by Linda Lear
The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and The Tale of Two Bad Mice were published simultaneously by Warne’s in September 1904. The action of Benjamin Bunny takes place in Mr McGregor’s garden, which is no longer a Scottish vegetable garden, but modelled on the garden of Fawe Park at Derwentwater. Reflecting the Lake District location as well as the author’s familiarity with the area, the dedication reads: ‘for the children of Sawrey from old Mr Bunny.’ Although Two Bad Mice has an upper-middle-class Edwardian doll’s house as its ‘house-within-a-house’ setting, it too has a reference to Sawrey, for Lucinda and Jane Doll-cook buy their groceries at Ginger and Pickles shop in the village. Her genuine interest in the village children was evident a few months later when she heard there had been an epidemic of scarlet fever in Sawrey and that the school was closed. She asked Norman ‘for books to be sent to the little people at Sawrey’, but insisted ‘there are to be no letters of thanks!’26
Eager for news of how the latest books were being received, Beatrix wrote to Norman from Keswick, ‘Are you printing a large edition of Benjamin, does it seem to be liked?’ She need not have worried. Once again her rabbits proved irresistible. Warne printed 20,000 copies of each book, and within a month, Benjamin Bunny had to be reprinted. To her chagrin, Beatrix realized that ‘Muffettees’ was spelled incorrectly; an error that was not corrected until the third printing.27
Benjamin Bunny not only sold well but merited a review in The Times Literary Supplement, which although not altogether approving, indicates the level of critical attention Potter was receiving. In the reviewer’s opinion the story was weak:
Among the little books which have become as much a manifestation of autumn as falling leaves, one looks first for whatever Miss Beatrix Potter gives, for Miss Potter is the author and artist of ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit.’ In her new book we meet again with Peter Rabbit, and also with Mr McGregor; but although there is no diminution in the charm and drollery of the drawings, Miss Potter’s fancy is not what it was. The story is inconclusive. Next year we think she must call in a literary assistant. We have no hesitation in calling her pencil perfect.
Beatrix found the review ‘amusing’. She also enjoyed a good report in the Scotsman, but wisely decided that it was ‘a mistake to attend to them at all’. Warne had printed another 10,000 copies by the year’s end.28
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer was not off the mark, for none of the subsequent rabbit books ever appealed to Potter in quite the same way as the story of Peter had. Neither of the rabbit sequels began as a picture letter to real children and for that reason they lack a certain vitality. Both Benjamin Bunny and the later Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies grew out of ‘left-over illustrations’ from Peter Rabbit and are what Beatrix considered ‘made to order’ books. The weaker story line also reflects her lack of enthusiasm for continuing the Peter Rabbit saga: it was surely this lack of energy the reviewer sensed. Even her miniature letters about Benjamin and his family, mostly composed after Flopsy Bunnies was published in 1909, reflect a certain boredom with the further lives of the rabbit characters.29
But in Benjamin Bunny Beatrix had successfully written a ‘bunny book’ that would appeal to younger children. The plot was less complicated than the previous tales and, almost inevitably, more didactic. At the time the book was conceived, she had few alternatives for the backgrounds since by her own admission she had run out of ideas and consequently had to spend time making new sketches of rabbits in gardens. She was also consciously catering both to the public’s demand and to her publisher’s desire for another commercial success, while suffering some of the familiar pains of trying to write a sequel to ‘an original work of genius’.30
The unique quality she brought to Benjamin Bunny, in addition to a contagious delight in place, was a thorough understanding of rabbit anatomy and behaviour. Benjamin Bouncer, her model for Benjamin Bunny, had been her first pet rabbit and her insights into rabbit nature are remarkable. After walking Benjamin one afternoon at Heath Park in Perthshire in 1892, Beatrix had observed:
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 tea-cup… will convert him into a demon… 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.31
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer was also correct in calling attention to her ‘pencil perfect’ drawings. The beautifully miniaturized backgrounds of the vegetable gardens, as well as the drawings of the rabbits themselves, are some of her finest paintings of this period. Over and over, Beatrix tells her editors that she can make a ‘pretty book of it’ — and that promise is most often fulfilled in the details of setting and place. She once remarked that it did not matter how large or small the area given her on a page, she could not restrain herself from filling it. This attention to detail — to what is true to nature — is what sets her illustration apart and also what carries a book in which the story line may wander. Her pleasure in sketching at Fawe Park — its charming, helter-skelter kitchen garden, the red-brick garden wall on which old Mr Bunny pranced, the tiny ferns poking out of its crevices, the rose bush espaliered on the top, the red foxgloves, the onions, broad beans and lettuces, and the clutter of flowerpots, frames and tubs in the greenhouse — is reflected on every page. As fine as the rabbits are anatomically, Potter’s studies for the red carnations, and her several drawings of the onions that Peter and Benjamin bring home to appease Mrs Rabbit, are each a perfection of botanical illustration. The onions and the carnations are rendered in a fluent line of sepia ink with a transparent wash. Although the flowers and vegetables are incidental to the main action of the story, they stand out because of their detail, their sense of movement, their liveliness and their translucent colour. The repeated bright red of the carnation, the foxgloves and the red pocket handkerchief that Peter repeatedly drops are calculated to catch a child’s eye in a book that is once again predominantly rabbit-brown and garden-green. It was indeed a ‘pretty book’.32
For the greater part of 1904, however, Potter’s creative and emotional energy was focused on the text and illustrations for The Tale of Two Bad Mice. This book reflects her pleasure in her deepening partnership with Norman Warne, as well as her delight in debunking some of the rigours and restrictions of middle-class domesticity. Two Bad Mice is certainly one of Potter’s most light-hearted creations. For all the havoc that the mice wreak, their vandalism is miniaturized and thereby more amusing than serious. Beatrix called Two Bad Mice a ‘girl’s book’ because of the doll’s house, its elaborate furnishings, the invading mice and their imitations of housekeeping. This second mouse book has the same detail that makes The Tailor of Gloucester so memorable, but it has more action and more humour. Beatrix enjoyed drawing the characters and developing a story that provided her with the vicarious experience of totally improper behaviour. The picture of the tiny mice releasing all the feathers from the feather bed is analogous to having the pillow fight she never would have dared in real life.33
The story came from a sketchbook inscribed ‘Hastings, Nov. 26th–Dec. 3rd’. She and Bertram had gone to Hastings for a week’s holiday in 1903. Unfortunately, the weather was quite wet, and Beatrix, who had hoped for outdoor sketching, was forced inside. There is no indication that Beatrix had any of her pet mice with her that week, although she certainly may have. But she had always loved drawing mice, and easily dressed them in clothing of all sorts — frilly cotton dresses, aprons, mob caps, period trousers and elaborate waistcoats. For The Tale of Two Bad Mice, Beatrix’s charming drawings of a mouse family are interpreted for the proper Victorian dec
or offered by Norman’s doll’s house, and given a rebellious sort of twist.34
When Beatrix saw the advance proofs of ‘Hunca Munca’s book’ in late September 1904, she felt confident that ‘it will be a nice little book’, and she told her editor, ‘It is a pleasant change from the interminable rabbit stories.’ A reviewer in the Bookman agreed, noting that ‘these mischievous mice are not entirely bad and in the twenty-seven water-colour drawings they look both innocent and loveable’. The reviewer approved Miss Potter’s ‘Chelsea-china like books’ that were ‘Messrs Warne and Co.’s annual marvels… to an adoring nursery-world’.35
Beatrix and Norman had tentatively agreed that one of the books for 1905 would be the book of rhymes, in a new larger format. In May 1904 Norman went abroad, and Beatrix visited the Huttons at Harescombe Grange in early June. After they had both returned to London, Beatrix was again anxious to get the subject of both books settled before leaving for the summer. She longed to do a book of nursery rhymes, but the idea was always pushed aside in favour of an original tale. Norman was less enthusiastic about a rhyme collection for several reasons: verse was already a well-represented genre at Warne’s and, aware of Beatrix’s fondness for rhymes, he anticipated another struggle to contain her enthusiasms. Most of all, Norman was trying to wean Beatrix from a reliance on riddles and rhymes, believing that her original stories were superior. Now Norman reluctantly acceded to Beatrix’s desire to do the Appley Dapply book. The second book for 1905 remained undecided.36
The Potters arrived at Lingholm on Derwentwater in late July, staying until the end of October. ‘I have made some more rhymes for the new book but I have not done much drawing yet,’ Beatrix wrote to Norman in early August. ‘[I]t would be a great pleasure to get settled to work again… I tried to look over into the Fawe Park garden the other evening & got all over tar. He [Benjamin Bunny] might well have had that adventure in addition to his other scrapes!’ A month later Norman provided her with a plan for the rhyme book and a large dummy book to lay it out. ‘The plan of it which you suggest is just exactly what I should like,’ Beatrix wrote. ‘If my rhymes are good enough, I don’t think I should have much difficulty in filling that number of pages! & I would rather try to make it a real pretty book than try to have more royalty.’37
Beatrix had suggested earlier that she might also revise a story she had invented some years earlier about her hedgehog, Mrs Tiggy-winkle. Over the years she had several pet hedgehogs, usually named Pricklepin or some variation thereof. In 1902 she made some especially fine paintings of one to illustrate the rhyme ‘Old Mr. Pricklepin’, using pencil, pen and ink and watercolour. Years later, she still considered this painting ‘about the best drawing I ever made’. She also had a good many backgrounds of the Newlands Valley in the Derwentwater sketchbook she kept in 1903. To ease Norman’s scepticism about the appeal of a book featuring a hedgehog, Beatrix explained, ‘I think “Mrs Tiggy” would be all right; it is a girl’s book; so is the Hunca Munca, but there must be a large audience of little girls. I think they would like the different clothes.’ Sometime that summer, Norman agreed to the hedgehog book, and Beatrix began revising her original story and adding drawings in pen and ink.38
Beatrix later claimed that she had begun a hedgehog story as early as 1886. It had its origins in her recollection of Kitty MacDonald, the little laundress of Inver, who had so fascinated Beatrix during her summer holidays at Dalguise. She probably first elaborated the story of Lucie of Little-town and Mrs Tiggy-winkle, the hedgehog clear-starcher, during the summer of 1901 at Lingholm. The immediate catalyst for the story was her introduction to the Carr family through their mutual friend, Canon Rawnsley. Carr was the Vicar of Newlands, the parish church at a crossroads at the head of the beautiful Newlands Valley, west of Derwentwater. The Vicar’s daughter, Lucie, was just a year old when Beatrix first met her, and she was quite taken with the little blond child. Lucie came to play with Mrs Tiggy whenever her parents came to tea at Lingholm and, after watching her, Beatrix put her into the hedgehog story. For Christmas that year she sent the Carrs a copy of the privately printed Peter Rabbit, inscribing it: ‘For Lucie with love from H. B. P., Christmas 1901 — I should like to put Lucie into a little book.’39
Beatrix tried out her story of Mrs Tiggy-winkle and Lucie on Stephanie Hyde Parker, her cousin Ethel Hyde Parker’s daughter, who was then about three. However, she did not write the story down until the following summer at Sawrey — and even then, it was a story without pictures. Beatrix intended it for Stephanie, as the opening paragraph in the original exercise manuscript reads, ‘Now Stephanie, this is the story about a little girl called Lucie; she was smaller than you and she could not speak quite plain…’, but in the end she dedicated The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle∗ to Lucie.40
Although The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle did not evolve from a picture letter, it was also a tale true to nature: a story set in a real place, about a real washerwoman, a real hedgehog named Tiggy-winkle and a child, Lucie, from Little-town in the Newlands Valley. When Beatrix began revising and illustrating the book in November 1904, she drew upon the watercolour sketches of the Newlands Valley for backgrounds. These finished and remarkably beautiful landscapes underscore the fact that Potter was a painter of place, not just a composite and idealized place, but an identifiable place that is transformed by her art into the ideal and the universal. Much of this book’s ultimate success comes from the accurate depiction of the natural setting that underlies the animal fantasy. The vistas of the Newlands Valley are recognizable even today, although Beatrix took artistic liberties and moved parts of the real valley to suit her narrative.
The fells surrounding the valley had been deeply veined with copper and lead. In medieval times, these mines had been among the richest in north-west Britain, but by the nineteenth century they were mostly abandoned because the depth required for shafts down into the fells made it too expensive to extract the ore. When Beatrix explored the area during her summer holidays at Lingholm in 1901 and at Fawe Park in 1903, she noted the abandoned mineshafts, some marked by small doors set into the hillside. She sketched a scene on the western slopes of Cat Bells where there was a little door covering the opening into the Yewthwaite Mine, as well as a prominent crag known as Castle Rock above the abandoned Castlenook Mine. Later she put Mrs Tiggy-winkle’s cosy little kitchen behind one of those doors. Above Little-town, a short distance up the Keskadale Beck was, and still is, the small, whitewashed Newlands church. A smaller building, the Newlands School, rebuilt by the parishioners in 1877, adjoined the church. It was there that Lucie and her little sister Kathleen later went to school. Beatrix climbed the path beyond Little-town to sketch a spectacular view of the valley with the lake and Cat Bells in the distance, adjusting her artistic perspective to include the Newlands church just below and changing the name of the hamlet to Little-town.41
Beatrix explored even the remote parts of the Newlands Valley, where she was especially interested in the high fell farms, such as Skelghyl, Low and High Snab, Gatesgarth, and Seathwaite near Buttermere; delighting as much in the sound of their names as in the farm life. Three pages of Beatrix’s Derwentwater sketchbook are filled with descriptions and sketches of the various sheep markings used at these farms, confirming her interest in sheep and the traditions of Lakeland sheep farming that she shared with Rawnsley. Her notes describe the distinctive smit marks and ear crops that she observed at each farm. In Beatrix’s story, Mrs Tiggy-winkle also washes the woolly coats of lambs from Skelghyl, Gatesgarth and Little-town, explaining to Lucie that the lambs’ coats are ‘always marked at washing!’42
The action in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle revolves around Lucie’s search for her lost pocket hankerchiefs and ‘pinnie’, finding them at last beautifully washed and ironed in Mrs Tiggy-winkle’s fell-kitchen laundry. This part of the story also has a basis in fact. In August 1904 the Carrs came to Lingholm for tea, and little Lucie, now about four, decked out in her best frock, left without her party gloves. B
eatrix wrote Lucie a picture letter that included drawings of a mouse in a party dress with blue ribbons and a blue pinafore, and sent back the child’s gloves. Beatrix also wrote a short poem about the incident which she intended to include in the rhyme book. It began, ‘I found a tiny pair of gloves/When Lucie’d been to tea,/ They were the dearest little loves — /I thought they’d do for me —.’ Lucie’s picture letter is an unusual one, in that it is one of only two known picture letters done in colour.43
For the remainder of her Lingholm holiday in 1904, Beatrix worked on a variety of pen-and-sepia-ink sketches as backgrounds for the hedgehog book. ‘Not exactly useful subjects,’ she told Norman, ‘but to get my hand into the way, I find it very interesting to do, & I think pretty good results.’ One lovely sketch she called ‘The Greta [river], Near Portinscale, Keswick’ reflects her success with this technique. She had also been collecting more rhymes; ‘most extremely odd ones some of them!, but of course,’ she assured Norman, ‘if they strike you as too fanciful they can easily go. I think it ought to make a nice book.’ Confessing that the family holiday had been long enough, she added, ‘I am hoping very much to go away myself again the next week; our summer “holiday” is always a weary business & Keswick pulls me down in August; though quite delightful in autumn when there is a bit of frost. The colours are most beautiful now the fern has turned.’44
When Beatrix returned to London in late October, however, she was too distracted by family matters to go off sketching. Her Aunt Harriet was ill in Wales, and it is likely that her parents were again objecting to the time she was spending on her books. In early November she confessed, ‘I have not begun on the hedgehog-book yet I am ashamed to say; but I think it is not a bad thing to take a holiday; I have been working very industriously drawing fossils at the museum, upon the theory that a change of work is the best sort of rest! but I shall be quite keen to get to work on the books again.’ She made plans to call at the Warne office the following week, after she returned from a brief visit to Gwaynynog.45
