Themes
Ginger and Pickles is Potter's celebration of village life and emphasizes her preoccupation at the time of composition with keeping accounts, making a profit, and dealing with neighbours as clients. Shopkeeping was thought an appropriate subject for children's books of the period and fold-out pages displayed the many products that would be found in a shop. In Ginger and Pickles, Potter offers the child reader not only the various products but a glimpse of what interests adults in a village shop: the quirks and eccentricities of village residents and the social life that revolves around such a place. The animals in the tale are humanized, wear clothing, and pursue a human activity, shopping. Potter's design was to record human life with a cast of animal characters rather than to place her animals in a fantasy world parallel to the human.
The story also looks at factors of the market economy. Ginger and Pickles get plenty of customers by granting credit but the failure to impose limits means that they do not receive any money in return. Their immediate rival, Tabitha Twitchit, is more astute: by refusing credit she gets fewer customers, but gets to stay in business while Ginger and Pickles go bust. The subsequent lack of competition means that she can raise her prices.
Ginger and Pickles is the last of Potter's important Sawrey tales though not developed as fully as its predecessors in complexity of narrative and irony. Domestic life – the prevalent theme of the Sawrey books – is only touched on in the tale with the accoutrements of domestic life such as soap and candles. The irony of the tale lies in two predatory animals operating a shop for what would be their natural prey yet the two are unable to succeed in the venture because of their propensity for extending unlimited credit. Ginger and Pickles both have the ability to survive by exercising their natural instincts but choose instead to behave like humans by running a shop; in the end, starving themselves and permitting their prey to live comfortably and without cost.
Read more about this topic: The Tale Of Ginger And Pickles
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
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“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
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