 Humpty Dumpty has become a highly popular nursery rhyme character . American actor George L. Fox ( 1825 – 77 ) helped to popularise the character in nineteenth @-@ century stage productions of <unk> versions , music , and rhyme . The character is also a common literary allusion , particularly to refer to a person in an <unk> position , something that would be difficult to reconstruct once broken , or a short and fat person . Humpty Dumpty has been used in a large range of literary works in addition to his appearance as a character in Through the Looking @-@ Glass , including L. Frank Baum 's Mother Goose in <unk> ( 1901 ) , where the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the king , having witnessed Humpty 's " death " and her father 's soldiers ' efforts to save him . In Neil Gaiman 's early short story The Case of the Four and Twenty <unk> , the Humpty Dumpty story is turned into a film noir @-@ style <unk> crime story , involving also <unk> Robin , the Queen of Hearts , Little Bo <unk> , Old Mother Hubbard , and other characters from popular nursery rhymes . Robert Rankin used Humpty Dumpty as one victim of a serial fairy @-@ tale character murderer in The Hollow <unk> <unk> of the Apocalypse ( 2002 ) . Jasper <unk> included Humpty Dumpty in his novels The Well of Lost <unk> ( 2003 ) and The Big Over Easy ( 2005 ) , which use him respectively as a <unk> of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike and as the victim of a murder . 
