Open Your Mouth and Shut Your Eyes

DESCRIPTION: "Open your mouth and shut your eyes, And you will get a big surprise." Or "...eyes, And I'll give you something to make you wise."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1860 (see NOTES)
KEYWORDS: food nonballad | counting-out
FOUND IN: US(MW) Ireland
REFERENCES (4 citations):
Sackett/Koch-KansasFolklore, p. 122, "(Open your mouth and shut your eyes)" (1 text)
Delamar-ChildrensCountingOutRhymes, p. 121, "Open your mouth and close your eyes" (1 text)
Brady-AllInAllIn, p. 22, "Shut your eyes" (1 text)
John Julian, editor, _A Dictionary of Hymnology_, p. 46, "Open your mouth and shut your eyes" (1 text)
Roud #25368
NOTES [276 words]: The earliest version I've found of this collected in tradition is Sackett/Koch-KansasFolklore's. But it is without doubt much, much older. When I was a child in the 1960s, my mother would haul this out at children's parties; she must have learned it in Illinois or Michigan some decades earlier. But that is by no means the earliest date. In July 1860, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) posed a picture of Lorina, Alice, and Edith Liddell in the garden of the Christ Church deanery (the home of the Liddell girls, the daughters of Dean Henry George Liddell). Lorina, the oldest sister, is holding a pair of cherries, and Alice, the middle sister, has her eyes closed and appears to be about to eat them. (Edith is just sitting off to the side). The photograph is titled, "Open your mouth and shut your eyes." Thus Dodgson, who often created photos with "stories," must have been illustrating some version of this rhyme.
The photo has often been reprinted. A selection of published copies includes:
Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling, Lewis Carroll: Photographer (Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 64.
Douglas R. Nickel, Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll (Yale University Press, 2002), Plate 26.
Morton N. Cohen, Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer (Aperture, no date), p. 63.
Colin Gordin, Beyond the Looking Glass: Reflections of Alice and Her Family (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 93.
Ann Clark, The Real Alice (Stein and Day, 1981), p. 69.
There are versions in many of Dodgson's biographies as well. Or just google "Open your mouth and shut your eyes Liddell." - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: SaKo122C

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