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
Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes other rhymes about animals, which [Caldecott] did not do." In the autumn of 1920, Potter proposed a book of nursery rhymes to her publisher Fruing Warne from those she had collected over the years. Titled "Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes", Warne doubted such a collection would sell. In 1921, however, Anne Carroll Moore, the Superintendent of Children's Work for the New York Public Library, visited Potter at her home, and expressed great interest in the book. Energized by her visitor's enthusiasm, Potter recommenced work on the rhymes. Fruing Warne realized he was not likely to receive anything else from Potter for