Biography
"Mother Goose" begins as a 1729 English translation of the name of Charles Perrault's tale-teller in Contes de Ma Mere Loye (1697). The popularity of these tales as translated evidently led John Newbery to name his collection of songs Mother Goose's Melody about 1765. The nursery rhymes then spread to North America, as Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951: 37-42) shows. (There is no reason to believe that Mother Goose is based on a Mistress Elizabeth Goose, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1665.) See also Gloria T. Delamar's Mother Goose, from Nursery to Literature (Jefferson: McFarland, 1987; PR 507 .D45 Robarts Library).
