Little Jack Horner

This is an accepted version of this page "Little Jack Horner" is a popular English nursery rhyme with the Roud Folk Song Index number 13027.

The song’s most common lyrics are: Little Jack Horner Sat in the corner, Eating his Christmas pie; He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And said, "What a good boy am I!"

It was first documented in full in the nursery rhyme collection Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle, which may date from 1765, although the earliest surviving English edition is from 1791.

[2] The earliest reference to the well-known verse is in "Namby Pamby," a satire by Henry Carey published in 1725, in which he himself italicised lines dependent on the original: Now he sings of Jackey Horner Sitting in the Chimney-Corner Eating of a Christmas pye, Putting in his thumb, Oh fie!

Fielding’s rendition had the prime minister, Robert Walpole, as its target, and ended with all the characters processing off the stage "to the music of Little Jack Horner.

"[5] The political theme was later taken up by Samuel Bishop, one of whose epigrams describes the Civil service bureaucracy and enquires: What are they but JACK HORNERS, who snug in their corners, Cut freely the public pie?

Till each with his thumb has squeezed out a round plum, Then he cries, “What a Great Man am I!”[6] Soon after, Thomas Love Peacock took up the theme in his satirical novel, Melincourt (1817).

"[8] John Bellenden Ker Gawler charged the mediaeval legal profession with similar interested motives in his Essay on the Archaiology of Popular English Phrases and Nursery Rhymes (Southampton, 1834).

Claiming to trace back the rhyme of Little Jack Horner to its "Low Saxon" origin, he then 'translates' the social criticism he discovers there, and adds an anti-clerical commentary of his own.

The poem concludes by reversing the picture presented in the original rhyme: Now let every good boy, With a sweetmeat or toy, Not slyly sneak into a corner, But to playmates repair And give them a share.

[21] In the following century, a copy of the Tacoma Times pictured a Japanese Jack pulling a battleship from the Russian pie during the Russo-Japanese war.

[30] In the 19th century, a story began to gain currency that the rhyme is actually about Thomas Horner, who was steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury before the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII of England.

[31] It is asserted that, prior to the abbey's destruction, the abbot sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie which had the deeds to a dozen manors hidden within it as a gift to try to convince the King not to nationalise Church lands.