BEATRIX POTTER AND SOCIAL COMEDY
GILLIAN AVERY*
OXFORD
If you look up Beatrix Potter in the Oxford dictionary of quotations you
will find one entry only: 'Don't go into Mr McGregor's garden: your
father had an accident there; he was put into a pie by Mrs McGregor'.
The Oxford dictionary of modern quotations also includes this, adding
two more from Peter Rabbit, one from the Flopsy Bunnies - about the
soporific quality of lettuce - and two from the Tailor of Gloucester. But
that terse remark, which occurs almost at the beginning of her first
book, conveys the essence of her writing. There are many more. '"It
would never do to eat our own customers," says Pickles to Ginger.
"They would leave us and go to Tabitha Twitchit's." "On the contrary,
they would go nowhere," replied Ginger gloomily'.
Aphorisms such as this are plentiful - dispassionate, ruthless
and beautifully succinct. One remembers the young Beatrix with
her brother collecting and skinning dead animals and birds with
scientific detachment; on one occasion even succeeding in
articulating a fox skeleton - having of course first boiled the carcass
and stripped it. At fifteen she was still the same. She did not agonize
about the possible fate of one of the family horses - she was no
Anna Sewell. Beatrix Potter was Augustan in spirit rather than what
we think of as Victorian: things are as they are, and the
consequences of them will be as they will be.
15 January, 1882. . . . The chestnut horse is disposed of at last. Papa sent Reynolds
to the Zoological Gardens to enquire the price of cat's meat: £2 for a very fat
horse, 30/- for a middling one, thin ones not taken as the lions are particular.
However, he was sold to a cab owner along the road for £15 ... Papa said he never
made a good bargain.
And at seventeen, during a visit to Manchester, she says: 'Saw a
grand sight in the evening, one wing of the Infirmary was burnt
down ... I had no idea it would make such a blaze'.
To a certain extent Beatrix Potter seems to have inherited her
hard-headedness from her Lancashire forbears, industrialists on
both sides of the family. We remember the story that her Potter
grandmother told about the fate of one of her youthful admirers,
* An earlier version of this paper was read to the Beatrix Potter Society in 1992.
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who attended the same Unitarian chapel. 'Quite a common man one of the congregation,' Grandmamma remarked to Beatrix. 'My
mother directed the footman to put him under the pump'.
Humphrey Carpenter in his essay 'Excessively impertinent
bunnies' 1 has drawn attention to the empathy between the young
Beatrix and her grandmother. And the calm way in which
Grandmamma Potter reduces a lover's tragedy to a dozen words is
closely paralleled by her granddaughter's equally concise account of
how Mrs Rabbit became a widow, or why it was short-sighted policy
for shopkeepers to eat their customers.
Potter's journal, which was being kept long before she had
embarked on any creative writing, is in some ways puzzling. It is
strikingly impersonal, particularly in her adolescent years when girls,
especially those with literary tastes, might be expected to be
introspective and brooding. And she was of course writing in cipher.
Though a professional decoder would presumably have had no trouble
in breaking this, it took Leslie Linder, as we know, six years, and the
young Beatrix herself was confident that no one would ever be able to
read what she had written. Even so, she shows amazing reserve and
power of self-control. There are a few, a very few, moments when deep
feelings surface. Occasionally she allows an expression of irritation to
escape her, about her drawing lessons, or when she discovers that her
parents are insisting on another governess when she thought her formal
education ought to be over. 'Miss Carter came' she says on 15
September 1883. And on 10 July 1885, when Miss Carter had left, she
coolly but dismissively assesses her: 'I have liked my last governess best
on the whole - Miss Carter had her faults, and was one of the youngest
people I have ever seen, but she was very good-tempered and
intelligent'. Over the period of two years these are the only references to
someone with whom she had been in daily close contact. Nor does she
bother to record what Miss Carter's faults may have been.
She goes to art exhibitions, but the pictures arouse no emotion or
enthusiasm, only critical comments. She appears to be engrossed by
the news of the day, by political events and personalities, and this in
itself is surprising at a time when female young persons did not
generally read the newspapers. The old idea of the young Beatrix
immured in her schoolroom, isolated from the world, clearly had to be
discarded; this girl must have spent a lot of time listening to her father
fulminating against crying scandals, such as Gladstone's efforts to
bring in home rule for Ireland. To the Potters (and therefore to their
daughter) Gladstone was abhorrent. In 1890, after seeing him at the
Royal Academy Winter Exhibition, she was to describe him thus:
1 Humphrey Carpenter: 'Excessively impertinent bunnies: the subversive element in
Beatrix Potter', in Children and their books, ed. Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989).
BEATRIX POTTER
187
He really looks as if he had been put into a clothes-bag and sat upon. I never saw a
person so creased. He was dressed entirely in rusty black, like a typical clergyman
or a Dissenting Minister or Dominie, and has a wrinkled appearance of not filling
his clothes.
His trousers particularly were too long, I did not notice his finger tips but one
would expect his gloves to be the same. I forgot to look at his collar either, one
accepts it as a matter of course, being Friday it may have toned down. [Gladstone
was famous for his enormously high collars, an obsolete fashion that he clung to.]
You are probably exclaiming at my not describing himself, but indeed he seemed to
be shrunk out of sight inside his clothes, in the same fashion that some gray wisps
of hair straggled out under his old hat. But very waken,2 not to say foxy the old
fellow looked, what there is of him.
What does stir the young Miss Potter is the past - the
possession of a dress which had belonged to her grandmother as a
girl; the anniversary of her grandfather's death; memories of old Mr
Gaskell, husband of the novelist, who had taken an interest in her
when she was a child. And one of the longest entries in the entire
journal is for 23 February 1886, when she visits her great-aunt and
sets down some of her talk of the past. 'I sat looking at the fire and
trying to keep back my tears,' wrote Beatrix - an unusual reaction,
surely, from a twenty-year-old listening to an elder's ramblings. But
only one of her own stories looks back to the past.
In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta there lived a tailor in Gloucester.
Satin and pompadour and lutestring, a cream-coloured satin
waistcoat trimmed with gauze and green worsted chenille - she sets
down details like these with the same relish, one would almost say
emotion, with which she had described her grandmother's wedding
dress ('white silk brocade, high-waisted, short, scolloped at the
bottom, lownecked, tight long sleeves with puffs to put on over
them'). We might have expected her to continue in this historical
vein, but the Tailor of Gloucester was to be her only costume
romance, and this fact in itself shows singular restraint, since on her
own admission it was her favourite book.
The early journal, as I have said, is puzzling because not only
is it different from the usual adolescent diary, but because we find
there so few hints of the sort of writer she was going to be. True, she
shows signs of a sense of humour, but this only takes the form
of recording jokes which she has presumably heard from her father or
seen in the newspaper. They are set down laconically, with
no comment, but we must assume they are there because she thought
they were funny. But any humour they may once have had has not
lasted, whereas her own has.
2 'Waken', seeming to mean sly, is a word she uses more than once in her journal.
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By the 1890s the journal is recording fewer newspaper items,
more about her own daily life. The account of the three months that
the family spent in Perthshire in 1892 might be called a turning
point. It is as if not just the writing but the author herself was
suddenly waking into life; the visit to Cornwall earlier in the year
had nothing like the same feeling of empathy with her surroundings.
In many ways the journal written in Perthshire is reminiscent of
Francis Kilvert's record of life in Radnorshire some twenty years
before, in the intensity with which the writer feels the landscape, the
personalities of the inhabitants, and the anecdotes that they tell her.
The economy of the descriptions, so marked in her stories, is
noticeable. This for instance is her account of a frosty morning in
late October:
The brook was full of icicles and thin pancake sheets raised up above the pools, and
jagged broken froth at the corner of the eddies. I drove up the Braan . . . The roads
were iron-bound and ringing, too dry to be slippery. In the shadow of the woods
the white hoar-frost felt like a cold breath, the shadows are long now even at noon.3
And she is equally successful in sketching personalities. The
post master she finds infuriating, though comical.
You go down in a hurry with two or three small affairs, say a postal order and three
stamps. He says in a forbidding manner 'let us do one thing first;
"haveyougotapenny?" He works out the change on his fingers, and after all has to
carry on the halfpence to the next transaction, which you work out for him as he
has collapsed into a state of imbecility.
He is a fat, hunched old fellow, with little piggy eyes, a thick voice and wears a
smoking-cap with a yellow tassel, and he has immense hands with which he slowly
fumbles about for the stamps . . .4
A few weeks later comes a famous passage, appraising the
character of rabbits from observation of her own Benjamin Bounce.
Rabbits are creatures of warm volatile temperament but shallow and absurdly
transparent. It is this naturalness, one touch of nature, that I find so delightful in
Mr Benjamin Bunny, though I frankly admit his vulgarity. At one moment amiably
sentimental to the verge of silliness, at the next, the upsetting of a jug or a tea-cup
which he immediately takes upon himself, will convert him into a demon, throwing
himself on his back, scratching and spluttering. ..
He is an abject coward, but believes in bluster, could stare our old dog out of
countenance, chase a cat that has turned tail.. .
Benjamin once fell into an Aquarium head first, and sat in the water which he
could not get out of, pretending to eat a piece of string. Nothing like putting a face
upon circumstances.5
3 The journal of Beatrix Potter, transcribed by Leslie Linder (London: Frederick Warne,
1989), 300.
« Ibid., 281.
5 Ibid., 307.
BEATRIX POTTER
189
And this brings us to her attitude towards animals. She was not
the usual type of animal lover. Her interest was scientific. She
records their behaviour and habits without sentimentality and
without anthropomorphizing them. We have seen her indifference
to the fate of one of the family's horses. On more than one occasion
in her journal she expresses dislike of dogs. Though she was to
become a dog-owner, she writes on 6 September 1894: 'I consider
the race an unmitigated nuisance'. Of cats she has little or nothing
to say. On the other hand she grieves over the death of a family of
snails, and gives much attention to pet dormice, hedgehogs,
squirrels, and of course the far longer lived Benjamin Bounce.
Here again one is puzzled. This is a wild rabbit whom she is
forcing to lead a wholly unnatural life. He is taken for walks with a
collar and lead; he lives indoors and lies in front of the fire like any
domestic pet, and when the family goes on holiday he accompanies
them in a basket. This is hardly the way one would expect an animal
lover or a scientist to behave. Humphrey Carpenter has referred to
her as 'pathologically shy and therefore bad at getting her own
way'.6 I personally would query the latter part of this affirmation;
the isolated life she led at the top of the house in Bolton Gardens
seems to have been her own choice, and in her day one required a
strong personality and spirit of resistance to avoid being dragged
into one's mother's social round. If we read the novels of Charlotte
Yonge we can get some idea how devouring and demanding
Victorian upper-middle-class mothers could be. They would
certainly normally have expected unmarried daughters, however shy
and awkward in company, to play their part in the interminable
treadmill of paying social calls and receiving them; but the young
Beatrix seems to have escaped most of this. And the life she
imposed on Benjamin Bounce seems to me another example of her
strong will - it can't be easy to tame a wild rabbit.
The journal, as has been said, is free of anthropomorphism.
What one finds in the stories is not so much animals with human
feelings as human beings given animal shapes for the purpose of
satirical comedy. In the same way Aesop and other fabulists used
foxes, cranes, frogs, and so on to illustrate human failings and
predicaments. Mrs Tittlemouse is any bustling house-proud little
body; the character of Mrs Tiggy-winkle was apparently based on
Kitty MacDonald, who did the washing for the Potter household
when they were staying in Perthshire. The pie and the patty-pan is a
sardonic account of the efforts of two fluttering human hostesses
trying to be genteel - it all turns on social embarrassment. And we
all have been amused and irritated by scatty females like Jemima
Puddleduck. The scientific accuracy with which Beatrix Potter drew
6 Carpenter, op. cit., 280.
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her animals even when wearing clothes has sometimes deluded the
casual observer, as for instance the author of the entry in the
Fontana biographical companion to modern thought who wrote: 'Rarely
portraying humans, she captured essentially animal characteristics'. 7
The dim-witted Perthshire post-master with his yellow-tasselled
smoking cap, whom she described in the journal, is just the sort of
person who might have figured in a story, and one would guess that
she had encountered a real Mr Jackson - the toad who blunders into
Mrs Tittlemouse's clean little house and is offered cherrystones for
dinner:
'Thank you, thank you, Mrs Tittlemouse! No teeth, no teeth, no teeth!' said Mr
Jackson.
He opened his mouth most unnecessarily wide; he certainly had not a tooth in
his head.
Or there is Mr John Dormouse whose attitude to his livelihood
epitomizes so much that the English have experienced in their
shopkeepers:
And when Mr John Dormouse was complained to, he stayed in bed, and would say
nothing but 'Very snug', which is not the way to carry on a retail business.
Conversely, her description of, for instance, one of her uncles in
1895 might be one of Mr Jeremy Fisher's friends:
Uncle Fred is quietening into a little old man, deaf, placid, rather dateless,
excessively obstinate, very mean as to ha'pence, unapproachably autocratic and
sublimely unconscious of the fact that he cannot drive.8
Nor would she have simplified this passage for storybook purposes;
she was as strong-minded about this as about other things in her
life.
The dispassionate ruthlessness that characterizes Beatrix
Potter's storytelling has already been mentioned. Ruthlessness and
violence have always been popular with children. They don't worry
in the least about the fate of Jack and Jill, the three blind mice, or the
old man in 'Goosey Gander' who wouldn't say his prayers. When a
wicked stepmother is rolled downhill in barrels of nails in one of
Grimms' stories their reaction is to hope the nails were long ones,
and perhaps to gloat over what the stepmother might have looked
like at the end of it all. But though children have now taken them
over, nursery rhymes and folk stories were not composed with them
in mind, and adults who write for children are in general more
7 Juliet McLean in The Fontana biographical companion to modern thought (London:
Fontana, 1983), 611.
8 Journal, 384.
BEATRIX POTTER
191
fastidious. Besides, they know that violence is followed by pain and
suffering. Some writers, particularly in the past, sought to justify
such things by inserting a moral. In Heinrich Hoffmann's
Struwwelpeter (English version first published in Leipzig in 1848)
Harriet is burnt to a cinder because she plays with matches. Conrad
has his thumbs cut off by the great long red-legged scissorman
because he sucks them. Hoffmann shows us the disconsolate little
boy exhibiting his thumbless hands. But his mother looks down at
this spectacle as if from Olympian heights:
'Ah!' said Mamma, 'I knew he'd come,
To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb.'
The dispassion which Beatrix Potter was to show was not in fact
unique to her.
There are plenty of other examples of violence in the picture
books of the last century; the mid-Victorians took particular
pleasure in savage grotesquery, which they often embellished with
horrible verbal puns. We get a late example in 1889 in The demon
cat, a pictorial record (by C.W. Cole and W. Ralston) of the
headlong career and violent end of a cat that attaches himself to a
warship in the Royal Navy. The havoc that he creates is on a
Homeric scale. Pursued, he takes refuge in a gun. The book
finishes:
Alas! unknown to him it was a Royal Review day, and they were about to salute.
Requies - Cat in pieces.
The final drawing is of a cat bloodily fragmenting. An earlier book,
published, one would guess, in the 1860s, with the title, The tragic
yet strictly moral story of how three little pigs went to market and the old
one stayed at home,, is stated to be 'related in Eggs-hameter,
illustrated with cuts from Bacon, and printed in Pigment'. The three
little pigs are sent to market by their mother to buy flour, milk and
eggs for pancake batter. Alas, they start fighting and come home
coated in batter from snout to trotter.
And they looked so much like batter.
Only richer far and fatter,
The old pig, mad as a hatter,
Put them all in the frying-pan,
Till all into one they ran.
And then we see their mother, watched by salivating cats, settling
down at table to demolish the whole panful, her only expression
being greedy anticipation. She eats them all up, and the
consequence is a fearful attack of indigestion in the middle of the
night.
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The doctor gave her a pill,
Which was certain sure to kill,
So she died upon the spot,
And she deserved what she got.
The last picture is of a garland of naked piglets, capering gleefully
round three mournful little boys clasping their stomachs, the moral
being two-fold.
Now boys, you should never fight,
Nor in quarrelling take delight;
And never, oh, never at night,
Roast pork for supper take.
Even more harrowing is a picture book of 1859 which went
into several editions. It is based on a rhyme which Thomas Hood
used to tell his children - The headlong career and woful ending of
Precocious Piggy. The tale is very simple; Piggy, dressed as a midVictorian swell, goes out to see the world. He takes to driving a gig
and drinking. He goes to a grand ball and (dressed rather more
seedily) to the fair. He also buys a wig. But then his destiny catches
up with him.
Where are you going to, you little pig?
'The Butcher is coming, I've grown so big!'
The Butcher! Poor pig!
Are you grown so big?
Well, I think it high time then you hop the twig!
And that is the end of the text. The delicately tinted pictures which
illustrate this brief last chapter in Piggy's life show the distraught pig
with his hair standing on end kneeling and clasping frenzied trotters,
while an implacable butcher in top boots mordantly sharpens his
knife. Decorating the text on the page opposite is a composition
showing a gutted pig's carcass wreathed in sausages, accompanied
by a ham and a pig's head on a plate, and beside it the pig in a
shroud haunting his old sty. But what seems especially curious is the
introduction by Thomas Hood's daughter. Admitting that she
herself used to cry over poor Piggy's tragical fate, she nevertheless
concludes with the pious wish that the book will 'bring a merry
laugh to the little face of that happy childhood that [my father] loved
so well'.
Pigs and frogs were very popular with mid-Victorian picture
book illustrators, perhaps because they lent themselves to comic
drawing. And the fate of pigs was much dwelt on, with no apparent
thought that this might be found distressing. Curiously, the whole of
Little Pig Robinson - published in 1930 though derived from
material written nearly forty years earlier - turns on pork and bacon
jokes. This sort of humour would have looked decidedly out of
BEATRIX POTTER
193
place in the 1930s - an epoch when there was a conspiracy on the
part of middle-class adults to conceal harsh realities from children.
Robinson's aunts, whom we meet briefly early in the story, are
benign and affectionate creatures, devoted to their nephew.
Aunt Dorcas was a stout speckled pig who kept hens. Aunt Porcas was a large
smiling black pig who took in washing. We shall not hear very much about them in
this story. They led prosperous uneventful lives, and their end was bacon.
Happy and placid though they are, they do have some intimation of
what happens to pigs. They take care, for instance, to patronize a
grocer's shop that does not sell bacon.
'What pleasure,' said Aunt Dorcas feelingly - 'what possible pleasure can there be
in entering a shop where you knock your head against a ham? A ham that may have
belonged to a dear second cousin?'
Robinson has less worldly wisdom than his aunts, and is
gullible and trusting, but when he hears that the ship a kind sailor is
going to show him round is called the 'Pound of Candles' he is
uneasy.
It reminded him of tallow, of lard, of crackle and trimmings of bacon. But he
allowed himself to be led away, smiling shyly, and walking on his toes.
Though why should candles remind him of pork and bacon? Tallow
comes from beef and mutton fat, not pigs. The pork jokes reach
their climax as the innocent Robinson allows himself to be fattened
for the captain's birthday dinner. The mate and the cook watch him
comfortably sleeping on the sunny deck, after a banquet of porridge
and potatoes.
'I don't fancy loin of pork with sunstroke, Cooky. Stir him up; or else throw a piece
of sail cloth over him. I was bred on a farm myself. Pigs should never be let sleep in
a hot sun.'
'As why?' inquired the cook.
'Sunstroke,' replied the mate. 'Likewise it scorches the skin; makes it peely like;
spoils the look of the crackling.'
This is the rather boisterous humour of Grandmother Potter's
generation. It all lacks the subtlety of that terse reference to the fate
of Peter Rabbit's father. It is noticeable that there are virtually no
pork jokes in The tale of Pigling Bland, written later though with an
earlier publication date.
There is very little record of what books Beatrix Potter read as
a child. It is clear that she was steeped in nursery rhymes and folk
stories, and we know she enjoyed Uncle Remus. It is perfectly
possible that she saw books like Precocious Piggy and their kind,
though, as I have said, I think that the ruthlessness she displayed in
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her stories was her own. And to it she added a unique touch of
comedy. Social comedy does not play a great part in children's
books; children lack the experience to understand it, so that the
writer who wants to write a comedy of manners is obliged either to
explain nuances that would be obvious to an adult, or exaggerate so
that the point won't be missed. Irony therefore is rarely attempted,
except by Beatrix Potter, who of all children's writers approaches
closest to Jane Austen.
The late Roger Lancelyn Green once referred to Mrs
Molesworth as the 'Jane Austen of the nursery'. 9 But Mrs
Molesworth, whose writing career began in 1875, and whose last
book was published in 1911, was alas no such thing. It would be
tedious and pointless to make an elaborate comparison, but one of the
obvious qualities that she lacked was a sense of humour. And we
would search through her voluminous output in vain for the smallest
touch of irony. She wrote stories - often about the interplay of
youthful personalities and about miniature storms in teacups - for the
sheltered child in its nursery and for well-bred girls, and because of
complicated personal reasons of her own she was on the defensive
and concerned to make the point that she herself came from a
background of landed gentry. She was typical of many Victorian
women who wrote domestic tales for children. Often they were
daughters or wives of the squirearchy or the Church (or like Mrs
Molesworth, aspirants to the squirearchy). They felt besieged by the
rising commercial classes, and set down with quivering emotion their
values which they knew to be eternal, and in direct opposition to
commercial values which they asserted revolved round personal gain
and conspicuous display. The elaborate English class stratification,
which has provided such a rich field for writers of adult fiction,
blighted family stories for children. (It is significant that one of the
few Victorian writers of this genre who is still read now is Frances
Hodgson Burnett, author of A little princess (1905) and The secret
garden (1911). Her childhood was spent in Manchester, but the
family emigrated to Tennessee when she was sixteen, and though she
was to give her books an English background they have none of the
stifling class awareness which suffocated her contemporaries.)
Women like Mrs Molesworth or Charlotte Yonge were unable to see
any humour in situations that Jane Austen found so comic - like Mrs
Elton's frequent boasting about her brother-in-law's seat of Maple
Grove and the barouche-landau. Or Miss Steele's deep interest in
every detail of Marianne Dashwood's dress and how much it had
cost. Writers for children would have felt bound to underline this sort
of behaviour heavily and point out how it differed from the true
gentlewoman's. To them the subject was far too serious for comedy.
9 Roger Lancelyn Green, Mrs Moksworth (London: The Bodley Head, 1961), 59.
BEATRIX POTTER
195
So Beatrix Potter's astringent observation of human society,
adroitly transferred to animals so as to engage the child's interest, is
something unique in children's books. She could give her sardonic
humour full play because ostensibly it was not being directed at
human characters; writers for children find it very difficult, if not
impossible, to avoid hinting at some sort of moral judgement where
human behaviour is involved.
She also avoids the sentimentality that beset so many of her
contemporaries. There is a suspicion of this even in so great a work
as The wind in the willows (published in 1908, the same year as The
roly-poly pudding). 'The piper at the gates of dawn', where the lost
baby otter is found nestling between the forepaws of the god Pan,
has always been a controversial chapter; one recent critic has
referred tartly to Grahame's unique achievement at turning the
savage god into a sort of woodland nanny. 10
Take the Tailor of Gloucester. Leaving the illustrations apart
(and there was no one else who could have done those) there were
other writers who could have made a story set in olden times about
friendly mice who helped a tailor to complete his work. Of all her
books, indeed, this is the one that most nearly resembles other
contemporaries. But to offset the sweetness - the grateful mice, the
snow in the streets of old Gloucester, the robins and the throstles
singing in Christmas - there is Simpkin, sullen, morose, indifferent to
his sick master, intent only on finding the supper which the tailor has so
wantonly released. ('Was it right to let loose those mice, undoubtedly
the property of Simpkin?' the tailor had wondered. He is not a little in
awe of his cat, as a husband might be of a domineering wife.)
All that night long Simpkin hunted and searched through the kitchen, peeping into
cupboards and under the wainscot, and into the tea-pot where he had hidden the
twist; but still he found never a mouse!
Whenever the tailor muttered and talked in his sleep, Simpkin said 'Miaw-gerr-w-s-s-ch!' and made strange horrid noises, as cats do at night.
And absorbed by resentment and regrets for his missing supper, he
stays sulkily aloof, and refuses to come to the help of the tailor.
We get another cat in the Simpkin vein in Little Pig Robinson.
The plot requires that Robinson should find an ally on board the
ship 'Pound of Candles' to help him make his getaway, to save him
being served up with onions and apple sauce. Most storybook
writers would have found him an altruistic friend; modern writers
would no doubt make the friend a passionate vegetarian. Potter
contrives the escape with characteristic mordancy. The story itself is
wordy, the plot sprawls and there is a strong element of midVictorian facetiousness as we have seen, but the cat is in her best
10 Neil Philip, 'The wind in the willows', in Children and their books, 309.
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style in spite of the unnecessary handicap she is imposing on
herself. For here she is poaching, it is the cat of 'The owl and the
pussy-cat'. Nevertheless, she breathes a new life into Edward Lear's
lovesick, sentimental animal. Robinson is perplexed by this crossgrained character, who speaks 'mysteriously about the impropriety
of greediness, and about the disastrous results of over-indulgence'.
It was not unfriendly. It was mournful and foreboding. [It] was crossed in love. Its
morose and gloomy outlook upon life was partly the result of separation from the owl.
That sweet hen-bird, a snowy owl of Lapland, had sailed upon a northern whaler,
bound for Greenland. Whereas the 'Pound of Candles' was heading for the tropic seas.
Therefore the cat neglected its duties, and was on the worst of terms with the
cook. Instead of blacking boots and valeting the Captain, it spent days and nights in
the rigging, serenading the moon. Between times it came down on deck, and
remonstrated with Robinson.
One of the best drawings in the book is of the cat sourly blacking
boots and trying to indicate by its facial expression that Robinson
ought to be on his guard.
We can be confident that this cat remains misanthropic to the
end. But Simpkin repents, and this marks the Tailor of Gloucester as
an early work. He watches the mice stitching so diligently at the
waistcoat that the poor sick tailor has had to abandon, and 'he felt
quite ashamed of his badness compared with those good little mice'.
Beatrix Potter never makes this mistake again. None of her
other characters ever feels shame or repentance. Indeed they seek
to capitalize on their villainy, as can be seen in the correspondence
supposedly penned by Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, Samuel
Whiskers, and the bad mouse Tom Thumb, and collected in 1983
under the title of Yours affectionately, Peter Rabbit. 'Dear Sir,'
Peter Rabbit writes brazenly to Mr McGregor, 'I write to ask whether
your spring cabbages are ready? Kindly reply by return & oblige,
Yours truly'. When Mrs McGregor in high indignation replies that
her husband is in bed and that she has 'bort a new py-Dish, itt is
vary Large', Peter Rabbit gleefully tells his cousin Benjamin the good
news about Mr McGregor's indisposition and makes an assignation
for more depredations on the McGregor garden. Squirrel Nutkin
gets his sister to apologize for him only when his other efforts have
failed to retrieve his tail from Mr Old Brown. Samuel Whiskers writes
to Obadiah Rat to expect him and his family, bag and baggage, at
9 a.m. (He thinks there are 96 of them but can't be sure.)
Am sorry to come upon you suddenly: but my landlord William Potatoes has given
me one day's notice to quit. I am of the opinion that it is not legal & I could sit till
Candlemas because the notice is not addressed to my proper surname.
But the most brazen request comes from Tom Thumb, asking the
dolls whose house they once vandalized, if they can have another
feather bed.
BEATRIX POTTER
197
The feathers are all coming out of the one we stole your house. . .
PPS Me and my wife would be grateful for any old clothes, we have 9 of a family at
present.
Miles Kington, in an article called 'The violent world of Miss
Potter' (published in the Independent on 1 November 1990),
decribed how he had read The story of a fierce bad rabbit to his threeyear-old son in the pious hope that it might teach him that the meek
will inherit the earth. 'Or at least that if someone nicks your carrot,
he will get shot within 10 minutes'. This was not to be. Father
Kington seeing Master Kington trying to wrench a helicopter from
his friend Max ordered his son to say 'please'.
'Bad rabbits don't say please,' he said scornfully.
'You don't want to be a bad rabbit, do you?' I said.
'Yes,' he said, then picked up a cucumber, pointed it at me and said, 'Bang, bang,
go away'.
Miles Kington concluded:
Why Beatrix Potter's books have not been banned before now is beyond me. Here
is the seed of violence and evil. Here is the beginning of murder and mayhem. But
however soon they are banned, it will be too late for me, because as I write my son
is pointing a banana at me and saying. 'Read me this book or I will shoot you very
badly.' The book he wants me to read is The tale of two bad mice.
The distinctiveness of Potter comedy does not just lie in its
ruthlessness, or its ironic delineation of character. The consummate
construction and the economy of her best work also set her apart
from any other children's writer. In this too she is Augustan rather
than Victorian. It could be relatively simple, one-strand work as in
The tale of Peter Rabbit, or what one might term contrapuntal, as in
The roly-poly pudding and The tale of Mr Tod with their repeated,
brilliant shirts of focus. It is well-known that the normal layout of
her books, with pictures and text alternating, imposed a discipline
on her writing that was sadly lacking in The fairy caravan and to a
lesser extent in Little Pig Robinson. There is no superfluous word in
the three chronicles of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin and Benjamin's
offspring. There is no character analysis either. But the differing
personalities of the two cousins are made perfectly clear. Peter is a
neurotic, as Grahame Greene pointed out. 11 It is only by
undeserved good luck that he escapes his father's fate when he
wanders into Mr McGregor's garden - he has no sense of strategy,
he makes himself ill with the lettuces, french beans and radishes,
thinks to remedy the matter with parsley, sees Mr McGregor and
11 Graham Greene, 'Beatrix Potter' in The lost childhood (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1951), 108.
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panics. Confronted with acute danger his reaction is to cry. He has
to be implored to exert himself by friendly sparrows. By the end of
The tale of Peter Rabbit we know Peter is a wimp, certainly not the
sort of person to whom we would care to trust our destinies.
But Benjamin is a different matter, a poised man of the world,
even though apparently the younger of the two. We know this when
he loftily tells his cousin:
'It spoils people's clothes to squeeze under a gate; the proper way to get in, is to
climb down a pear tree'.
He, unlike Peter, has a plan when they go back to Mr
McGregor's garden to rescue Peter's clothes. This must be their first
priority, Benjamin instructs his cousin, so that they can retrieve the
pocket handkerchief and J511 it with onions for Peter's mother.
Miss Potter, as one would expect, takes a balanced view of
these two opposing personalities. Benjamin's recklessness gets him
into an even worse predicament than Peter's blundering cowardice
had done; the cousins are imprisoned under a basket for five hours,
weeping with the smell of the stolen onions, woefully conscious of
the peril they are in from the cat sitting on top of the basket. Their
release only comes with the arrival of old Mr Benjamin Bunny (who
has no opinion whatever of cats).
However, this is Mr Bunny's only moment of glory. When he
reappears in The tale of Mr Tod he is in his dotage, a gaffer who sits
drowsily in the sun and tipples and smokes and gossips, and allows
his grandchildren to be kidnapped. It is hard to remember him as
the once energetic father who savaged the cat and then applied the
switch to his son. Indeed, far from chastising anyone this time, he
suffers the humiliation of being slapped by his daughter-in-law, and
of being dismissed by the now mature Peter as a wrinkly (or one of
the EMPTIES brigade - ex-middle-aged professionals turning into
elderly soaks)
'My Uncle Bouncer has displayed a lamentable want of discretion for his years;'
said Peter reflectively.
The tale of Mr Tod is remarkable for having two major villains. 'I
have made many books about well-behaved people,' Miss Potter
begins. 'Now, for a change, I am going to make a story about two
disagreeable people . . .'. How little she seemed to remember about
her own writing; by the time she wrote this in 1912 she had a long
list of badly behaved characters to her credit, and very few who set
any sort of good example. Indeed, only Mrs Tiggy-winkle and Mrs
Tittlemouse can be said to do that; perhaps the Tailor of Gloucester
can be added, as a character for whom our sympathy is evoked. Her
ostensibly decorous characters, like Mrs Tabitha Twitchit, she views
with sardonic amusement.
BEATRIX POTTER
199
And by 1912 she already had a record of distinguished villains.
There were the vandalizing Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb who
wreck the doll's-house, enraged by its hollow pretentiousness. There
were two confidence-tricksters - the laconic Mr Drake PuddleDuck (Tt's a very fine morning') and the 'gentleman with sandy
whiskers' who mesmerizes the feeble-minded Jemima Puddle-duck.
And there was perhaps her greatest character of all, the sinister
Samuel Whiskers, who with Long John Silver is one of the supreme
rogues of children's books. The measured Johnsonian prose in
which he converses, even at moments of crisis, add to his
balefulness.
'We are discovered and interrupted, Anna Maria; let us collect our property - and
other people's, - and depart at once.'
'I fear we shall be obliged to leave this pudding.'
'But I am persuaded that the knots would have proved indigestible, whatever
you may urge to the contrary.'
'In her comedies,' Grahame Greene says, 'Miss Potter had
gracefully eliminated the emotions of love and death'. He felt that it
was an indication of her genius that in The tale of Mr Tod, which
would seem to end in the destruction of both villains, her ironic
style remained unshattered. 12
But even more do we feel this in what is often referred to as her
Persuasion - The tale of Pigling Bland. It is far easier to write
convincingly about death than about happiness, to describe the bad
rather than the good. She did not eschew villains; Mr Thomas
Piperson is as dark a ruffian as she ever created (though it is a pity
she attempted to illustrate him). But she - who had never written a
love story before; who had just lived through her own - contrived an
elopement that is funny and exciting as well as genuinely moving.
And even within the compass of the book's few hundred words,
Pigling Eland's character develops. At first we are deceived by his
sedateness; our sympathies are more with the frivolous Alexander.
But he has hidden qualities of resourcefulness and initiative, even
though we recognize that once this dangerous episode is over he will
probably relapse into bucolic placidity. He contrives to pull wool
over the eyes of the infamous Piperson, and at the same time we
watch him falling in love, as much surprised by this new emotion as
the reader is. The conversation peppermints which play a large part
in the courtship of Pig-wig were a brilliant stroke, keeping the
episode delicately humorous. Aunt Pettitoes supplied both her sons
with eight apiece when she dispatched them to market, and it was
Pigling's first intimation that there was a fellow pig in Mr Piperson's
house when these were sucked under the cupboard door.
12 Ibid., 109.
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'I thought you had eaten them,' said Pigling, waking suddenly.
'Only the corners,' replied Pig-wig, studying the sentiments with much interest by
the firelight.
And she still has one in her mouth when it seems as though
they are going to be caught on the brink of freedom. It is here that
Pigling, with a last despairing effort, engineers their final escape. He
is successful.
They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill, and across a short cut at level
green turf at the bottom, between pebble beds and rushes.
They came to the river, they came to the bridge - they crossed it hand in hand then over the hills and far away she danced with Pigling Bland!
In this late work the ironist surprises us by suddenly showing that
she indeed has a heart. But even at this great moment in her own
life she contrives to display it with the controlled simplicity that has
been a mark of all her preceding work.