Old Mother Hubbard: Magical Changes with Mother Goose Melodies is a late nineteenth-century children’s book that exemplifies the type of movable children’s book originating in mid-seventeenth century England known as the metamorphic book, flap book, turn-up book, or harlequinade. Whereas earlier flap books used engraved illustrations, this one indicates its relative modernity by using tinted lithographs for its illustrations (William Ludwell Sheppard, the illustrator, was a noted artist). Old Mother Hubbard is the 4th in the 6-part Mother Goose Series published by G.W. Carleton in the late 1870s. Carleton referred to its lithographs as “magic colored pictures.”
Like the other books in the series, Old Mother Hubbard presents violent verse and images that appear inconsistent with literature considered appropriate for young readers, the apparent intended audience. Verses in the book for instance refer to “John O’Gudgeon” the “wild man” who “whipt his children now and then,” making them “dance.” The effect of unexpected horror and subversion is accentuated by the book’s format, which requires readers to lift the flap whose front makes up one image to reveal another lying underneath depicting the next action. One of the metamorphic flap pages exhibited shows on the outer flap Old Mother Hubbard leaving the house she shares with a dog to go to the bakery. When lifting the flap, she is seen returning home to find the dog dead. With the flick of a wrist and turning of a flap page, the narrative expands, progresses and mutates visually, textually and kinetically.