18th century | Cotsen Children’s Library

A platter of turducken can substitute for the traditional turkey on the groaning Thanksgiving table. This elaborate dish made famous by New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme consists of a boned chicken inside in a boned duck inside a boned turkey, the empty spaces crammed with figs, bread stuffing, or a sausage force meat and the whole roasted until glistening brown.

For those of you who are wondering what on earth this has to do with a nursery rhyme, don’t sign off yet, because I can vouch for my credentials as a rhyme finder. Before the publication of James Orchard Halliwell’s The Nursery Rhymes of England (1840), I swear that the ditties are more likely to be found in bawdy plays, descriptions of rambles around London, and nasty political satires than anthologies for children, which are not especially numerous before 1860. Lowlifes and servants are more likely to repeat them than ladies and gentlemen.

I made this discovery trying to verify Iona and Peter Opie’s claim in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes that the earliest printed appearance of “The House that Jack Built” was in Nurse Truelove’s New-Year’s-Gift (1750). Being a long accumulative rhyme, different searches using various combinations of distinctive words had to be run. Nothing new had turned up on previous attempts, but this time a 1707 translation of the Spanish novel Estevanillo Gonzales, the Most Arch and Comical of Scoundrels, popped up and I thought it was a really promising hit. Indeed it was!

In one of his escapades, the hero was hired on the strength of his assurance that he was the best cook in the army. Here is the passage where he gives the recipe for “Imperial Stuffed Meat,” a more elaborate version of turducken, explaining to his audience:

It is just like the Tale the Children tell of, This is the Stick that Beat the Dog, the Dog that bit the Cat, the Cat that kill’d the Mouse, the Mouse that eat the Malt, the Malt that lay in the House that Jack Built; for this Egg is in the Pidgeon, the Pidgeon is to be put into a Partridge, the Partridge into a Pheasant, the Pheasant into a Pullet, the Pullet into a Capon, the Capon into a Turkey, the Turkey into a Kid, the Kid into a Sheep, the Sheep into a Calf, and the Calf into a Cow, all these Creatures are to be Pull’d, Flea’d [i.e. flayed], and Larded, except the Cow, which is to have her Hide on, and as they are thrust one into another like a Nest of Boxes.A dish fit for an emperor’s coronation after four hours’ roasting in a covered trench, brags Estevanillo. The 1707 recipe is rather similar to the one called the “Roti sans pareil” in the 1807 Almanach des gourmands, cited by today’s foodies as the earliest reference. But curiously enough, the 1707 edition was the only one of all the reprints I found elsewhere to include the reference to “The House that Jack Built”…

Traddles displaying a slate with a skeleton drawing. From an advertising card for a cigarette manufacturer.

The most celebrated child artist of the skeleton must be Tommy Traddles, David Copperfield’s fellow pupil at Salem House. Or would be if any of his slate drawings had survived…

Poor Traddles!…He was always being caned—I think he was caned every day that half year….After laying his head on the desk for a little while, he would cheer up somehow, begin to laugh again, and draw skeletons all over his slate before his eyes were dry. I used at first to wonder what comfort Traddles found in drawing skeletons, and for some time looked upon him as a sort of hermit, who reminded himself by those symbols of mortality that caning couldn’t last forever. But I believe he only did it because they were easy and didn’t require any features (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 7).

We may have none of Traddles’ art, but there are a respectable number of boys’ and girls’ drawings of skeletons in the manuscript versions of the religious turn-up book, The Beginning, Progress and End of Man. (There’s more information about this fascinating illustrated text at the Learning as Play site). The subject of the final metamorphic picture is a rich and worldly young man, who, when the flaps are lifted, transforms into Death, always represented as a skeleton, usually holding an hourglass and scythe, sometimes with a coffin in the background. The manuscript turn-ups are actually more common than the printed ones, whose heyday was between 1660 and the early 1800s. However, the anonymous manuscripts are harder to localize, even when signed by their makers. English or American? 18 or 19^th century?

Here is a gallery of skeletons from Cotsen’s rather large collection of the manuscript turn-up books. No two are the same and none are even remotely anatomically correct. Maybe the differences reveal something about the extent of the individual artist’s knowledge of the human body, in addition to the level of skill with pen and watercolor wash.

Perhaps Eleanor Schank was quite young in 1776 when she scratched out the drawings for this turn-up. The figure’s costume is unmistakably feminine. It’s the only one in the collection where a young woman is substituted for the man. The skeleton seems to have given her more trouble (Cotsen in process).The anonymous artist of this nicely colored one emphasized the joints at the expense of the rib cage. The floral frames around the verse are a dainty touch (Cotsen 5145).This creator of this unsigned manuscript produced a substantial man in blue breeches holding money bags and the pleasingly abstract skeleton with bow legs. The Adam and Eve were given belly buttons (Cotsen 23624).John Sutton drew this well dressed young man in a tricorne and a better than average skeleton–one of the few with a pelvic girdle (Cotsen 3135). The drawings in this, the last example, has dash and energy, along with major problems with the perspective. The skeleton’s face looks a little too friendly.Children continue to be fascinated by making skeletons. One father/blogger has immortalized his three-year-old son’s obsession in at least three posts. He sounds as if he could give Tommy Traddles a run for his money filling up all available blank space with animated constructions of bones…