The rhyme as published today however is a sophisticated piece usually attributed to American poet Eliza Lee Cabot Follen (1787–1860).

The poem was published in England in 1817 in a review by Willhelm Ewart Gladstone, writing as Bartholomew Jenkins, in The Zion Miscellany.

[1] A version was later published in 1833 as an anonymous addition to a volume of Follen's verse and in the United States in 1843.

The poem is a sophisticated production that avoids the typical moralization of 19th century children's literature in favor of metamorphic fantasy, satirical nonsense, and word play.

Gray observes that the mother cat's disciplinary measures and the kittens' need to report their movements to her are also indicators of a bourgeois status.

"Three Little Kittens" is attributed to Bostonian Sunday school teacher and abolitionist, Eliza Lee Cabot Follen (1787–1860), a member of a prominent New England family and the author of the juvenile novel The Well-Spent Hour.

It is unlikely Follen composed "Kittens" wholecloth, Gray believes, but rather far more likely that she developed and refined an existing but rude version of the piece.

Although Follen disclaimed authorship following the poem's first appearance in print, she continued to publish it under her name in succeeding years.

[3][4] Cuthbert Bede (pen name of Edward Bradley) published a prose version in his Fairy Fables (1857).

[5] In 1858 R. M. Ballantyne published his prose version that elaborated Follen's poem in a volume of the Good Little Pig's Library.

Unlike her female literary contemporaries who typically stressed moral edification in their children's pieces, Follen subordinated such edification in "Three Little Kittens" and emphasized fantasy involving anthropomorphic characters, verbal play, and satirical nonsense.