The interment register at St Olaves Hart Street records Mother Goose being buried on 14 September 1586. This is extremely strange so we did some digging. The story of a goose laying golden eggs can be traced back to ancient Greece, but not the term 'Mother Goose'. From The Development of Mother Goose in Britain in the Nineteenth Century we learn that Mother Goose first appeared on stage in 1806 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in ‘Harlequin and Mother Goose, or the Golden Egg’ in which Joseph Grimaldi also appeared. It’s thought that the term ‘Mother Goose’ was popularised by the French ‘Mother Goose’s Rhymes’, by Perrault, published in 1697 but it existed before that. There is a reference to the phrase in Loret's ‘La Muse Historique’ collected in 1650 and in a work by Guy de la Brosse, in 1628. Which gets us pretty close to the St Olave’s burial year of 1598, but still doesn’t explain the entry in the register. Oddly, there is another burial site for Mother Goose, 1690, in Boston, Massachusetts. Possibly the phrase was a perfectly acceptable name for a mother with the surname Goose. Greater minds than ours have failed to solve this one.
This section lists the memorials where the subject on this page is commemorated:
Mother Goose
Commemorated ati
St Olave's Church
'The Uncommerical Traveller' was the name of articles that Dickens wrote for ...
Other Subjects
Crabbet Park Arabian Stud
Founded by Wilfrid Blunt and his wife. From 1917 run by their daughter, Lady Wentworth until her death in 1957.
1 memorial
Barking Lord Scruff
Music critic, dog poet, photographic model and all round good egg.
1 memorial
Sheridan’s Stables
Harrow Through Time by Don Walter dates this bucolic image to 1795.
1 memorial
Dogs killed in medical experiments in 1902
232 dogs died in 1902 as a result of medical experiments. Wikipedia gives: "In 1875 there were around 300 experiments on animals in the UK, a figure that had risen to 19,084 in 1903 when the brown...
2 memorials
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