Early South African English children's verse is little known. The reference books on South African English children's literature by Jay Heale (1985) and Shirley Davies (1992) do not have separate sections for poetry. Heale (1996), in his survey From the Bushveld to Biko, and the National Library, in the exhibition called Amandla eBali that it mounted in 2004, included only one book of verse, South African Nursery Rhymes by Margaret Whiting Spilhaus (1924), which is not strongly representative of the genre. Their choice indicates how ignorant the few authorities on local English children's books are on this subject. The proceedings of three major South African conferences on children's literature (Cilliers 1988; 1993; Machet, Olën and van der Walt 1995) contain no papers on English verse. By contrast, the authoritative study of Afrikaans children's literature, Van Patrys-hulle tot Hanna Hoekom (Wybenga and Snyman 2005) has two lengthy essays on children's poetry: Dorothea van Zyl (2005) on poetry before 1970 and Karen de Wet (2005) on subsequent poetry.

Compared with the wealth of material that Van Zyl and De Wet have to discuss, the English field is indeed slim. I have identified twenty-two books published between 1901 and 1950, some of which only include a few poems among other material. I do not count anthologies for children that include poetry originally written for adults but which has come to be considered suitable for children to read. I have also excluded the poems by Pauline Smith that are included in Platkops Children, which, I explain in Chapter 8, I prefer to regard as a book for adult readers.

Of the twenty-two books, seventeen were published in South Africa, only four having been published in the UK. (One is an unpublished manuscript written in South Africa.) This proportion reflects the publishing history of all South African English children's books for the same period: the verse comes from a pronounced South African milieu.