Volume 31, Number 1 · February 2, 1984
The Meaning of Mother Goose
By Robert Darnton
The mental world of the unenlightened during the Enlightenment seems to be irretrievably lost. It is so difficult, if not impossible, to locate the common man in the eighteenth century that it seems foolish to search for his cosmology. But before abandoning the attempt, one might find it useful to suspend disbelief and to consider a story—a story everyone knows, though not in the following version, which is the tale more or less as it was told around firesides in peasant cottages during long winter evenings in eighteenth-century France.
Feature, 9156 words
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