Humpty Dumpty - Other Appearances in Fiction and Popular Culture

Other Appearances in Fiction and Popular Culture

Humpty Dumpty has become a highly popular nursery rhyme character. American actor George L. Fox (1825–77) helped to popularise the character in nineteenth-century stage productions of pantomime, music and rhyme. The character is also a common literary allusion, particularly to refer to a person in an insecure position, something that, once broken, would be difficult to reconstruct, or a short and fat person. In addition to his appearance in Through the Looking-Glass, as a character Humpty Dumpty has been used in a large range of literary works, including L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose (1901), where the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the king, having witnessed Humpty's "death" and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him. In Neil Gaiman's early short story The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds, the Humpty Dumpty story is turned into a film noir-style hardboiled crime story, involving also Cock Robin, the Queen of Hearts, Little Bo Peep, Old Mother Hubbard and other characters from popular nursery rhymes. Robert Rankin used Humpty Dumpty as one victim of a serial fairy-tale character murderer in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse (2002). Jasper Fforde included Humpty Dumpty in two of his novels, The Well of Lost Plots (2003) and The Big Over Easy (2005), which use him respectively as a ringleader of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike and as the victim of a murder.

The rhyme has also been used as a reference in more serious literary works, including as a recurring motif of the Fall of Man in James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake. Robert Penn Warren's 1946 American novel All the King's Men, the story of populist politician Willie Stark's rise to the position of governor and eventual fall, based on the career of the corrupt Louisiana Senator Huey Long, won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a film All the King's Men, which won the 1949 Academy Award for best motion picture. This was echoed in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book All the President's Men, about the Watergate scandal, referring to the failure of the President's staff to repair the damage once the scandal had leaked out. It was filmed as All the President's Men in 1976, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

It has also been used as a common motif in popular music, including Hank Thompson's "Humpty Dumpty Heart" (1948), The Monkees' "All the King's Horses" (1966), Aretha Franklin's "All the King's Horses" (1972). and Travis's "The Humpty Dumpty Love Song" (2001). In jazz, Ornette Coleman and Chick Corea wrote different compositions, both incidentally titled Humpty Dumpty (in Corea's case, however, it is a part of a concept album inspired by Lewis Carroll, called "The Mad Hatter" (1978)).