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 in the Peter Rabbit collection. "Miss Moppet" was intended for babies and very young children, and MacDonald believes Potter's suggestion indicated she also intended "Appley Dapply" for the very young who are satisfied with vignettes and the sorts of simple, isolated incidents nursery rhymes present, rather than longer, more complex plots. MacDonald believes the illustrations are some of Potter's best, but the book suffers from its small format and would be better suited to the larger format Potter originally intended. Much detail in the illustrations, MacDonald argues, is obscured with the reduction in book size. M. Daphne Kutzer of the