A brisk rhyme about a lost pocket and an empty find. Lucy Locket and Kitty Fisher were both real eighteenth-century women, a nice fact to keep in your back pocket. Quick and tidy, easy to learn by heart.
Sung to the Yankee Doodle tune.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
Nothing in it, nothing in it,
But the binding round it.
About this rhyme
A pocket here is not the sewn-in kind. It was a small pouch a woman tied round her waist, worn under her skirts, easy to lose and easy to find. The rhyme was first written down in the 1840s. You may read that Lucy Locket and Kitty Fisher were rival London women of fashion, and Kitty Fisher was a real one, well known enough to be painted by Joshua Reynolds. The tie to this rhyme, though, is guesswork rather than record.
Make it a losing-and-finding game. Hide a little purse and let your child be Kitty Fisher, hunting it down. The nothing in it, nothing in it repeat is made for peeking inside and pulling a surprised face. It suits tidying-up time, when things are being found anyway.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition