AN OLD RHYME

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 26, 30 July 1927, Page 20

AN OLD RHYME

THE ORIGINAL "MOTHER GOOSE"

Since 1719, when the first volume of "Mother Goose Rhymes" was published in Boston, it has been current belief that Mother Goose was a mythical character. On the "contrary (says the "Christian Science Monitor") Mother Goose was a Bostrn woman. Her name was Elizabeth Foster Vergoose. She was the daughter of William and Anno Foster, and was born at Charlestown. In 1692 she married Isaac Vergoose. The name Vergoose is an odd one. It first appears on record in the United States in 1660. Perhaps the name is of Anglo-Norman origin, and if so, probably meant "green goose" in the seventeenth century, since the old Norman French was. "vert" for green as modern French has it. When Elizabeth Foster married Isaac Vergoose she was his second wife. He had some although it is not noted how many' children. There were six by this marriage, and perhaps it was this fact that had something to do subsequently with the Old Mother Hubbard rhyme: "She had so .many- children she didn't know what to do." One of the Vergoose children was Elizabeth, named for her mother. And in 1712 Thomas Fleet, a lad of Shropshire (Eng.), who had been' apprenticed to a printer, decided that lie would go to America to seek larger opportunity. He established a small printing house in Pudding lane, later to be known as Devonshire street, where he carried on a modest printing of ballads, pamphlets, and small books for children. And in June of 1715 Elizabeth Foster and Thomas Fleet were married by the Rev. Cotton Mather. When Mother Goose's first grandchild came in 1719 Mother Goose took to making rhymes for him in the intimacy of his nursery. Other grandchildren came', and with them the need for more rhymes. The grandchildren's father was a printer, and he thought, "What a pity that only the little Fleet boys and girls should have the fun of knowing Grandmother's rhymes. I shall print a book of them, I believe so that more and more little children may know about 'Old King Cole' and what would happen 'If wishes were horses' and about 'the Pig who flew up in the air,' 'Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son,' and the rest." And so he did.