Background
Helen Beatrix Potter was born to wealth and privilege on 28 July 1866 in London to barrister Rupert Potter and his wife Helen (Leech) Potter. Raised by a series of governesses, Beatrix filled her hours with reading, painting, drawing, and tending a schoolroom menagerie of small mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Summer holidays in Scotland or the Lake District and long visits to her grandparents' Camfield Place home in Hertfordshire cultivated her love for and observation of the natural world. As a young woman, she was discouraged from seeking higher education, and groomed instead to be a permanent resident and housekeeper in her parents' London home.
While summering with family in Perthshire in 1893, the 27-year-old Potter sent a story and picture letter about a disobedient young rabbit to the son of her former governess Annie Carter Moore, and continued to send similar letters to the boy and his siblings over the following years. Mrs. Moore recognized the literary value of the letters and urged her former charge to publish them. Potter developed the 1893 letter into The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and worked up a dummy book based on the small book format and style of Helen Bannerman's bestselling Little Black Sambo (1899) with its pages of simple texts opposite appropriate pictures.
The late Victorian and early Edwardian children's book market was flooded by inexpensive small format books with profusions of illustrations made possible by technological advances in colour reproduction. The publishing firm of Frederick Warne & Co. wanted to compete in this lucrative market and chose to publish Peter Rabbit after receiving an enthusiastic endorsement from their prominent children's book artist L. Leslie Brooke. The illustrations were reproduced by the then-new Hentschel three-colour process which favoured a painterly rather than a linear style and was kinder to watercolours than chromolithography.
Potter's career as a children's author and illustrator was launched in October 1902 when The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published to great success. Five books similar in concept and format followed, and, in July 1905, profits from book sales and a small legacy from an aunt allowed Potter to buy a 34-acre (140,000 m2) farm called Hill Top at Sawrey in the Lake District. The farm became her home away from London and her artistic retreat. In the years immediately following its purchase, she produced tales and illustrations based on the farm, its natural surroundings, and nearby villages.
Ginger and Pickles was inspired by a shop in Smithy Lane, Sawrey, where villagers came to make purchases, visit, and exchange gossip. The book was dedicated to bedridden shop owner and blacksmith John Taylor whose wife and daughter ran his shop. Taylor had long wanted to appear in a Potter book but was unable to leave his bed to pose for the artist. He told her he thought he could pass for a dormouse; Potter made him John Dormouse in the tale. He did not live long enough to see the book or its dedication. Ginger was modelled on Tommy Bunkle, a cat belonging to Sawrey schoolmistress Mrs. Bunkle. Potter thought the cat's colour unusual and was reluctant to put him in clothes but bowed to her public's preference in storybook animals. She refused however to put him in trousers.
Potter wrote to friend Millie Warne during the composition process that the book was causing some amusement in Sawrey: "It has got a good many views which can be recognized in the village which is what they like, they are all quite jealous of each others houses & cats getting into a book".
Potter wrote Ginger and Pickles in a penny exercise book as a Christmas gift for Louie Warne, the daughter of her publisher Harold Warne, and worked on proofs during her 1909 summer holiday at the country house of Broad Leys near Bowness-on-Windermere. The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and Ginger and Pickles were the two books chosen for publication by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1909. The book was finished in August. It was published in October 1909 in a large format that was later reduced to the standard small format of the Peter Rabbit library. In 1931, Potter and E. Harcourt Williams collaborated on a dramatization of Ginger and Pickles.
Read more about this topic: The Tale Of Ginger And Pickles
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