Publisher's Synopsis
Mother Goose in Prose was L. Frank Baum's first literary work. It was also the first book illustrated by Maxfield Parrish. It was published in 1897 by Way & Williams.The book contained 22 prose fables based on famous nursery rhymes: Twelve of the stories are complemented with black-and-white illustrations by Parrish.Baum gives the stories English settings and ambience, with mentions of London, the Sussex downs, and the River Dee. His tactic in the book is to take the often-nonsensical nursery rhymes and weave coherent, or at least self-consistent, stories from them. In the third selection, on the well-known "Hey, diddle, diddle" rhyme, Baum writes to his child readers, "Perhaps you think this verse is all nonsense, and that the things it mentions could never have happened; but they did happen, as you will understand when I have explained them all to you clearly.
