Thimble's scolding wife. Together with The Boston beau and the cow

With an illustrative print by George Cruikshank, the new song “Thimble’s Scolding Wife” was published as Heighho! Says Thimble: Written by G[eorge] Colman [Jr.], Esq. And Sung, with Unbounded Applause, by Mr. [John] Liston, in the Farce Called ‘Killing No Murder!’ at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (Tune—Heighho! Says Rowley) (George #11525). “Heighho! Says Rowley,” is the chorus line of “The Frog and Mouse” of which this text is a direct parody. From the opening phrase of the song, the audience would be prepared for a funny lyric with at least one line of a nonsense burden. In American performances of Killing No Murder, Liston’s part was played by Francis Blissett, a successful low comedian. His song was published in several editions and the text appeared in twenty-seven songsters between 1811 and 1820 (Porter, With an Air 256; Wolfe, Secular Music #9342-45; R. Keller, Early American Songsters). Parodies appeared in the 1809-12 period and several nineteenth-century slip ballad exemplars are in the Bodleian Library collection. Frank C. Brown collected one verse of the song in North Carolina (George 8:907; Belden and Hudson 2:484-85; Roud #6494). It survived long enough in Virginia to be published as a folk song text in the twentieth century (A. Davis 160). 

Charles Dibdin wrote “Jackey and the Cow” for his entertainment Christmas Gambols (1795), satirizing society’s fixation on being “in the fashion,” regardless of how foolish one looked. In 1796, Laurie & Whittle published a colored mezzotint of the scene in which Jackey comes back to his parents’ house and sees the mutilated cow. For this broadside, the lyric has been localized to Boston and the original English West-Country dialect removed. The original song appeared in six songsters between 1798 and 1805 (R. Keller); the tune is included in Riley’s Flute Melodies (3:72).