Charles H. Bennett's Shadows (ca. 1856)

[prismatic]

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/shadows/

[tetris11]

> Bennett wrote a number of children’s books — The Faithless Parrot (1863), The Frog Who Would a Wooing Go (1864), The Nine Lives of a Cat (1860)

At first I thought he was the originator of the Froggy goes a-courtin song, but that predates his book by several hundred years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_Went_a-Courting