What is the real story behind Humpty Dumpty?
Herminia Abernathy
2025-05-16 04:59:39
Count answers: 1
Humpty Dumpty is the protagonist of the English nursery rhyme, ‘Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall’. Perhaps due to his fragility revealed in the fall, he has often been portrayed as an egg – including by actor George L. Fox in his Broadway pantomime Humpty Dumpty, and by Lewis Caroll in his weird and wonderful Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Some historians believe Humpty Dumpty was simply a device for a riddle around breakable things. Others have suggested that Humpty Dumpty is King Richard III of England, who is supposed to have been humpbacked and who was defeated at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. We could assume Humpty Dumpty is the King, the wall is his reign and fight to preserve power, the fall is his defeat, and ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ the army that failed to prevail. Another theory is that Humpty is actually a cannon. During the English Civil War, history says, a one-eyed gunner named Thompson managed to get a cannon – colloquially called ‘Humpty Dumpty’, to the top of the tower of St Mary at the Walls church and wreak untold destruction on the forces below, before return cannon fire dislodged the pair of them. A professor David Daube once had a fourth theory to add, in 1956, he posited that ‘Humpty Dumpty’ might have been reference to an armoured siege engine that was deployed unsuccessfully in the 1643 Siege of Gloucester during the English Civil War. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue from 1785 defines ‘Humpty Dumpty’ as “a short clumsy person of either sex; also ale boiled with brandy”, so the rhyme could have derived from either meaning.
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