Little Jack Horner in the Tudor period. The song’s most common lyrics are: <poem style="margin-left:24px> Little Jack Horner Sat in the corner, Eating his Christmas pie; He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And said, "What a good boy am I!"</poem> It was first documented in full in the nursery rhyme collection "Mother Goose's melody, or, Sonnets for the cradle", which may date from 1765, although the earliest surviving English edition is from 1791. The melody commonly associated with the rhyme was first recorded by the composer and nursery rhyme collector James William Elliott in his "National Nursery Rhymes and
Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes State University of New York at Plattsburgh argues in "Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code" that the charm of "Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes" lies in the illustrations rather than the text, and that the book (like other nursery rhyme collections) is not a sustained narrative but a series of short verses. Such collections are typically unified in style and design, but "Appley Dapply" lacks this unity because the illustrations range over a number of years in which Potter's style changed significantly. The illustrations for the opening verse about Appley Dapply, for example, date from 1891 and reveal an artist with an