Imagining the girl next door seeking salvation from a
constable, Bloom plays wittily on the name of her employer, Mr. Woods: "O please, Mr
Policeman, I'm lost in the wood." His conceit alludes to two
staples of popular culture. The traditional children's story Babes
in the Wood is one that he might have encountered
either in pantomimes or in
Mother Goose nursery rhymes.
He combines its picture of frightened children lost in the
forest with a music-hall
song, Oh Please, Mr. P'liceman, about country girls
lost in the big city.
Babes in the Wood, originally published as a
broadsheet ballad in 1595, is the story of two small children
left in the care of their uncle after their parents die. To
steal their inheritance, the uncle sends them off with a pair
of murderers, one of whom kills the other and leaves the
children to fend for themselves in the woods. They die, and
birds cover their bodies with leaves.
Oh Please, Mr. P'liceman presents a less dire
predicament. Gifford and Seidman identify the song as one
"written by E. Andrews and popularized in the 1890s by the
Tillie Sisters." They publish these lyrics:
To London Town we came, you know, a week ago today,
And 'tis the first time we've been out, and quickly lost our
way;
We got somewhere near Leicester Square, when a p'liceman
bold
Cried out, "Move on!" and how he laughed as we our story
told.
(Chorus)
Oh, please, Mr. P'liceman, do be good to us;
We've not been long in London, and we want to take a 'bus.
They told us we could go by 'bus to Pimlico,
Oh, what wicked Place is London—Oh! Oh! Oh!
This was not the only music-hall song about unhelpful
policemen. In Popular Music in England, 1840-1914: A
Social History (McGill-Queen's UP, 1987), Dave Russell
observes that "Policemen seem to have featured in music-hall
song from at least the late 1860s," often as objects of scorn
(101). Nor was it the only such song to entertain audiences
with stories of country bumpkins daunted by their city
cousins.
Please, Sir, I've Lost My Way, performed by Vesta Tilley, is the song
of a Lincolnshire villager who feels "a little green" in the
big city. He is approached by a woman who says that she too
has lost her way in the city and needs help. A policeman
appears; the woman suddenly accuses her savior of insulting
and threatening her; the policeman threatens to haul him away
and teach him better manners; he offers to give the policeman
all his possessions to avoid the beating; the policeman takes
his watch, his chain, and his purse. When the man finds
another policeman and tells him the story, the constable at
first laughs, and then tells him that he has been victimized
by a pair of swindlers that the police are looking for. And
now, "I'm chaffed by all who know it, by my friends, both far
and near, / And even cheeky barmaids when they serve me smile
and jeer."
The theme of laughter in these songs—knowing city dwellers
enjoying themselves at the expense of naive recent
arrivals—cuts the melodramatic pathos of Babes in the
Wood. Bloom clearly is not too worried about the sexual
vulnerability of his neighbor's servant, the girl who wears
"Brown scapulars in
tatters, defending her both ways." Herself perhaps a recent
arrival from the country, she goes in the same mental
pigeonhole as redheaded curates
from the county Leitrim and burly policemen.
