CHAT: Humpty Dumpty (was: con-childish taunts)

At 3:49 pm -0400 18/5/99, Mathias wrote:
>Dans un courrier dat=E9 du 18/05/99 20:19:17  , Ray a =E9crit :
>
>>  The Victorians
>>  were also responsible for turning Humpty Dumpty into an egg!
>>
>
>what was it before then ?
And at 5:08 pm -0500 18/5/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
=2E.....
>What or who was Humpty Dumpty originally?
Ah, why did I mention him!  I'll have to do a bit of research again.
But IIRC "he" was some sort artillery piece - or some war engine -
used in the civil war between Cromwell's "Roundheads" and the royalists.
There were other versions of the poem.  One began:

'Humpty Dumpty fell in a beck'...

'Beck' is an dialect word for "stream".  The next line ended with 'neck',
but I don't recall the other words now.

I'll report back  :)

The Victorians seemed to have had a fondness for "tidying up" nursery
rhymes and giving "official forms" - something Lewis Carrol good naturedly
mocked in many of his writings.

Ray.