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 of ninety-four pages and thirty rhymes, twenty-one of which Warne approved for future publication. When Warne died suddenly and unexpectedly in August 1905, the book of rhymes was set aside, and Potter turned her attention to other projects. Early in 1917, Frederick Warne & Co. faced financial ruin after then-publisher Harold Warne was convicted of forgery and sentenced to eighteen months of hard labor in a London prison. Potter was the company's greatest creditor and artistic property, and, when asked to do what she could to save the firm, she agreed to provide a book for Christmas: "I hope Appley