The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe

The Woman Who Lived in a Shoe is, by most accounts, an old British woman who lives in a shoe along with a number of offspring substantially in excess of what she can effectively discipline and who therefore uses corporal punishment with them. She and her children are usually depicted as literally living in an oversized shoe, although there are other portrayals, and some texts indicate they eventually move on to better accommodations. The handful of sources that document her name are in great disagreement: A pantomime from 1863 or 1864 says her name is Dame Tucker, one 1874 text refers to her as Sister Shoester, another 1874 text calls her Granny Kenneth, an 1882 text calls her Mother Madge, an 1890 text calls her Mistress Crispin, a 1906 text calls her Mrs. Brown and a 1913 text names her Mrs. Oldwomaninshoe. In the worlds of both Three Old Friends and Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes, she and her family are mice, and in the world of Mother Wild Goose, she is a white rabbit who pins her children to trees by their ears.

The available texts are quite inconsistent in their explanations of how it is that the woman and her offspring came to live in a shoe, but they can be placed in three broad groupings: those that indicate that the shoe is indeed unusually large (History of the Little Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe and others), those that indicate that the shoe is of normal size but that the woman and her family are unusually small (Three Old Friends and others), and those that indicate that “living in a shoe” is merely a turn of phrase and that they do not actually live inside a shoe (Mother Goose in Prose and others).

According to a 1913 text, other nursery‐rhyme figures are among her children, apparently adopted, namely Daffy Down Dilly, Peep Peep, Taffy and Humpty Dumpty (Marriage of Jack and Jill). A 1922 text makes a similar claim, albeit with different children : Margery Daw, Miss Muffet, Boy Blue, Jack Horner, Tom Tucker, Piper’s Tom and Baby Bunting, as well as Cinderella, Topsy and Orphan Annie (“Sing a Song of Sleepy Head”).

(Mrs. Brown, offspring Tommy, Betty, Maggie, Katy, Mary and Alice Brown, poor mother living in city near Mary L., Christmas charity box in the shape of a shoe)

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