Sir, The popularity of the Civil War explanation of the name Humpty Dumpty (letter, July 11) dates only from Richard Rodney Bennett’s children’s opera All the King’s Men, composed in the 1960s. Significantly, the Opies do not even mention this possible origin in their definitive Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951). They do, however, cite close analogues in other European cultures. If there was a gun that fell off a wall and broke, it would surely have been given the nickname after a phrase in an already existing tale.
MICHAEL GROSVENOR MYER, Cambridge