Jack and Jill went up the hill

we all know these words that call back our early childhoods so vividly, yet where did they come from and what does this rhyme mean? It can be dangerous to try to probe or analyse the meaning of nursery rhymes too deeply – much like analysing the nonsense verse of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll, we are likely to come upon a hermeneutic dead-end. But 'Jack and Jill' is so well-known that a closer look at its meaning and origins seems justified.

Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water;

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got, and home did trot,

As fast as he could caper,

To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob

With vinegar and brown paper.

Is this the complete rhyme of 'Jack and Jill'? That depends on when you read it, or where. The first stanza is by far the oldest, and seems to have been the sum total of the 'Jack and Jill' rhyme in the eighteenth century, when it's first recorded. The second stanza appeared in the early nineteenth century when the vogue for chapbooks – short illustrated books containing extended versions of popular nursery rhymes – arose. (The chapbook for 'Old Mother Hubbard', for instance, was a huge bestseller in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.)

The word 'crown', by the way, almost certainly refers to Jack's head (or the very top of it), rather than suggesting royal connotations (e.g. Jack is a prince or portraying a monarch of some sort). Jack and Jill are just an ordinary boy and girl (or young man and young woman, potentially).

If you read one of these old chapbook versions, you encounter a 'Jack and Jill' rhyme that is a whopping fifteen stanzas long: