The Tale of Tom Kitten by Beatrix Potter

The press release that came with a new biography by American academic Linda Lear explains that Potter was a cunning businesswoman: 'She was the first writer for children to see the potential market in merchandise 'spin offs' from literature to the toy market, and children's home products.' So Potter might have liked the fact that on eBay I recently found six Beatrix Potter drawer knobs for sale, each featuring a different character (starting bid: $14.99). We dry her with a Peter Rabbit bath towel courtesy of her nan.

We feed our daughter tricolore baby pasta from the Peter Rabbit's Organics. The other was Little Red Riding Hood, in which we are asked to believe that the big bad wolf is scared off by the mere arrival of the girl's dad, and that granny and granddaughter emerge from their hiding place under the bed for an intergenerational group hug.Īlready our house teems with Potter merchandise. One was Jack and the Beanstalk, whose narrative has been shrunk into a shocking apologia for theft. First came two terrible, sanitised reworkings of fairytales in the Ladybird touch-and-feel library that made me suspicious of what moral agendas lay beneath. It's been a weird re-initiation into children's literature. I came back to Beatrix Potter only recently, when reading to my 15-month-old daughter. Mr McCracken Peck seems to have forgotten, for instance, that Squirrel Nutkin is reduced to a gibbering wreck by the final page, hurling sticks at anyone who asks him how he lost his bushy tail (the reader knows: it was snipped off by Old Brown Owl).

I have just one problem with that - the idea that Potter's world is in any way comforting.

The Tale of Tom Kitten by Beatrix Potter