Bo‐Peep

☞ Public‐domain character. Traditional. First appearance in print, Monthly Literary Recreations, vol. 1, no. 2, Aug. 1806.

Bo‐Peep or Bo Peep or Bopeep, or sometimes Boo Peep or Bow Peep, is, by most accounts, an inattentive English shepherdess who temporarily loses her sheep when they all wander away. She recovers the sheep shortly thereafter (although at least one source claims otherwise) and then goes on to have numerous adventures for over a century. A few sources portray Bo‐Peep as a young man—with the first giving him the name Johnny Bo‐peep—and even, according to a pantomime from 1831, a hero who rescues the damsel Blue‐bell from imprisonment. According to a 1902 text, she is the daughter of King Cole and thus a princess in Far Away Land, but a 1906 text instead claims she is an American girl named Alice who loses a pretend sheep in a party game.

In July 1828, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine quotes the first line of the nursery rhyme as “Johnny Bo‐peep has lost his sheep,” suggesting that this is Bo‐Peep’s full name, at least when portrayed as a boy, but he is never actually called this name in any subsequent text (“Evening”). The name, however, is used in the 1844 nursery rhyme “Margery Mutton‐pie and Johnny Bo‐peep,” but that this could be the same 1806 shepherd seems unlikely.

(Alice, the animal episode was only a party game on her birthday with a picture of a sheep)

See also https://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/ballads/OO2066.html

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