Doctor Knickerbocker and Other Rhymes: A Canadian Collection

William Blackburn teaches children’s literature at the University of
Calgary.

The compiler of this collection of more than a hundred children’s
rhymes describes them as “the folk poetry of childhood”—and so
they are. Spanning more than a century, this four-part collection is
often funny, occasionally naughty, and—best of all—entirely free of
the shrivelling and petrifying influence of political correctness. As
its bibliography and two indexes (one by first lines, one by type of
poem) indicate, this is not a book intended only for children—but
Maryann Kovalski’s zany illustrations will do much to inveigle young
readers, and all others interested in seeing how much (and how little)
the oral culture of anglophone children has changed in the last hundred
years.