One, Two, Buckle My Shoe


"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:
Other sources give differing lyrics.

Origins and meaning

The rhyme is one of many counting-out rhymes. It was first recorded in Songs for the Nursery, published in London in 1805. This version differed beyond the number twelve, with the lyrics:
A version published five years later in Gammer Gurton's Garland had the following different lines:
According to Henry Bolton, collector of counting rhymes in the 1880s, the rhyme was used in Wrentham, Massachusetts as early as 1780.

Illustrated publications

The rhyme was sometimes published alone in illustrated editions. That with lithographs by Caroline R. Baillie 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 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 there was only a single page given to the rhyme, illustrated by Constance Haslewood in the style of Kate Greenaway.