This Little Piggy

Story

This Little Piggy is a finger-play nursery rhyme about five little pigs on market day. Typically, it is told to a small child while an adult wiggles each one of the child’s toes in turn, with tickles and squeals.

Why we chose it

This Little Piggy is loved by very young children. It was one of the rhymes in our original audio stories collection and featured in the nursery rhyme room in our Time for Bed exhibition.

Where it came from

The first line of the poem was published in 1728 in a collection called The Nurse’s Song, and it subsequently appeared in full in The Famous Tommy Thumb’s Little Story Book in 1760. As is the norm with nursery rhymes, there is no definitive author, but it is generally attributed to Mother Goose. Mother Goose is sometimes believed to have been a real woman, but she is usually understood to be a fiction inspired by many real people dating back as far as the 8th century.

Where it went next

In recent years there have been many attempts to attribute different meanings to This Little Piggy. Often, it is thought that the first little pig was not going to the market to do its shopping, but to be sold, and the one eating roast beef was being fattened for market. It has been referenced in a number of films and television programmes, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) in a scene where Tweety Pie peels Eddie Valiant’s fingers from a pole one by one (which was itself a reference to a Tweety Pie cartoon of 1947).

Associated stories

This Little Piggy is included in many collections of children’s poetry and nursery rhymes. It has also been adapted in lots of different ways, including This Little Piggy by Jarvis (2019) a 1-10 counting book in which the piggies play bongos on an elephant, dance for hours, and have trouble parking their car.

In the museum

Find the pigs on the mural behind the bed in Small Worlds.