Talk:Just So Stories/The Elephant's Child

I keep six honest serving-men ;

 (They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
 And How and Where and Who.

Text of poem is quoted wrong here (and in article)

No it's not. The text of this poem matches that on the scanned page Page:Just so stories (c1912).djvu/101. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 07:32, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

This is wrong. Note that Where is repeated and Why is missing.

There are several Doubleday books through at least 1958 that make this same mistake.

However, the correct order is not known, as there are (at least) two different published orders that have equal numbers of hits (about 140,000) [This varies from one day to another].

Also, the original date of publication is 1902.

One order is:

What and Why and When And How and Where and Who

Another is:

What and Where and When And How and Why and Who

There are 24 possible permutations of the four, so there might be others.

The only acceptable way to decide would be to get a scanned image of the page (or pages) of the first edition to see what it says.

agb

Sure, however, we reproduce the text as published. So, for this particular edition, "why" is correctly missing. We welcome other editions that will be hosted separately. Beeswaxcandle (talk) 17:12, 21 October 2023 (UTC)