Nursery Rhyme Books Free Online: 16 Illustrated Classics and Where They Came From
Nursery rhymes are the first literature anybody meets and the least examined. They are also much older and much odder than their reputation: the rhymes a two-year-old learns are mostly fragments of ballads, street cries and political songs, worn smooth by a few hundred years of use until only the rhythm was load-bearing.
That is why they survive being sung by someone who has no idea what they mean. The meaning went first. What is left is the meter, which is exactly the part an infant is listening to.
Sixteen nursery rhyme books are free to read in the library, and they fall into three quite different groups.
The great illustrated editions
The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of colour picture-book printing, because Edmund Evans could suddenly print wood-engraved colour cheaply and handed the pages to the three best illustrators in England. These are the results, and they are the reason to read a nursery rhyme book on a screen rather than reciting from memory.
- Hey Diddle Diddle and Baby Bunting: R. Caldecott's Picture Books — Caldecott is the one the American picture-book medal is named after, and this shows why: he tells a story in the gaps between the rhyme's lines, so the pictures contain events the words never mention.
- An Alphabet of Old Friends — Walter Crane, and the most beautiful object on this list. Crane composed a page like a poster; the flatness and the heavy outlines are a direct debt to Japanese prints.
- A Nursery Rhyme Picture Book: With Drawings in Colour and Black and White — L. Leslie Brooke, slightly later and gentler, and the best of the three at drawing animals who are plainly thinking.
- Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes — Potter, tiny, and mostly her own verses in the traditional shape rather than collected ones.
- Complete Version of ye Three Blind Mice — Ivimey's joke: he wrote the mice a full backstory and a happy ending, in period pastiche. Genuinely funny and completely unnecessary.
- Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog — one rhyme, stretched to a whole book, which is how nursery rhymes were actually published for most of the nineteenth century.
- Jack and Jill and Old Dame Gill — the same treatment, and a good illustration of how much longer these rhymes originally ran before use trimmed them.
Collections and verse for reading aloud
- Favorite Nursery Rhymes — the plain anthology, if what you want is coverage rather than an artist.
- A Apple Pie and Other Nursery Tales — rhymes and very short tales together, which is how a real nursery session actually goes.
- Cradle Songs — lullabies specifically, gathered across several languages and traditions. Worth knowing that the lullaby is a much darker form than the nursery rhyme; a lot of these are about the child's mother not coming back.
- In My Nursery — Laura E. Richards, who wrote original nonsense verse good enough to pass as traditional. "Eletelephony" is hers.
- Little Songs — Eliza Lee Follen, American, early, and much more moralising than the English material.
- A Child's Garden of Verses — Stevenson, and a step up in age and ambition. Not nursery rhymes at all, but it is what a child who has outgrown them should get next, and "The Land of Counterpane" is the best poem anybody has written about being ill in bed as a child.
- Fun and Nonsense — nonsense verse in the Lear tradition, illustrated, and pitched at exactly the age that finds a made-up word hilarious.
- Jingle Book — Carolyn Wells, American nonsense, sharper and more verbally clever than most.
- Cautionary Tales for Children — Belloc, and an entirely different proposition: mock-improving verse in which children die of their faults, played completely straight. Read it yourself first. Children who get the joke find it the funniest thing they have ever heard.
The strange scholarly corner
Two books here treat nursery rhymes as evidence, and both are more interesting than they sound.
- A History of Nursery Rhymes — Percy Green, tracing rhymes back to ballads, cries and political satire. Read with mild scepticism: Victorian rhyme scholarship was very willing to find a beheaded queen in anything.
- Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes — Lina Eckenstein, and considerably more rigorous. Her comparative work across European languages is the real thing, and her chapter on counting-out rhymes is the one that will change how you hear a playground.
- Anguish Languish — not scholarship but the best possible demonstration of its central claim. Howard Chace rewrote "Little Red Riding Hood" as "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", using only real English words that sound nothing like the originals. It is unreadable silently and perfectly clear aloud, which proves that the sound was carrying the story all along.
What to do with them
Read them out of order, repeat the ones that land, and do not explain them. The rhyme is doing prosody instruction, not comprehension instruction — a child is learning that English has a stress pattern, which is the thing they will need for every poem afterwards. Meaning can wait.
When the rhymes stop holding attention, the next step is short chapters rather than longer poems: read-aloud chapter books free online picks up from there.