[3] As a character and literary allusion, Humpty Dumpty has appeared or been referred to in many works of literature and popular culture, particularly English author Lewis Carroll's 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, in which he was described as an egg.

A manuscript addition to a copy of Mother Goose's Melody published in 1803 has the modern version with a different last line: "Could not set Humpty Dumpty up again".

Evidence of an alternative American version closer to the modern received rhyme quoted above is given by William Carey Richards in the issue of a children's magazine for 1843, where he comments that he had come across it as a riddle when he was five-years old and that the answer was "an egg".

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the 17th century, the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale.

[8] The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person.

One, advanced by Katherine Elwes Thomas in 1930[14] and adopted by Robert Ripley,[8] posits that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, depicted as hunchbacked in Tudor histories and particularly in Shakespeare's play, and who was defeated, despite his armies, at Bosworth Field in 1485.

In 1785, Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue noted that a "Humpty Dumpty" was "a short clumsey [sic] person of either sex, also ale boiled with brandy"; no mention was made of the rhyme.

[16] Professor David Daube suggested in The Oxford Magazine of 16 February 1956 that Humpty Dumpty was a "tortoise" siege engine, an armored frame, used unsuccessfully to approach the walls of the Parliamentary-held city of Gloucester in 1643 during the Siege of Gloucester in the English Civil War.

[21][22] From 1996, the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648.

The story given was that a large cannon, which the website claimed was colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall.

"James Joyce used the story of Humpty Dumpty as a recurring motif of the Fall of Man in the 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

[31][32] One of the most easily recognizable references is at the end of the second chapter, in the first verse of the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly: Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty How he fell with a roll and a rumble And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple By the butt of the Magazine Wall, (Chorus) Of the Magazine Wall, Hump, helmet and all?