Hello, I'm Richard Nicholas Nimz, prospector of the written word. Beatrix Potter was an amazing woman. She wasn't just an author: she bred sheep, she fought for conservation, and her drawings and studies about plants and fungi are still examined by scientists today, not to mention her twenty-three books for children which constitute part of the Golden Age of Children's Literature. All of them called The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Thus, in the interest of broadening cultural awareness, this is The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.
Potter, B. (2005). The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15137/15137-h/15137-h.htm
Summary: One day, a girl named Lucie looses three pocket handkerchiefs and her pinafore. In the process of looking for them, she stumbles on the home of a hedgehog named Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, a laundress and the finder of Lucie's missing items. Lucie decides to stay and help Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle with the washing, including items from several other characters from Mrs. Potter's stories. Finally, Lucie makes her way home, reunited with her pocket handkerchiefs and her pinafore, now all clean.
Thoughts: I'll admit, I mainly did this due to J.K. Rowling. In her expanded Harry Potter universe, there's a witch by the name of Beatrix Bloxam, author of the Toadstool Tales, a swipe at over-sanitized children's stories (a sample of which can be found in The Tales of Beedle the Bard). I'll be honest, I'm not really fond of when an author uses their podium to take a potshot at something, something I try to enforce even when it's my own side and in my own writing. However, this potshot at Beatrix Potter seems to have been unintentional, since Rowling recommends Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Two Bad Mice as one of ten kids should read (Higgins, 2006).
If I were to continue with this nonexistent association, I could argue that Beatrix Potter's stories are hardly sanitized with the tales of Peter Rabbit and Squirrel Nutkin. However, this story doesn't have anything that remotely looks like violence. It's just a girl who loses her handkerchiefs and stumbles on a friendly laundress who has them. It can be a little unengaging if you're not that interested. And yes, it can seem a little overly sweet at one or two points.
The illustrations, however, are gorgeous. They're bright, colorful, and adorable. This fits the book as a sweet little story about ultimately nothing, which feels like a nice counterpoint to entertainment getting darker and more didactic. What really interested me, though, is this sentence:
"And she hung up all sorts and sizes of clothes—small brown coats of mice; and one velvety black moleskin waist-coat; and a red tailcoat with no tail belonging to Squirrel Nutkin; and a very much shrunk blue jacket belonging to Peter Rabbit; and a petticoat, not marked, that had gone lost in the washing—and at last the basket was empty!"
I'm a nerd. I love continuity, especially in this age of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I love the idea that all of Beatrix Potter's stories share a universe. Admittedly, if you're going to get started on her stories, you'll want to start with something like The Tailor of Gloucester. However, this is still a good story.
Sources:
Higgins, C. (2006, January 31). From Beatrix Potter to Ulysses: What the top writers say every child should read. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jan/31/buildingachildrenslibrary.guardianchildrensfictionprize2005
No comments:
Post a Comment