Albert Jack

Get ready for a wild ride.

Nursery rhymes often mean more than we realize, and there is an honorable tradition of collecting them and trying to figure out what they mean. Some of these books -- notably Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes -- are excellent pieces of scholarship. Some -- like the word of Katherine Elwes Thomas -- are closer to drug dreams.

This book is somewhere in the middle, but leaning toward the wild side. Take "Jack Sprat." Jack-the-author suggests that show more this was inspired by the reign of King Richard the Lion-hearted, who was imprisoned in Austria, forcing the English to scrape up a huge ransom -- i.e. to "lick the platter clean." This is historical enough, and England was indeed scraped bare to get back their hard-fighting nitwit of a king. But Richard I was king from 1189 to 1199 -- the early Plantagenet period. Richard -- who spend only six months of his reign in England -- spoke no English, and even if he had, the English of the time was early Middle English, not Modern English. "Jack Spratt" could not have been composed in Middle English.

So there is a lot of material here that is purely speculative or, in some cases, wrong. Of course, some of it is right as well. It's not a bad book; it simply needs to be controlled. The Opie book would be a good start. But this is a lot cheaper.... show less

Interesting but also frustrating conflation of some genuine food history and lots of apocryphal 'some people say' stories. The author mostly fails to differentiate between factual information and inaccurate food mythology. This is mostly because the book is lacking in citations or references to any sources for the 'facts' we are being given, so the reader is unable to verify or follow up on anything. Unfortunately, it's exactly this type of work that tends to perpetuate historical show more inaccuracies and misconceptions rather than clear them up. show less

I read this one over the course of a single day home sick from work. It is lots of fun and quite informative. I feared that the author might put forth the theories of the rhymes as fact but he did not; he was very fair and balanced and simply presented the best and most interesting theories, understanding that the true origins of most of the verses are lost in the mists of time. This was an enjoyable read.

An interesting and often amusing collection of the origins of everyday phrases like 'bluestocking' or 'bought the farm', marred only by the writer's numerous jibes at marriage.

Jack is a member of father's for justice and that's an organisation I'm sympathetic towards, but he assumes all marriages are like his own, and, as a happily married person for the last thirty years, I find that irritating when I hit yet another jibe at wives or marriage.