Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head

Oranges and Lemons is a children's song, basically a nursery rhyme, and one that Orwell's audience would know, and would probably teach to their children. Orwell wrote this in 1949, and it's set in--surprise, surprise--1984, so how far into the future is that, and how old would you guess Winston is? What I'm getting at is: Winston didn't learn the song from a history book or something, he grew up knowing it. A lot of dystopian sci-fi is set in the far-off future, where the world of the author's present has long since vanished, like The Hunger Games. This is set in a future that has living memory of the present. What does that tell you about how quickly this world came into being? Why would Orwell make that choice? To give you some context, a lot of sci-fi since then has taken a cue from Orwell, like the first couple of Terminator movies, V for Vendetta, and Handmaid's Tale, to pick just three. Winston is living in this unrecognizable world, but he has dim memories of a recognizable one, in the form of a children's song he used to know. While we're on the subject, what does it mean that his memory is so dim? What does it mean when he starts remembering more of it?

Also, it's a song about churchbells. IngSoc, the authority in 1984, is fiercely atheistic--they accept no higher power than them, no code of morality that they don't control, and no private sense of goodness or virtue. In that context, what would happen if you let people sing songs about churches?

And that last line. It's interesting, isn't it, how many children's songs are about violence, death and disaster, and we don't even notice. "London Bridge is falling down..." "...ashes, ashes, we all fall down," "...who cut off their tails with a carving knife..." You can probably think of more yourself. If it's just kindergartners dancing in a circle, it's all pretty innocent, right, but how does it change if a coldly violent government official reminds you of it while you're under arrest for singing children's songs?

"Oranges and Lemons" was a nursery rhyme. It was Charlotte Pollard's favourite when she was a child. The Eighth Doctor told her to sing it to help block out the sound of Aboresh and his brethren chanting. (AUDIO: Absolution)

When chased by a Feratu named Janet in a helicopter, Ace jokingly quoted the line from the poem, "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!" (AUDIO: An Alien Werewolf in London)

Joe Buchanan once recited the rhyme in part, saying, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head". (TV: The God Complex)

Behind the scenes[]

It is also obliquely referenced by the episode title The Bells of Saint John, as one of the rhyming couplets from the original nursery rhyme goes "Pokers and tongs / say the bells of Saint John's".

It was alluded to in TV: Ghost Light, when Gwendoline Pritchard presents the Doctor with a candle and states "here, Doctor, to light you to bed".

'More. Two hundred, I dare say. One can't tell. It's impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays.'

She went over to look at it. 'Here's where that brute stuck his nose out,' she said, kicking the wainscoting immediately below the picture. 'What is this place? I've seen it before somewhere.'

'It's a church, or at least it used to be. St Clement's Danes its name was.' The fragment of rhyme that Mr Charrington had taught him came back into his head, and he added half-nostalgically: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's!"

To his astonishment she capped the line:

'You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin's,
When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey -- '

'I can't remember how it goes on after that. But anyway I remember it ends up, "Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"

It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after 'the bells of Old Bailey'. Perhaps it could be dug out of Mr Charrington's memory, if he were suitably prompted.

'Who taught you that?' he said.

'My grandfather. He used to say it to me when I was a little girl. He was vaporized when I was eight -- at any rate, he disappeared. I wonder what a lemon was,' she added inconsequently. 'I've seen oranges. They're a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin.'

'I can remember lemons,' said Winston. 'They were quite common in the fifties. They were so sour that it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.'

'I bet that picture's got bugs behind it,' said Julia. 'I'll take it down and give it a good clean some day. I suppose it's almost time we were leaving. I must start washing this paint off. What a bore! I'll get the lipstick off your face afterwards.'

Winston did not get up for a few minutes more. The room was darkening. He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the

What does the nursery rhyme symbolize in 1984?

What are the words to St Clement's tune 1984?

Who said and by the way while we are on the subject here comes a candle to light you to bed here comes a chopper to chop off your head?

What is the meaning behind the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons?