 1697, the Paris printer Claude Barbin published an expanded version as Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités. It had eight tales, among them Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots, and the title "Contes de ma mère l'Oye" appeared in the frontispiece. The book was credited not to Perrault but to his youngest son, Pierre Perrault d'Armancour, probably because Perrault was wary of how critics would treat a collection of folk tales.

The frontispiece of that first printing shows the idea plainly: an old woman by the fire, spinning thread while she tells stories to a small audience, under a sign that reads "Contes de ma mère l'Oye". She is a type, not a person, and the sign is the whole point: these are the tales an old nurse would tell.

1729: the name arrives in English

Robert Samber translated Perrault into English in 1729 under the title Histories, or Tales of Past Times, Told by Mother Goose. That put the English words "Mother Goose" on a title page for the first time, still attached to fairy tales. The translation was reprinted in America in 1786.

Look at the dates on the rhymes themselves and an oddity appears. English nursery rhymes were already around before the name reached them. Of the 26 rhymes in our Mother Goose group that carry an exact first-printed year, three are older than Perrault's book: Jack Sprat as a proverb in 1639, Rain Rain Go Away in 1659, and A Was an Apple Pie mentioned in 1671. Pat-a-cake turns up in 1698 in a play by Thomas D'Urfey, and Old King Cole in 1708. The rhymes were there. The name had not yet been hung on them.

1780: the name moves to the rhymes

The change came with a small book, Mother Goose's Melody, or Sonnets for the Cradle. The first known advertisement for it is in the London Chronicle in 1780, and Thomas Carnan, the stepson and successor of the children's publisher John Newbery, registered it at Stationers' Hall that December. Each rhyme came with a woodcut and a short, mock-solemn comment in smaller type.

The dates here are less tidy than many websites suggest. Older reference books put the book in the 1760s and linked it to Oliver Goldsmith, but no advertisement earlier than 1780 has turned up. The oldest copy that survives is dated 1784 according to one account and 1791 according to the De Montfort University Hockliffe collection and the 1904 facsimile of a 1791 edition. A careful writer says "first advertised in 1780" and leaves it there.

It still matters, because it is the earliest known printing of many rhymes. Eleven pages on our site name it in their history notes, including Hickory Dickory Dock, Baa Baa Black Sheep and Rock-a-Bye Baby. From this point "Mother Goose" in English meant a book of rhymes, and the French storyteller faded into the background.

The Boston story, and why historians do not accept it

If you search for the real Mother Goose, you will find Boston. The story goes that Elizabeth Goose, born in 1665, was a Boston grandmother who sang rhymes to her grandchildren, and that her son-in-law, the printer Thomas Fleet, collected them in a book called Songs for the Nursery, or Mother Goose's Melodies for Children in 1719. A book from 1719 would pre-date both Samber and Newbery, which is why the story is so appealing.

The trouble is the evidence. No copy of the 1719 book is known, and no record of it has been found. The claim itself first appeared in 1860, from Fleet's descendant John Fleet Eliot, more than a century after the supposed printing. Iona and Peter Opie, the leading authorities on nursery rhymes, gave no credence to the Boston theory. They were equally unconvinced by another idea, put forward in a 1930 book by Katherine Elwes-Thomas, that the name came from a French queen. Elizabeth Goose was a real woman. The evidence that she was the Mother Goose is what is missing.

A pantomime, a picture book and a name that stuck

The Mother Goose most children recognise, the old woman who travels on a goose, comes from the stage. On Boxing Day 1806 Thomas Dibdin's pantomime Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, The Golden Egg opened at Covent Garden in London with the clown Joseph Grimaldi in the cast, and the character stayed in British pantomime for generations.

Picture books did the rest. In 1881 Kate Greenaway's illustrated Mother Goose carried the first printed English version of the ring game we list as Ring Around the Rosie. In the United States nursery rhymes came to be called "Mother Goose rhymes" in general, and in 1916 Blanche Fisher Wright's The Real Mother Goose gave the name to a collection that is now in the public domain, and 180 of the rhyme pages on this site draw their lyrics from it.

Other old women who are not her

Old Mother Hubbard is sometimes treated as a relative. She is a different character. A stock figure called Mother Hubberd was already familiar enough in 1590 for Edmund Spenser to use her in a satire, and the rhyme about the bare cupboard comes from Sarah Catherine Martin's 1805 book. Another one people mix up is the goose in Goosey Goosey Gander, first printed in 1784 in Gammer Gurton's Garland. It shares a bird and nothing else.

The dates side by side

What "Mother Goose" means on a rhyme page today

When we group rhymes under Mother Goose, we mean the traditional rhymes English-speaking families have handed down, and not a claim about authorship. The group on this site holds 348 rhymes. Most have no single author and no exact first-printed year, which is itself the honest answer to "who wrote Mother Goose": nobody did. The rhymes were sung and said for generations before anyone printed them, and the people who printed them each took what they heard.

The group page is the best place to browse. Famous ones such as Little Miss Muffet are there, and each rhyme page carries its own history note with the dates that are actually known.