Ceil Baring Gould

I'm bound to agree with the reviewer who complained about the layout, which defies reason, though to a large extent I find that this problem is common with many annotated editions of classic works (but this one is especially bad). Also common is the tendency of annotators to take themselves and their insights way too seriously: a good fifteen percent of the annotations could have been dealt with under a single heading: Katherine Elwes Thomas got it all wrong. I think the whole book might better be arranged with simple notes before or after each rhyme--the proliferation of Arabic numerals that deface even the shortest lyrics is worse than distracting, especially when it takes your mind off the rhyme and leads to...yet another refutation of Katherine Elwes Thomas! One begins to wonder whether the world really reeded an annotated Mother Goose. For a genre that's most of all about the fun of rhyme and meter, and of nonsense, the annotations are disappointingly, well, unfun and deflating.… (altro)

Even though it’s entirely impossible to have a truly complete collection of Mother Goose nursery rhymes, this annotated collection by the Baring-Goulds is an admirable attempt. It holds an astounding number of nursery rhymes, both familiar and more obscure, which I found rather delightful to peruse. Discovering new rhymes and recollecting old ones seems to be the entire point of the collection, since the authors admit that they omitted some of the most commonplace pieces because they had no real place among “Mother Goose nursery rhymes” (which are arguably a subset of their own within children’s literature) as well as the more obscure and oddly placed poems that were often added by publishers to pad collections. This may seem like an oversight, since obscurity and commonality have their place in collections with even a modicum of academic tone, but the collection is already large enough and there are other sources for this material. My only real complaint about this volume is that their annotations left me slightly disappointed. The poems were in no sense completely annotated, since some pieces had no accompanying text at all, and the authors tended to ramble on about various topics which seemed to have very little bearing on many of the poems in question. Once I stopped reading the annotations, though, I regained my interest in the book and focused on simply enjoying the nursery rhymes themselves - with only quick jaunts to the margins if I felt particularly inquisitive about specific poems. Since this collection was published some time ago, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a more modernized (and complete) academic Mother Goose collection, which I shall have to seek out for my own library.… (altro)