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site is an adaptation of Illustrations Of Mother
Goose's Melodies. Designed And Engraved On Wood By Alexander Anderson,
M.D., With An Introductory Notice By Evert A. Duyckinck (New York:
Charles Moreau, 1873). All seventeen of the rhymes and illustrations Duyckinck
and Charles Moreau selected from the original Mother Goose's Melodies
(Boston: Munroe & Francis, 1837), have been reproduced here, even though
we know not all of the illustrations were created or engraved by Alexander
Anderson, whose memory Duyckinck sought to honor by this book. However,
while including all of his selected illustrations, we have suppressed Duyckinck's
colorful "introductory notice," advancing the celebrated theory that Thomas
Fleet, a colonial Boston printer, invented the figure of Mother Goose in
the likeness of his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Foster Vergoose. The short,
substitute introduction, prepared some ten years
ago for a letterpress adaptation of Duyckinck's work, abandoned in medias
res (this site is thus an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation),
follows the major points of Duyckinck's "Notice," while making use of some
of the bibliographical scholarship unavailable to him, including Codman
Hislop's analysis of the nineteenth century Goose wars, E.F. Bleiler's
introduction to the 1970 Dover reprint of Mother Goose's Melodies,
the work of Peter and Iona Opie, and Jane Pomeroy's recent and splendid
studies of Alexander Anderson.
iN addition to the rhymes and illustrations, which are linked to a table of contents, this website also includes an appendix discussing the site's musical melodies, a scanned reproduction of Duyckinck's original title page, an imitation of the original t.p., a page of first lines, and a homepage. |
