See caption
Illustration from St. Nicholas Magazine, 1873
Wikimedia Commons

“Monday’s Child” is a nursery rhyme supposed to foretell a child’s character or future from their day of birth. The earliest known version was published in A. E. Bray’s Traditions of Devonshire (1838).[1]

The common modern version is:

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace.
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go.
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living.
And the child born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.[2]

In some early versions of the rhyme, including that reproduced in Traditions of Devonshire, Christmas Day is substituted for the Sabbath day. A few others begin with Sunday, but have the character attributes in the same order. The rhyme is somewhat at odds with other beliefs about days of the week, [1] such as that Friday was considered to be particularly unlucky, as it was the day of Christ’s crucifixion.[3]

References

  1. loc. 1235
  2. pp. 364–365
  3. loc. 11522–11566

Bibliography

Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1997.
Roud, Steve. The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland. Ebook, Penguin, 2003.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England. Ebook, Penguin, 2003.