shush I am trying to sleep

oldbookillustrations:

Jack Sprat and his wife.

Arthur Rackham, from The old nursery rhymes, New York, 1913.

(Source: archive.org)

“…the rhyme is found in James Howell’s collection of proverbs but with an archdeacon as the central figure:

Archdeacon Pratt would eat no fatt,

His wife would eat no lean;

Twixt Archdeacon Pratt, and Joan his wife,

The meat was eat up clean.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ‘Jack Sprat’ was a term for a dwarf, and an earlier form was ‘Jack Prat’. Conceivably Howell’s rhyme was used against a contemporary cleric of small proportions.”

from The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes edited by Iona and Peter Opie, 1997