"Кішкентай Жек Хорнер" өлеңі тарихы мен мағынасы

Nursery rhyme

"Little Jack Horner" is a popular English nursery rhyme with the Roud Folk Song Index number 13027. First mentioned in the 18th century, it was early associated with acts of opportunism, particularly in politics. Moralists also rewrote and expanded the poem so as to counter its celebration of greediness. The name of Jack Horner also came to be applied to a completely different and older poem on a folkloric theme; and in the 19th century, it was claimed that the rhyme was originally composed in satirical reference to the dishonest actions of Thomas Horner in the Tudor period.

Jack Horner’s adventures with his pie have frequently been referenced in humorous and political cartoons on three continents. In an 1862 issue of Punch, Abraham Lincoln pulls the captured New Orleans out of his pie. In the following century, a copy of the Tacoma Times pictured a Japanese Jack pulling a battleship from the Russian pie during the Russo Japanese war. In other contexts, the rhyme was applied to Australian politics in the Melbourne Punch; to a Canadian railway scandal; to income tax relief in Ireland; and to David Lloyd George’s use of his party political fund. Other humorous uses of the nursery rhyme include: a comic variation in Guy Wetmore Carryl’s Mother Goose for Grown Ups (New York, 1900), in which Jack breaks his tooth on a plum stone; and one of Lee G. Kratz’s Humorous Quartets for Men’s Voices (Boston, 1905), in which the pie is stolen by a cat.

In the chapbook The History of Jack Horner, Containing the Witty Pranks he play'd, from his Youth to his Riper Years, Being pleasant for Winter Evenings (mid 18th century), there is a summarised version of the nursery rhyme which Jack himself is said to have composed. However, it has been observed that the story is based on the much earlier Tudor tale of The Fryer and the Boy, and that this insertion is merely to justify the use of Jack Horner's name. The book’s main purpose is to follow its hero’s career after he has left childhood behind. In the 19th century, a story began to gain currency that the rhyme is actually about Thomas Horner, who was steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury before the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII of England. It is asserted that, prior to the abbey's destruction, the abbot sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie which had the deeds to a dozen manors hidden within it as a gift to try to convince the King not to nationalise Church lands. During the journey, Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the manor of Mells in Somerset, which he kept for himself. It is further suggested that, since the manor properties included lead mines in the Mendip Hills, the plum is a pun on the Latin plumbum, for lead. While records do indicate that Thomas Horner became the owner of the manor, subsequent owners of Mells Manor have asserted that the legend is untrue, and that Wells purchased the deed from the abbey. Two later novels provide virtuous heroes named Jack Horner that distance themselves from the nursery character. The first chapter of James Jackson Wray's Jack Horner the second (London, 1887) criticises the behaviour of the first Jack Horner in order to emphasise the preferable behaviour of his virtuous namesake. The "charming little boy" featured in Mary Spear Tiernan's eponymous Jack Horner: A Novel (Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1890) is equally contrasting. An American foundling, he is so named from being discovered in the Christmas season. By the second half of the 20th century, the pendulum had swung back to interpreting versions of Jack Horner as a psychologically damaged character. Commenting on the role of Jacob Horner, the dysfunctional narrator of his novel The End of the Road (1958), John Barth commented that "he is supposed to remind you first of Little Jack Horner, who also sits in a corner and rationalizes." In 2022, an adult version of Jack Horner appears as a villain in the Universal Pictures/DreamWorks Animation movie Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The owner of a pie business, he now calls himself "Big" Jack Horner.