About the book
In January 1894 a woman in Barnes finished a book nobody had asked her to write. Alice Gomme had spent years collecting children's games by post — from village schoolmistresses, country clergymen, dialect scholars and her own friends — and she had done something nobody in England had done before: she wrote down the tunes. There were collections of children's rhymes before hers. What she added was the music, taken down as the children actually sang it and printed unaltered. A rhyme without its tune is a poem; a rhyme with its tune is a game you can still play. This edition is the singing half of her first volume: 43 games, from All the Soldiers in the Town to Nuts in May, with 209 versions of the rhymes — each one printed with the county it came from and the person who sent it, exactly as she printed them — and all 78 tunes. EVERY STAVE IN THIS BOOK WAS ENGRAVED FOR IT. The tunes were read as pitch and duration and then drawn, note by note, by the edition's own engraver: nothing is a photograph or a tracing of an 1894 page. Around them: a Register of Collection and Conjecture that keeps what Gomme gathered apart from what she concluded — the survivals theory of her generation, which held that a ring game about a dead lady was the wreckage of a funeral rite, and which nobody now believes; a guide to reading one of her entries; a playing guide that sets out eight of the games to be played this afternoon; head-notes to all 43 games; and a gazetteer of where every version was sung and who wrote it down, built by reading the 296 attribution lines under her versions. That gazetteer stands in for the one thing this edition could not reproduce: her husband's great comparative tables, up to eighteen columns wide, which will not go on a book page at a size anybody could read. What they encode is the geography, and the geography is here — 42 counties and countries, 79 named collectors, most of them women whose names appear nowhere else. 244 pages.
