The Tale of Peter Rabbit

I DON’T know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits, whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in 1893, in a letter to a little boy, the five-year-old son of her former governess, who was suffering from scarlet fever. A decade later, these lines, only slightly adjusted, formed the opening to what has become one of the bestselling, most fondly remembered books in children’s literature.

- Beatrix Potter, Jack Watkins

Like many authors of stories aimed at infants, Potter (1866–1943) was not a writer by profession. Her chief enthusiasm was natural history. Childhood family holidays in Perthshire and, later, the Lake District had given her the freedom to experience the natural world at first hand, and at the Natural History Museum in London, not far from her home in Kensington, she had made meticulous studies of plants and animals, often with the use of a microscope. Allied to an imagination that delighted in traditional fairy stories, it was this background that gave Peter Rabbit and Potter’s subsequent animal tales their peculiar atmosphere of believable wonder.

Aimed at the very young, with minimal text, the book is clearly not fine literature in the way of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Yet, as in the latter, much thanks to Potter’s illustrations, the humanised rabbits seem to exist in a recognisably real place. As Potter once admitted, the ‘careful botanical studies of my youth’ informed the ‘reality’ of her fantasy drawings.