{"id":328712,"date":"2025-12-03T04:39:31","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T04:39:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/made-for-a-grandson-a-nursery-rhyme-cloth-book-ca-1897\/"},"modified":"2025-12-03T04:39:31","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T04:39:31","slug":"made-for-a-grandson-a-nursery-rhyme-cloth-book-ca-1897","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=328712","title":{"rendered":"Made for a Grandson: A Nursery Rhyme Cloth Book ca. 1897"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Children were reminded constantly to take care of their books before the rise of untearables on cloth, board, and textured paper in the second half of the nineteenth century.\u00a0\u00a0 Cotsen has hundreds of examples of these books and pamphlets for the unintentionally destructive hands of babies and toddlers\u2014or careless older children\u2013 \u00a0should anyone want to write a history of the genre.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cotsen 18522<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

One of the most interesting examples in the collection is a nursery rhyme collection made by a grandmother for \u201cpetit cher William,\u201d which she gave him on September \u00a01,1897.\u00a0 Two pieces of cloth are sewn together with blanket stitch around three of the four edges.\u00a0 The style of the illustrations look American, but there aren\u2019t any definitive clues pointing to her state and city of residence. The title is embroidered on the dark red cloth cover and illustrated with paper cut-outs of Mother Goose holding a goose on a lead, now partly torn away. Although the inscription is in French, the rest of the book\u2019s text is in English, copied on differently shaped slips of paper attached to the cloth pages, as seen to the right.<\/p>\n

Grandm\u00e8re\u2019s large selection of rhymes for William includes many familiar ones, such as \u201cPat-a-cake,\u201d \u201cHumpty Dumpty,\u201d and \u201cLittle Bo-Peep,\u201d\u00a0 with others like \u201cRichard and Robin\u201d or \u201cCome, butter, come,\u201d which appeared in the first nursery rhyme collections from the 1740s, but have dropped out of the canon.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The rhymes are illustrated with cut-out pictures.\u00a0 The \u00a0black page has an especially nice example of her collages.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThis little pig went to market\u201d consists of a hand with \u201cO. N. T,\u201d which almost certainly comes from an Our New Thread advertisement for Coats and Clark.\u00a0\u00a0 She then pasted pictures of the pigs on its fingertips, then wrote the text on curlique shapes, which resemble Struwwelpeter\u2019s uncut nails. Below it is \u201cThere was a little man, and he had a little gun.\u201d The \u201clittle man\u201d is a little boy in soldier\u2019s helmet, not hunter\u2019s green.\u00a0 Opposite him is \u00a0\u201cSee-saw, Margery daw\u201d illustrated with a sawhorse, with one child balanced against the three at the other end of the plank.<\/p>\n

Displayed on this page of beige cloth are several eighteenth-century rhymes: \u201cLucy Lockit lost her pocket\u201d in the lower left is acted out by a girl dressed in mourning and her adversary in a rather short skirt waving a parasol.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>Above them to the right is \u00a0\u201cOld woman, old woman, shall we go a\u2019shearing?\u201d \u00a0a humorous take on a failed attempt at courtship. \u00a0The \u201cold woman\u201d has the head of the Cheshire cat pasted on a body to which has been added an ear trumpet.\u00a0 Shouting into it is a much smaller pig dressed in a suit. (Was the choice of animal for the man was deliberate?)\u00a0 She also divided the page in half diagonally to accommodate the long rhyme \u201cWhen I was a little boy, I lived by myself,\u201d with the main character illustrated by three figures in completely different costumes.<\/p>\n

Manuscript nursery rhyme collections usually contain unrecorded appearances of songs and this one is no exception.\u00a0 It falls within the time period when Frank Green\u2019s song \u201cTen Little N*****s\u201d was considered amusing and performed frequently at \"\"<\/a>Black minstrel shows.\u00a0 In the upper left hand corner of this page is a rhyme about organ grinder\u2019s monkey, which turns out to be an early, possibly unrecorded, version of the tongue-twisting song \u201cI wish I was in Monkey land \/ The place where I was born,\u201d sometimes called \u201cThe Malalankey Song.\u201d\u00a0 The verbal pyrotechnics start in the second stanza \u201cI wililish I walalaas in mololonkey Lalaland.\u201d\u00a0 While unfamiliar to me, it turns up in on blogs, Reditt, and several Youtube videos, some of which call it an Indian, i.e. South Asian, children\u2019s song.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Grandm\u00e8re illustrated it with a grotesque Illustration of old black man, a reinforcement of the ugly old stereotype familiar to Americans.<\/p>\n

Homemade books like this one for a grandson deserve to be appreciated for what they preserve, both the good and bad.\u00a0 It simultaneously displays the creativity of a woman fashioning a unique object for a beloved child that will introduce him to an important genre of poetry for the young while also reflecting typical attitudes of her time, which make us uncomfortable today.<\/p>\n

Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Children were reminded constantly to take care of their books before the rise of untearables on cloth, board, and textured paper in the second half of the nineteenth century.\u00a0\u00a0 Cotsen has hundreds of examples of these books and pamphlets for the unintentionally destructive hands of babies and toddlers\u2014or careless older children\u2013 \u00a0should anyone want to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":328713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107055,155016,155005,109838],"tags":[2268,2658,1512,3342,110178],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-328712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-19th-century","category-manuscripts","category-nursery-rhymes","category-textiles","tag-book","tag-cloth","tag-grandson","tag-nursery","tag-rhyme"],"yoast_head":"\nMade for a Grandson: A Nursery Rhyme Cloth Book ca. 1897 - 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