I don’t know how widely distributed nursery rhymes are in the world, but one that’s repeated for practically every little tyke in the US is Mary Had a Little Lamb. It’s about some kid named Mary and her pet sheep. Nursery rhymes are often just “around;” you don’t think of them having authors — but this one does: Sarah Josepha Hale, who was born October 24, 1788 in the (brand-new at the time) United States.
Hale received an education, even though she was a girl, because her parents went against the popular tradition of the time and believed that both genders should be equally educated. She became a schoolteacher when she grew up, and married a local lawyer. They had five children, but her husband died after only 8 years of marriage — Hale wore black for the rest of her life, which amounted to almost 70 more years. She lived to be 90.
After her husband passed away, Hale needed a source of income, and she turned to writing. Her first publication was a collection of poems, then she wrote her first novel, Northwood: Live North and South. It was published in the US, became quite successful, and a new edition was published in Europe under the title A New England Tale. It was one of the first novels to talk about slavery, and one of the first novels written by a woman in North America. It was solidly against slavery, by the way.
On the strength of her books’ success, she got a job as editor of the most popular magazine of the time, Ladies’ Magazine. She kept writing, too, and around 1830 included Mary Had a Little Lamb in the book Poems for Our Children. The original title of the poem was simply Mary’s Lamb; the current title is just the first line. But it was editing that brought her even more prominence; Ladies’ Magazine merged with Godey’s Lady’s Book (it was a magazine, not a book) and Hale became the editor — and kept the job for 40 years. As the editor of the highest-circulation magazine of the time, Hale became widely known as an important influencer in taste, fashion, and morals, and she issued a steady stream of quotations that everybody, at the time, repeated. They’re couched in language that sounds awkward today, but in the 1800s things like “The temple of our purest thoughts is silence” were the motivational sayings of the moment.
When Hale retired at 89 in 1877, Thomas Edison recited Mary’s Lamb as the first recording on the phonograph he’d invented. By that point she had published nearly 50 books, including both novels and poetry, and had used her influence to make Thanksgiving a national US holiday, to turn George Washington’s plantation as a museum, to advocate for women’s education and help found Vassar College, and for the creation of the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston. The Sarah Josepha Hale Award is a literary prize that’s been won by writers including Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, Arthur Miller, and Julia Alvarez. And if you visit the New Hampshire Historical Society gift shop in Concord, New Hampshire (it’s an imposing granite building on Park Street; you can’t miss it), she’s represented as…a bobblehead doll?! I wonder what she would have had to say about that.
