Caldecott fashioned a distinctive interpretation all his own of these short six-line and four-line traditional nursery rhymes.
Hey Diddle Diddle
What if a cat played a fiddle? Caldecott interprets the original verse with the fiddling cat and the hilarious consequences. The Dish runs away with the Spoon but the dish is broken and the elopement fails. Caldecott skillfully turns six lines of nonsense into a charming and dramatic eleven-page tale.
Baby Bunting
Caldecott changes the story of the rhyme about a father going to hunt for a rabbit skin to wrap his baby in which the father, coming home from hunting without having shot anything, stops in the town to buy a rabbit skin. The last page, showing the baby in his rabbit bunting gazing at the rabbits in the fields, displays Caldecott’s bemused view of the human beings behind these traditional rhymes.