However gratefully received by Irving, instructing the future author of Knickerbocker's sketches in the art of the clarionet would not ordinarily have commended Dr. Anderson to posterity. Nevertheless, the small, compactly built, Scottish doctor, described by Irving as "full of good humor, and as gentle as a woman"--indispensible traits for a teacher--is well-remembered, more than one hundred years after his death, not only for administering the music lessons, but because of his more important accomplishments as the Father of American Wood Engraving.

This technique of engraving a block of boxwood across the grain, the most common method of book illustration during the 19th century, could be seen at no greater advantage than in Dr. Anderson's own creations. Happily, of these we are left with a rich abundance. More than eight thousand different illustrations can be counted among the hundreds of books enhanced by the Doctor's inexhaustible burin. Many of these can be admired among the finest book illustrations ever produced. Dr. Anderson's productive years consumed almost the entirety of his long lifetime (1775-1870); he executed his first engraving on wood in 1792, a young man of 18 years, and continued to practice his craft up to the very end of his life, in January of 1870. The illustrations reprinted here were rendered in 1835, at the zenith of his powers. Although printed for children, they embody an unmistakably adult vision, in which the conventional foils of satire, i.e., scoundrels, halfwits, inebriates, naifs, traipse about in a world of mystery and wonder. In conception and detail, they assert eloquently the full fruit of Anderson's acclaimed comic genius. Washington Irving's whimsical pronouncement jibes with the reminiscences of other distinguished acquaintances of Dr, Anderson's. Benson J. Lossing, the noted historian, wrote with affection and admiration:

Also prominent among the cultural lions comprising the register of Dr. Anderson's admirers,*2 Evert A. Duyckinck, co-editor of The Cyclopaedia of American Literature, had grown up in a household in which Anderson was a regular visitor. His father, Evert Duyckinck the publisher, had employed the "ingenious Anderson's" illustrative talents as early as 1805, and continued to engage him for at least 22 years, or until 1827, when Evert Augustus was yet only a boy of 11.

In 1870, Evert A. Duyckinck drafted a letter to Anderson's son in law, Dr. Edward Lewis (with whom Anderson had resided since 1868 and at whose residence he had recently passed away), in which he praised the "range of [Dr. Anderson's] intellectual cultivation and the independence and strength of his mind." Duyckinck, conjuring up an image of his own youthful high-spirits, which maturer souls may have found trying, confided: "I will always retain a most grateful recollection of the kind manner in which I was received"*3 Duyckinck concludes this note by asserting, in his capacity as Domestic Corresponding Secretary of the New-York Historical Society, that the Society would be "a watchful guardian of the good fame of its honorary member." As good as his word, Duyckinck proposed to the Society the Memorial, published in 1872 (vide supra), and, a year later, he undertook to publish two assemblages of Dr. Anderson's engravings. For these now exceedingly rare volumes he chose the recondite Analectic Press, and its proprietor, Charles L. Moreau, to be his printer. Illustrations of Mother Goose's Melodies,*4 whose reprint you now have in hand, formed the second of these Duyckinck/Moreau collaborations.*5

Evert A. Duyckinck's contemporaries would have been very familiar with the text honored in this extract. The Munroe & Francis*4 editions of Mother Goose's Melodies, first published in 1825, rearranged significantly in 1833 and 1835, had enjoyed unprecedented popularity for nearly a quarter of a century and spawned innumerable imitations. They were so successful, in fact, they succeeded in permanently making the figure of Mother Goose, who had been only one of a number of fictitious personages, or tutelary powers (among such as Nurse Lovechild, Tommy Thumb, Gammer Gurton and Nancy Cock), the emblem of the kind of anonymous verse that, even then, was just coming to be called nursery rhymes. By their sheer popularity, Munroe & Francis's Mother Goose's Melodies married the epigrammatic rhymes and their titular muse once for all.

The Duyckinck/Moreau publication followed the sequence of these rhymes present in the Munroe & Francis original*8, but for one puzzling departure: "Pretty John Watts," occurs nearer the middle of the original text, preceding "Three wise men of Gotham," not at the end. Its placement in the latter text, as well as its selection, appears almost as an afterthought.

But why a thought at all? The illustration plainly was not the work of Alexander Anderson, but of Abel Bowen, a later and lesser artist, whose cypher shows where it could not be overlooked, or misread for the characteristic "A" or "AA" of Dr. Anderson. More importantly, its quality is at sharp variance with its company, displaying neither their whimsy nor their lucid intelligibility.

Whether the commiserable error is to be rightfully ascribed to Evert A. Duyckinck, or Charles L. Moreau, or to Charles S.Francis (son of David Francis, co-founder of the original publishing firm), who made the blocks available for this project, or, perhaps, to all three, we leave to future researchers. The editors of this book, bemused though undaunted, find it more agreeable to preserve the integrity of Mr. Duyckinck's selection than attempt to improve upon it. (And, what harm in a little brown mouse, after all?)

The rhymes' origins are unpredictably varied: 'One misty moisty morning' (#4), broke off from a ballad; 'The sow came in with the saddle (#13), is likely to have been invented in a Mummer's Christmas play; "There was an old woman, she lived in a shoe" (#7), if the speculations of the Opies' are accurate, may derive from a fertility ritual. But, although the roots & paradigms of nursery rhymes are naturally diverse, as diverse, perhaps, as their themes, they do appear to share one common, natal, element: like the greater body of juvenile classics, they were not composed for children. (And, how natural the match to Dr. Anderson's sophisticated engraving style.) "Of those pieces which date from before 1800," the Opies wrote, " the only true nursery rhymes [specifically for children] are the rhyming alphabets, the infant amusements ... and the lullabies."*10 Of these three genres, Dr. Anderson seems to have illustrated nothing, at least within the Munroe & Francis text, and only rhymes #9, #11 & #17 appear to be post 1800 creations. Verse #9, with its comically abrupt shift of sympathy, is charged with the "adult jollity" characteristic of the older specimens. Thus, only rhymes #11 and #17 truly deserve the modifying appellation "nursery," and both are remarkable for different reasons: Of "Pretty John Watts" nothing more need be said, save that its inclusion arose from an oversight bordering on perversity; "Jemmy Jed went into a shed" offers the rare example of a nursery verse of distinctly American vintage. Minor differences, of course, do obtain between many of the Duyckinck/ Moreau cum Munroe & Francis rhymes and those of the canonical texts offered by the Opies & yet in print; these lend to the rhymes the verisimilar flavor of eccentricity. But, in the instance of "Jemmy Jed," which exceeds the older English version in detail and substance, we have before us a rare specimen of American folk composition.

Evert A. Duyckinck concluded his introduction, as a I will conclude mine, with the hint that possibly another verse in this collection had been spun at home: He implies that rhyme #14, the penultimate verse "Jacky, come give me thy fiddle," may have come from the hand of Dr. Anderson himself! The basis for Duyckinck's intriguing conjecture lay in Dr. Anderson's polyphenomenol musicality, or, as Duyckinck wrote, in Dr. Anderson's love of the fiddle, "upon which instrument he was an accomplished adept." Disregarded by the Opies, Duyckinck's proxy claim for authorship may be true, nonetheless. Alexander Anderson may have composed "Jacky"--it may be involuntarily--believing himself to be transcribing a fragment of the Scottish ballad "O Rattlin', Roarin' Willie." The selection of the variant rhyme may have constituted part of Anderson's contribution to Mother Goose's Melodies (ed. 1835), offered, as Duyckinck suggested, as a gesture of his fondness for the fiddle, as well as, conceivably, for the rhyme. Jane Pomeroy, whose bibliography of "the ingenious Anderson" will resolve many of the issues surrounding Anderson, informs us that Doctor Anderson liked Burns' work tremendously. Burns, of course, had been closely linked with the ballad through his work on Johnson's Scots Musical Museum. His own embellishments upon it were famous. It is reasonable to assume that Dr. Anderson came to possess the ballad through his fondness for Burns. It may be that Anderson learned the piece, or a version of it, directly from a fellow Scott, John Roberts. (We happen to find this possibility provocative.) Roberts, himself, had been known to the great Burns, who remarked upon his skill at engraving, and subsequently had befriended Anderson. We remember Roberts with imperishable gratitude for having exposed Anderson to the art of wood-engraving. By no coincidence, we also remember Roberts for having taught the future Father of American Wood-Engraving in the art of the clarionet.

2.Frederick M. Burr, Life and Works of Alexander Anderson, M.D.: The First American Wood Engraver ... (New York: Burr Brothers, 1893), 67-70, passim.

3. Evert A. Duyckinck to Dr. E. Lewis, 18 January 1870, Misc. Mss. Duyckinck, Evert A., New-York Historical Society.

4. Mother Goose's Melodies. The only pure edition. Containing all that have ever come to light of her memorable writings, together with all those which have been discovered among the mss. of Herculaneum, likewise every one recently found in the same stone box which hold [sic] the golden plates of the Book of Mormon. The whole compared, revised, and sanctioned, by one of the annotators of the Goose family (Boston: Munroe & Francis, ca. 1833) William H. Whitmore (1889), Codman Hislop (1938) and E.F. Bleiler (1970) have all attempted to fix a plausible chronology For the various undated editions of M&F Melodies. Bleiler, building upon the earlier research, provides the only indispensable collation of texts, but a more comprehensive survey is required. At least two editions unknown to Bleiler and apparently unique (one housed at the American Antiquarian Society, one at the New-York Historical Society) remain to be studied.

5. It is typical of Duyckinck's independent turn of mind that he headed his introductory remarks by advocating John Fleet Eliot's maverick theory, posited 13 years earlier in his famous Requiescat letter to the "Boston Transcript," explaining that Mother Goose "was not, as had been generally supposed, a merely mythical personage but an actual lady who had enjoyed a hundred and fifty years or so since a veritable existence." She was, continued Duyckinck, Elizabeth Foster Vergoose, or, alternatively, Elizabeth Foster Goose, the mother-in-law of colonial Boston's picaresque printer, Thomas Fleet. Fleet, goes the theory, really deserves the bays for having been the first printer to publish nursery rhymes, or, as they were then known, sonnets for the cradle, under the rubric Mother Goose, which he was reputed to have done in an appreciation (not entirely altruistic) of his mother in law's inexhaustible capacity for jingles. The point of this theory, once much debated, was that Mother Goose (the lady) was an American, and that Mother Goose (the muse) was a unique American contribution to the history of children's literature. Equally typical of Duyckinck's independence was his decision to stop short of crediting Dame Goose with composition, and mincing the ancestral claims of Perrault's M'ere l'Oye. The best summary of the Goose wars, which raged, more or less, during the last 40 years of the 19th century, appears in Codman Hislop's "The Old Woman Who Lives in a Book, Colophon. Vol. I No. 2 (New Series, Autumn, 1925), pp. 167-182, in which the question of the real Mother Goose is made to nicely, if uneasily, come to rest in the cool shade of the legendary existence of an undiscovered book.

6.Evert A. Duyckinck, A Brief Catalogue of Books Illustrated with Engravings by Dr. Alexander Anderson ... (New York: Thompson & Moreau, 1885)

7.The copy-text used for the Duyckinck/Moreau reprint has not been determined, but the sequence of the rhymes they reprinted remained unaltered from 1835 on.

8.Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1952) 1-7.