Apple Pie ABC - Literary Allusions

Literary Allusions

The nursery rhyme seems to have appealed particularly to the English writer Charles Dickens, who mentions it in three different mediums. The first is in the course of an essay on “A Christmas Tree” (1850), on which the illustrated nursery books so popular at the time are hung. "Thin books, in themselves, at first, but many of them, and with deliciously smooth covers of bright red or green. What fat black letters to begin with! "A was an archer, and shot at a frog." Of course he was. He was an apple-pie also, and there he is! He was a good many things in his time, was A, and so were most of his friends, except X, who had so little versatility, that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes or Xantippe."

A little later, he was writing the novel Bleak House (1852) and introduces an allusion into a description of legal process in the Court of Chancery: "Equity sends questions to law, law sends questions back to equity; law finds it can't do this, equity finds it can't do that; neither can so much as say it can't do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the apple pie."

Finally there is his story of “The Italian Prisoner” (1860), which details the difficulties of transporting an enormous bottle of wine through Italy. "The suspicions that attached to this innocent Bottle greatly aggravated my difficulties. It was like the apple-pie in the child's book. Parma pouted at it, Modena mocked it, Tuscany tackled it, Naples nibbled it, Rome refused it, Austria accused it, Soldiers suspected it, Jesuits jobbed it."

The reference to Xerxes in the first of these quotations, and to ‘the history of the apple pie’ in the second, suggests that it is the ‘Z’ version with which Dickens is acquainted.