It is difficult today to separate the truth of Beatrix Potter’s writing from the
commercialism which has surrounded it for so long. The illustrations, which were
designed to fit naturally into the complexities of the text, can be tainted with the
anthropomorphism that is a great danger of the humanised animal story. As Nicholas
Tucker says
In all her stories, in fact, Beatrix Potter describes a half-human, half-animal world,
populated by partly-clothed animal characters who have courtesy titles and
surnames, and visit each other exactly as humans do, but who also mix the
gentilities of polite conversation with offhand references to a more savage state.
This type of ambiguity enables her characters to flit between human and animal
roles, according to the needs of the plot.
Tucker 1981:62–63Indeed, danger is never too far away in Potter’s stories, as it is in real life. Tom Kitten is
the potential filling for a roly poly pudding in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908), while
in The Tale of Jeremy Fisher (1906) the hero, a frog, ends up in the mouth of a trout,
only to be saved by his mackintosh. However, the author does prevent her child readers
from seeing too much realism: unlike later writers who use a similar technique (Dick
King-Smith, for instance), sex and death are almost taboo subjects.
Many comments have been made on Potter’s refusal to write down to children and on
her insistence that she introduced at least one complex word into each of her books. She
also tried to ensure that the physical appearance of her books was child-centred, as
Alison Lurie has noted:
One special attraction of these books was that Beatrix Potter portrayed the world
from a mouse’s—or rabbit’s—or small child’s-eye view. The vantage-point in her
exquisite water-colours varies from a few inches to a few feet from the ground, like
that of a toddler. Indeed, when I first came across the Peter Rabbit books, I had no
idea Beatrix Potter was a grown-up woman: I thought of her as a little girl.
Certainly she was small enough to look at hollyhocks and tables and big dogs from
below and to see everything in close-up. In her illustrations a cabbage leaf, the
pattern of moss on a stump, a painted china cup, or a spool of red thread are seen
with a short-range clarity of focus that is physiologically possible for most of us in
early childhood.
Lurie 1990:94–95Others have seen much of the writer’s own life in the stories. Humphrey Carpenter has
described the early stories as bitter comments on life while The Tale of Pigling Bland
(1913), published the year of the writer’s late marriage, is a comment on her escape from
her frustrating life as the spinster daughter of repressive parents. Earlier, The Tale of
Two Bad Mice (1904) can be seen as a parody of Potter and her fiance breaking up a
conventional Victorian life. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), the writer’s first and most
famous book, written initially as a letter to her governess’s child, is a variation on the
giant-killer folk-tale in which Peter outwits the gigantic Mr McGregor. However, it
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