Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here we need to talk about Humpty Dumpty.
Speaker 1: You may well have grown up with this nursery rhyme,
Speaker 1: but just in case, let's review it goes. Humpty Dumpty
Speaker 1: sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Speaker 1: All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't
Speaker 1: put Humpty together again. It's a simple verse, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot going on here. Who is this Humpty character?
Speaker 1: Why was he sitting and why did he fall? Why
Speaker 1: on earth was the monarchy involved? And why couldn't they
Speaker 1: put the poor guy back together? Furthermore, is he an egg?
Speaker 1: In popular culture today, Humpty Dumpty is almost always portrayed
Speaker 1: as an anthropomorphic egg. He has legs and arms coming
Speaker 1: off of his large egg body slash head, and he's
Speaker 1: wearing clothing. But the poem doesn't say the Humpty is
Speaker 1: an egg. The thing is this poem was probably originally
Speaker 1: intended to be a riddle. If you can't put him
Speaker 1: back together after a fall, what is he? An answer
Speaker 1: is that he's an egg, which is part and parcel
Speaker 1: of modern portrayals. A spoiler alert Okay. The Humpty Dumpty
Speaker 1: rhyme first appeared in seventeen ninety seven in a book
Speaker 1: called Juvenile Amusement written by one Samuel Arnold. In the original,
Speaker 1: the first two lines were the same, but the last
Speaker 1: two lines read four score men and four score more.
Speaker 1: Could not make Humpty Dumpty where he was before. It's
Speaker 1: not really material here, but a score is twenty men,
Speaker 1: so this means eighty plus eighty or one hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty men total. Anyway. There have been a few other
Speaker 1: variations since then, but they all amount to about the
Speaker 1: same thing. Humpty falls best efforts can't set him right. Certainly,
Speaker 1: the exact wording could influence the answer of the riddle.
Speaker 1: The original I'd have referred to a famous historical person,
Speaker 1: and other versions that talk about being unable to set
Speaker 1: Humpty upright again might refer to a different creature, like
Speaker 1: maybe a tortoise. An illustration from eighteen oh three in
Speaker 1: Mother Goose's Melody portrays him as a normal, non egg
Speaker 1: human boy. So why is Humpty so firmly an egg today?
Speaker 1: Blame Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and what Alice
Speaker 1: found there. The sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland a
Speaker 1: first published in eighteen seventy one. The book devotes a
Speaker 1: whole chapter to Humpty Dumpty. But here's the passage where
Speaker 1: Alice first comes upon him. The egg only got larger
Speaker 1: and larger, and more and more human. When she had
Speaker 1: come within a few yards of it, she saw that
Speaker 1: it had eyes and a nose and a mouth. And
Speaker 1: when she had come close to it, she saw clearly
Speaker 1: that it was Humpty Dumpty himself. It can't be anybody else,
Speaker 1: she said to herself. I'm as certain of it as
Speaker 1: if his name were written all over his face. Then
Speaker 1: refers to Humpty as looking like an egg. Allowed, and
Speaker 1: he's very offended. At any rate, a humanoid egg fits
Speaker 1: right in with the story's surreal cast of characters. But
Speaker 1: this was the first time Humpty Dumpty was depicted as
Speaker 1: the character that we're familiar with today, complete with an
Speaker 1: image by the book's illustrator, John Tenniel. The Alice books
Speaker 1: were and remain popular, and future illustrators of the nursery
Speaker 1: rhyme have often paid homage to Tenniel's depiction of the character. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we know why he's an egg today, But was
Speaker 1: he always an egg? What was the inspiration for this
Speaker 1: riddle in the first place. Let's go back even further.
Speaker 1: The first known appearance of the term humpty dumpty in
Speaker 1: print was in sixteen ninety in a slang dictionary, where
Speaker 1: it's defined as a drink being ale boiled with brandy.
Speaker 1: There's no real explanation for this slang term, although strong
Speaker 1: beer was sometimes called hum around that time. Also, so
Speaker 1: if you think this drink sounds gross, there's no accounting
Speaker 1: for taste. But there were a lot of warm beer
Speaker 1: or wine plus liquor cocktails happening back then. Skipping ahead
Speaker 1: to seventeen eighty five, one Francis Gross noted in his
Speaker 1: book A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue that the
Speaker 1: term could refer to either the drink or to a short,
Speaker 1: clumsy person, which is sort of getting somewhere, okay. In
Speaker 1: eighteen forty two, a Punch magazine, a popular British satire publication,
Speaker 1: claimed that Humpty was a symbol for Cardinal Thomas Walsey,
Speaker 1: who was appointed in eighteen fifteen during King Henry the
Speaker 1: Eighth's reign. Their claim was meant to be funny, but
Speaker 1: it's not totally implausible. Wallsy apparently enjoyed sitting on the
Speaker 1: walls of the high tower of Cowwood Castle in York,
Speaker 1: and he notably fell from grace with King Henry for
Speaker 1: not obtaining the Pope's permission for the king to divorce
Speaker 1: his first wife and Mary Anne Boilen. Wallsey was ultimately
Speaker 1: arrested by the King's men. Another theory, with perhaps a
Speaker 1: few cracks in it, is that Humpty Dumpty is an
Speaker 1: allusion to King Richard the Third. Richard has often been
Speaker 1: depicted as having a grotesquely rounded, hunched back, partially because
Speaker 1: of negative propaganda in Shakespeare's play about him. The Bard's
Speaker 1: patron at the time was one Fernando Stanley, who was
Speaker 1: a direct descendant of one of Richard's enemies, so it's
Speaker 1: no wonder that in the play insults are hurled about
Speaker 1: him like that he's a poisonous, bunch backed toad. In reality,
Speaker 1: we now know, after his remains were found buried under
Speaker 1: a parking lot in twenty twelve, that Richard only had
Speaker 1: scoliosis mild enough that it would have made one shoulder
Speaker 1: sit a bit higher than the other back to Humpty Dumpty.
Speaker 1: Though Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth in
Speaker 1: fourteen eighty five, kicking off the reign of the Tudors.
Speaker 1: It's claimed that Richard the Third's horse was named Wall,
Speaker 1: and that Richard died after falling off of Wall and
Speaker 1: being attacked beyond, and no matter what his men tried
Speaker 1: to do. Yet another theory is absolutely untrue. It was
Speaker 1: written up in a spoof article in Oxford Magazine in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, but it wound up gaining popularity. It
Speaker 1: purported that Humpty Dumpty was in fact a cannon that
Speaker 1: was used in Colchester, England, in sixteen forty eight to
Speaker 1: defend against a siege during the English Civil War. As
Speaker 1: with many towns at the time, Colchester's castle, churches and
Speaker 1: village were surrounded by a protective stone wall. The forces
Speaker 1: defending the town put a cannon on top of the
Speaker 1: church tower at Saint Mary's at the Walls Church and
Speaker 1: nicknamed the cannon Humpty Dumpty. When it came under fire
Speaker 1: by Parliamentary armies, the tower toppled and the cannon was
Speaker 1: destroyed and couldn't be put back together again again. That
Speaker 1: one's a definite spoof. It seems that Humpty Dumpty has
Speaker 1: some secrets in that egghead of his after all these years,
Speaker 1: but his legend lives on characters like Humpty, Alexander Dumpty
Speaker 1: in the film Puts in Boots, and the albeit minor
Speaker 1: batman villain Humphrey Dumpler, whose attempts to fix things that
Speaker 1: he perceives as broken always and in disaster. Today's episode
Speaker 1: is based on the article was Humpty Dumpty really an egg?
Speaker 1: On how Stuffworks dot Com? Written by Rebecca Treon. Brain
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