ThatMarkRobertsThat Kinder Surprise advert I just reblogged is apparently from 1983. I vividly recall it. It was profoundly disturbing (especially for something marketed at kids) but somehow I had parsed that in my head as a Cadbury advert. #80sAdvertising #OldBritishTelly
And I mean who would not find this oddly human-faced Humpty disturbing? It’s pure nightmare fuel. #80sAdvertising #OldBritishTelly
Perhaps more disturbing though? Is that if you actually *think* about it? Nowhere (in any commonly recognised rendition of the nursery rhyme) is Humpty Dumpty ever actually described as *being* an egg. He sat on a wall. He had a great fall. Nobody was able to put him back together again. That’s all. You’ll probably find a picture of an egg in your book of nursery rhymes, sure. But it’s not in the words. #80sAdvertising #NurseryRhymes
It’s not until Humpty was featured in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’ that he was ever referred to as as looking "exactly like an egg”. But that’s Carroll’s addition, here. Not the original nursery rhyme. #80sAdvertising #NurseryRhymes
And from there I guess it just… got traction? Made sense? Humpty Dumpty is now an… egg. Yes. Because eggs break. You can’t put *them* back together again. #80sAdvertising #NurseryRhymes
Easier to illustrate in books of children’s nursery rhymes. Because, well, without that? Just read those lyrics. We’re basically just talking about a normal guy who fell off the top of a massive wall, and suffered such brutal injuries that parts of his body were separated from… other parts of their body. Irreparably so. Try illustrating *that* for children’s book! #80sAdvertising #NurseryRhymes
JdeBP@ThatMarkRoberts Not true. Carroll didn't add this. That the answer to the riddle was "an egg" was common for decades by that point.
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps's 1843 Nursery Rhymes of England gave the answer in the riddle's title: "[an egg]".
Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen's Neues Jarbuch of 1839 has the riddle with the same title, and that was three decades before Alice. Dodgson was 7 years old at the time, and that wasn't even the first publication of the riddle.