Peter Rabbit
I wish I had a better memory, especially for my earlier years. Like most people, I suspect, I only remember odd events, tiny elements of a year that otherwise has become irretrievably lost. Did I read Beatrix Potter books when I was young? I think so, but I’m not certain. What I can recall are odd specific events, like watching an elephant play a mouthorgan, during the trip to the London Zoo a little before my 4th birthday! Books are particularly problematic if you have had children: stories you might have read as a young child are now embedded in recollections of reading to a daughter or son.
Given an absence of early memories, thoughts about Beatrix Potter and her series of illustrated small books for children have taken my thoughts in several directions. As it happens, most of that thinking all about me! Why did I like these books, and why do they still stick in mind? However, they are also part of a broader reflection on influences and change, on how preferences develop, and on how learning about an author can influence how you read. The Tale of Peter Rabbit might seem a slight foundation for all that exploration, but, like many other things in our life, something apparently small can be important in many different ways, a talisman unlocking secrets from the past.
Let’s begin with me. When I read authors talking about their childhood, in the New York Times ‘By the Book’ section for example, I am often amazed how quickly they were reading serious books, books for children, but children in their early teens. I wasn’t like that. Early on I adored the Railway Series books by Awdry (his first names were Wilbert Vere but he is almost always referred to as the Rev. W V Awdry), every page of text facing a colour illustration on the opposite page. They were small – about 14.5 x 10.5 cms (which translates to a little under six inches by just over 4 inches). Not just those books, however. Two other early favourites were Winnie the Pooh and Hugh Lofting’s adventures of Doctor Doolittle.
In due course text became more important, and those early preferences were added to by Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, The Railway Children and Treasure Island. Despite growing older (!!), I still loved Alison Uttley’s small format books, Little Grey Rabbit, Wise Owl’s Story, and so many others (I was disappointed to read that in real life she was a difficult woman, who hated both Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter). Above all, and for a long time, whatever else I was reading I would return to return to Peter Rabbit, and other Beatrix Potter books, even though the adventures were so familiar: I would still pause at the end of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, when Lucie turns to thank the washerwoman, and instead sees “how small she had grown—and how brown—and covered with PRICKLES! Why! Mrs. Tiggy-winkle was nothing but a HEDGEHOG.” How clever was that, to tell a tale about a washerwoman who happened to look like a hedgehog to whisk off her clothes to reveal she was a hedgehog. In the book, the last picture shows a hedgehog going away and up a hill, and on four legs, not two as in all the other pictures.
Of all the Beatrix Potter books, Peter Rabbit had a special place, at least for me. Why? What is it about Peter Rabbit? Quintessentially English, a mischievous and foolish ‘bunny’ rabbit, he must be deeply embedded in the imaginative lives of millions of children. Amazingly, this was achieved in the few pages of a small format book. There have been cartoon versions of the story, even a ballet, but I think it is the original book that sticks in minds – although I concede that I am not a reliable commentator, as older Englishmen are frequently and inadvertently biased. However, I am going to claim Beatrix Potter’s books about a young rabbit are magic, especially the first one, The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
At one level, the attraction is obvious. Peter is the eldest child of widowed Mrs Rabbit, and he lives in a remarkably human looking home underground with his three sisters, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. He’s naughty, not dreadfully so, but easily led into one scrape or another. His mother gets exasperated with his occasional disasters, but not dreadfully so, because … well, because he is endearingly loveable, of course.
The story almost reads like a myth, contrasting good and bad, and tricking us into liking the bad. The structure is clear:
We start with a warning – the children are not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden (where Peter’s father had met his sad end)
Three of the bunnies (the three girls) are good, and go to collect berries for dinner; one, Peter, is naughty, doesn’t help his sisters and instead he goes into Mr McGregor’s garden.
He overeats, feels sick, and is spotted by Mr McGregor
Almost caught, he hides in a watering can, having lost his coat and shoes
He escapes home, feels sick and goes to bed early with camomile tea
His sisters enjoy a lovely dinner
What do we learn from this? Boys are naughty; girls are good. Being naughty is dangerous: you can get sick, be afraid, and even worse fates might be around the corner. Good behaviour is rewarded; bad behaviour isn’t!
It is, of course, much cleverer than that. The three good bunnies, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, are somewhat peripheral to the main story. I’m tempted to say they come over as goody-goodies. This is all about Peter, and he commands our attention. Standing out on every page with his bright blue coat, (until he doesn’t have it any longer), while there are no coats for the girls. He’s adventurous, and we are attracted to his bold behaviour. As for Mr McGregor, the defender of the garden comes across as an indignant old Scotsman, wielding his rake like a halberd. We are left with no doubt that Peter is a hero. Resourceful but naughty, he takes risks and overcomes danger, even if, at the end, he’s worn out. If her books embodied traditional gender stereotypes, there’s little surprise in seeing Beatrix Potter was clearly of her time and its values. However, there’s much more to this Lake District person.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit appeared in 1902, when Potter was 36, to be followed the next year by two more books based on illustrated stories in letters to her former governess’s children, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester. Encouraged by Norman Warne, an editor at his father’s publisher, Frederick Warne, she published two or three books a year, continuing to do so through the First World War. Combined with other books (she wrote around sixty in all), the proceeds from her books and a legacy from an aunt, allowed her to buy Hill Top Farm in 1905, and additional farms in the 1920s and 1930s, giving her the opportunity to preserve the unique hill country landscape of the Lake District.
She was a smart and entrepreneurial businesswoman. In 1903, she made and patented a Peter Rabbit doll, the first in a series of other ‘spin-off” merchandise over the years, items that went on to include including painting books, board games, wall-paper for nurseries, figurines, baby blankets and china tea-sets. These were all licensed through Frederick Warne and Co., giving her an independent income (as well as significant profits for her publisher).
In 1913, aged 47, she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead, and gradually devoted more and more time to farming. She became a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick Sheep, was well known in livestock markets for having a good eye for purchases and prices, as well as a prosperous farmer keenly interested in land preservation. She continued to write and illustrate, and to design further merchandise based on her children’s books for Warne for several years until land management and her weakening eyesight made it difficult to continue. She died in late 1943, leaving almost all her property to the National Trust, contributing much of the land that now comprises the Lake District National Park. A fascinating woman, whose life is well documented in a couple of biographies, Margaret Lane’s The Tale of Beatrix Potter, and Linda Lear’s A Life in Nature.
Young readers are impressionable. We hear stories, and we pick up the underlying themes. It’s for this reason we are careful book buyers for children when we become older. I have no idea what influenced my parents to choose Peter Rabbit and the other books in my Beatrix Potter collection. Looking back, it was more than they were essentially so British. They embodied the right mix of values, the virtues of behaving well, the dangers of being naughty, and the fun of life as a child. Awdry’s railway stories achieved the same end. This was a world of reason and rationality. While the families in Beatrix Potter’s books lived normal lives focussed on food, cleanliness and avoiding disasters, Awdry’s engines embodied the virtues of determination, kindliness, challenge, and the foolishness of being selfish (as when Henry – the Green Engine – refuse to leave a tunnel because it was raining outside, and was left there, bricked in, as a result). Tough love? Life was about good behaviour, wise parents and well-ordered lives, leavened with fun and competition.
Did my values predate these stories, or did the stories I liked also shaped my values and beliefs? An impossible question. What I do know is that the books I first read, before I was let loose in a public library, were selected by my parents. They must have been books they liked, or they thought I would enjoy. Was that a conscious attempt to shape me? In one sense it must have been, as they certainly would have selected ‘good books’, even if what made them good wasn’t necessarily clear or explicit. Some must have been books of their own childhoods.
One indication of how they chose is provided by what isn’t there. Little Golden Books had started to appear in the middle of the Second World War, a series of colourful, relatively durable and cheap children’s books, cheaper than the typical children’s book at the time which cost around £2 to £3. The initial twelve titles, released simultaneously, each had 42 pages, 28 printed in two colours, and 14 in four-colour, staple-bound, sold for 25 pence each. 25 pence! Some of the titles became well established, including Mother Goose, The Little Red Hen, and The Poky Little Puppy. They proved very popular, but not in my household. I suspect my parents would have seen these as ‘lower class’ books, not the kind of literature they wanted me to confront!
When I became a parent, I think some of those Little Golden Books joined the ‘better’ examples from my childhood, as well as The Little Engine that Could, and an extraordinary series of books with unusual shapes, of which I can only recall the Slant Book by Peter Newell. These were American books, picked up while travelling. However, of the American titles that inveigled their way into my children’s lives, it was the Dr Seuss books that entranced children as they managed to be funny, easy to read, and stunningly illustrated. And Beatrix Potter, of course!
Books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit convey more than a simple story. If Peter is naughty, he gets his comeuppance. If he eats too much, he gets stomach ache. At the same time, there is a curious twist in this. While he is naughty, disobedient, and even loses his jacket and shoes, his mother is indulgent rather than angry. Surely that is part of the attraction of the story: you can be a little bit naughty, and that’s OK. It hinges around the idea of an ‘adventure’. Adventures, boys’ adventures in particular, involve risk, breaking rules, yet they are exciting, and almost accepted as ‘that’s the way things are’.
If Peter Rabbit was just a boy being a little bit naughty, and getting away with it, the same can be said for some of the other children’s classics. Peter Rabbit and Toad in Wind in the Willows are almost indistinguishable: they did what they shouldn’t do, lived on the edge, and yet emerged alright. Alice in Alice in Wonderland teetered on the edge of being naughty, and certainly was cheeky and pushy. As for Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island, he certainly broke the rules (with that curious outcome noted in the story that, if he hadn’t done so, things could have turned out for the worse). What is the message here? It seems that it is acceptable to break the rules just a little, provided you don’t cause too much damage, and provided you come back to the straight and narrow in due course.
The children’s books of my generation gave space for us to enjoy being silly, taking risks, evading rules, but doing so in small and (almost) acceptable ways. This might be part of a larger theme, that this is integral to childhood. When you are a child you steal fruit from a neighbour’s tree, you climb inside deserted buildings, tease dogs and even (back then) dip the hair of the girl in front of you in class into the inkwell on your desk. Many of the books we read included more serious older brothers or sisters, as if to make it clear to a young reader what he or she was going through a phase, and ‘growing up’ was just around the corner.
I guess that’s the point. Books for children in the past did contain a set of moral precepts and rules, admitting we might be ‘naughty’ but that this was limited in time and extent. Is that true of children’s books written in more recent years? I suspect the most important difference is that many children’s books written today have an explicit value promoted – racial tolerance, poverty, bullying, and more. These were themes in the books of a hundred years ago, but in the case of those books, the values were implicit, embedded, not made explicit. This might be the reason some critics like returning to some of the old classics and pointing out the underlying values they promote.
When it comes to older children, there is little doubt that many stories address controversial and even adult themes. As one example among many, back in the 1970s Judy Blume became famous as a ground-breaking writer . She was a leading author in addressing teen sex as normal, together with several other complex subjects such as family conflict, bullying, body image, and sexuality, alongside reality about adults, illness and death.
If there is a difference in many of the popular children’s books today from those of my childhood, I suspect it is that the values they espouse are more in your face in current literature. People of my generation read books and absorbed their underlying values and perspectives almost without noticing. Today, a reader is brought up short by incidents and events that make values explicit and confronting. As a child, I read the Tale of Peter Rabbit, and didn’t pay attention to the implicit gender differentiation in the story. Does that matter? Reluctantly, I have to admit it probably does. To the extent I am a male, a middle-class Caucasian male with all the cultural prejudices that implies, so those childhood stories must have been. one important source of my attitudes. Will they have to be rewritten? I hope not.
