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One, Two, Buckle My Shoe facts for kids

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"One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"
1-2 buckle my shoe.jpg
Augustus Hoppin's illustration, published in New York, 1870
Nursery rhyme
Published 1805

"One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" is a popular English language nursery rhyme and counting-out rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 11284.

Lyrics

A common version is given in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes:

One, two, Buckle my shoe;
Three, four, Knock at the door;
Five, six, Pick up sticks;
Seven, eight, Lay them straight:
Nine, ten, A big fat hen;
Eleven, twelve, Dig and delve;
Thirteen, fourteen, Maids a-courting;
Fifteen, sixteen, Maids in the kitchen;
Seventeen, eighteen, Maids in waiting
Nineteen, twenty, My plate's empty.

Other sources give differing lyrics.

Illustrated publications

The rhyme was sometimes published alone in illustrated editions. That with lithographs by Caroline R. Baillie (Edinburgh, 1857) had an oblong format showing domestic 18th-century interiors. There were also two editions of the rhyme published from London, both illustrated by Walter Crane. The first was a single volume picture-book (John Lane, 1869) with end-papers showing a composite of the 1 – 10 sequence and of the 11 – 20 sequence. It was followed in 1910 by The Buckle My Shoe Picture Book, containing other rhymes too. This had coloured full-page illustrations: composites for lines 1-2 and 3-4, and then one for each individual line.

In America the rhyme was used to help young people learn to count and was also individually published. Of the 21 pages in Hurd and Houghton’s edition, published in New York about 1870, there were ten taken up by Augustus Hoppin’s nonsense drawings. In Old Mother Goose’s Rhymes And Tales (London and New York, 1889) there was only a single page given to the rhyme, illustrated by Constance Haslewood in the style of Kate Greenaway.

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