Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Four
Scholarship and 
Approaches
FOUNDING SCHOLARS
William Wells Newell’s 
Games and Songs of American Children
(1883) first identi-
fied children’s folklore as a separate area of study. Before the publication of New-
ell’s book, a few other scholars had published books on children’s lore. Joseph 
Strutt’s 
Sports and Pastimes of the People of England
(1801) includes some boys’ 
games of skill and a few girls’ games; Robert Chambers’s 
Popular Rhymes of Scot-
land
(1826) and James Halliwell’s 
Nursery Rhymes of England
(1842) and 
Popular 
Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England
(1849) examine rhymes and tales taught to 
young children. Newell’s study takes a different approach. Observing children’s play 
and commenting insightfully on its meaning, Newell considers children on their 
own terms. His book still delights readers of the twenty-first century.
After his graduation from Harvard Divinity School in 1863, Newell worked as 
a minister and as an employee of the War Department in Washington, D.C.; in 
the early 1870s he founded a school in New York. Early in the 1880s, he retired 
from employment to pursue his diverse interests as an independent scholar. At 
that point he had enough free time to observe and record children’s street games 
in New York City. In 1888, he cofounded the American Folklore Society and 
became the first editor of the 
Journal of American Folklore.
Newell’s 
Games and Songs of American Children
does not simply describe chil-
dren’s folklore; it also identifies its purposes and places it in the context of previ-
ous scholarship. In his introduction to the Dover edition of the book, published 
in 1963, Carl Withers explains that Newell’s organization of children’s games 
into categories was “a remarkable and imaginative pioneer thrust toward what 
was later to be called ‘functionalism’ ” (vi). This insight, contributed by folklorist 

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102 Children’s 
Folklore
Herbert Halpert, helps us understand how Newell’s innovative study inspired later 
functionalist studies in the field of children’s folklore.
Shortly after the publication of Newell’s 
Games and Songs,
the British folklor-
ist Lady Alice Bertha Gomme produced an impressive study of children’s games. 
Gomme, wife of anthropologist Sir George Laurence Gomme, was a founding 
member of the Folk-Lore Society and Folk-Song Society in England. She pub-
lished her two-volume 
Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland
be-
tween 1894 and 1898. This study of about 800 games from 112 locations in 
the United Kingdom gives the reader a prodigious amount of information about 
children’s traditions from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. Her 
commentary on game variants follows the evolutionary approach that was com-
mon in the 1890s. Closely examining game-playing patterns, Gomme looked for 
survivals of early rituals. She concluded that the singing game “London Bridge Is 
Falling Down” represented ancient sacrifices in the foundations of bridges, while 
courting games such as Nuts in May represented an early form of “marriage by 
capture” (2: 484). 
Some twentieth-century scholars have downplayed Gomme’s achievements, 
finding her evolutionary approach limiting and disappointing. In his study 
Th
 e 
British Folklorists,
Richard M. Dorson wryly states that Gomme followed her 
Girls play a singing game in New York City in the late 1970s. Photograph by Martha Cooper.

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Scholarship and Approaches 103
husband’s academic preferences with “perfect conjugal accord” (280). Iona and 
Peter Opie recognize the value of her large collection of game texts but criti-
cize her search for survivals (
Singing Game
v–vi). According to Dorothy Howard, 
Gomme “chose to ignore the games of Dickens’ illiterate back alleys and tene-
ments though she could have hardly been unaware that they existed.” This critical 
comment seems minor, however, in view of Howard’s assertion that “No student 
of children’s playlore can now or ever ignore the Gomme 
Dictionary.
No monu-
mental study equal to hers has yet appeared anywhere” (“Introduction” vi, viii).
Within the past 20 years, folklorists have found other strengths in Gomme’s 
work. In her essay “Alice Bertha Gomme (1852–1938): A Reassessment of the 
Work of a Folklorist” (1990), Georgina Boyes praises Gomme’s “reasoned and 
sophisticated” analysis and her adherence to “rigorous academic standards” that 
surpassed the standards of William Wells Newell (199–200). One of Gomme’s 
greatest achievements, Boyes argues, is her close attention to girls’ games and to 
games played by adolescents. Cocklebread, for example, is a game in which ado-
lescent girls “wabble to and fro with their Buttocks” (Gomme 1: 74–76). Gomme 
deserves credit for describing the details of this game, which some adults of that 
era would not have found appropriate for open discussion.