A Is For Apple Pie

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours Despite the drought, it has been a good year for apples and there are some lovely ripe Bramleys on sale now. Thus the time for apple pie has arrived again so I take this opportunity to present The Tragical Death of an Apple Pie, an alphabet rhyme first published in 1671, in a version produced by Jemmy Catnach in the eighteen-twenties. Poet, compositor and publisher, Catnach moved to London from Newcastle in 1812 and set up Seven Dials Press in Monmouth Court, producing more than four thousand chapbooks and broadsides in the next quarter century. Anointed as the high priest of street literature and eager to feed a seemingly-endless appetite for cheap printed novelties in the capital, Catnach put forth a multifarious list of titles, from lurid crime and political satire to juvenile rhymes and comic ballads, priced famously at a ‘farden.’ A An Apple Pie B Bit it C Cut it D Dealt it E Did eat it F Fought for it G Got it H Had it J Join’d…