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In honor of the #1620project and other 19th-century fables, allow me to tell you about the legend of Mother Goose and how it is actually about Antebellum Bostonians denying their complicity in slavery.
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In 1860, a column ran on the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript: “Many persons imagine that Mother Goose is a myth — that no such person ever existed. This is a mistake. Mother Goose was not only a veritable personage, but was born and resided many years in Boston.”
The writer, John Fleet Eliot, claimed that the first edition of Mother Goose’s Melodies was printed in Boston in 1719 by Thomas Fleet, based on the songs and stories that Fleet’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Foster Goose, sang to Fleet’s nine children.
