The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck - Production

Production

In 1900 Beatrix Potter revised a tale about a humanized rabbit she had written in 1893, worked up a dummy book in imitation of the small format bestseller Little Black Sambo (1899), and, after multiple rejections from London publishers, privately published her tale in December 1901. Frederick Warne & Co. was eager to compete in the burgeoning and lucrative small format children's book market, and accepted the "bunny book" (as the firm called it) after their prominent children's book artist L. Leslie Brooke gave it his enthusiastic endorsement. Potter agreed to colour her pen and ink illustrations, chose the then-new Hentschel three-colour process for reproducing her watercolours, and in October 1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit was released.

In the next few years, Potter published books similar in concept, style, or format to Peter Rabbit: The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin in 1903, and the tales of Benjamin Bunny and Two Bad Mice in 1904. In August 1905, sales profits and a small legacy from an aunt enabled Potter to buy Hill Top, a working farm of 34 acres and 36 perches (13.85 ha) in the Lake District. In the years immediately following its purchase, she produced tales and illustrations inspired by the farm, its woodland surroundings, and nearby villages. Potter worked on sketches for Jemima Puddle-Duck during the winter of 1907 while recuperating from respiratory infections. She accompanied her parents on a holiday to Sidmouth in April 1908, and continued to work on Jemima Puddle-Duck. Potter's cousin Caroline Hutton Clark was at Hill Top during the composition of Jemima Puddle-Duck and joined Potter as she searched the farmstead for a suitable place in which to situate Jemima's nest for the illustrations. Kep was a real dog, and Mrs. Clark was given one of Kep's sons. She later described the puppy as "the dearest and cleverest dog I ever had."

Two versions of the opening paragraph were written. The slightly cynical, "What a gratifying thing it is in these days to meet with a female devoted to family life" was revised to read, "What a funny sight it is to see a brood of ducklings with a hen." The tale is complicated with irony (the feather-filled shed and the herbs for roasting a duck) and the co-existence of two time sequences or two different points of view: Kep's as he seeks the assistance of the fox-hounds in rescuing Jemima, and the sandy-whiskered gentleman's as he waits nervously for Jemima to return with the herbs.

The "farmyard tale" was dedicated to Betsy and Ralph Cannon, the children of Potter's farm manager, John Cannon. The children appear in one of the illustrations collecting Jemima's eggs from the rhubarb patch, and their mother is depicted in the opening picture feeding the barnyard fowl. Jemima was based upon a real world duck at Hill Top Farm who evaded Mrs. Cannon and her children in their attempts to locate her eggs before she mismanaged their incubation. Mrs. Cannon believed ducks made poor sitters, and routinely confiscated the ducks' eggs to allow the hens to incubate them. Potter may have taken inspiration from a drawing in her father's 1853 sketchbook of a flying duck wearing a bonnet. Potter almost certainly chose the name "Jemima" in honour of Jemima Blackburn, an ornithological painter and illustrator whose Birds from Nature she had received as a gift on her tenth birthday and whom she met in 1891.

The illustrations depict the new barn and outbuildings at Hill Top, the wrought-iron gate Potter installed at the kitchen garden, the rhubarb patch, the entrance porch at the farmhouse, the exterior of the Tower Bank Arms in the village, and imagined aerial views of the countryside around Near Sawrey. In 1940, Potter remarked upon the illustration of Jemima rushing downhill with her bonnet and shawl askew, "That is what I used to look like to the Sawrey people. I rushed about quacking industriously."

The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck was published in July 1908 after heated discussions with publisher Harold Warne about the dialogues and cover illustration. The book was an immediate success.

In later years, Ernest Aris would blatantly plagiarise not only the Peter Rabbit character in his The Treasure Seekers but Jemima in his Mrs. Beak Duck. Potter was restrained when alerted to the imitations: she praised his technical artistry but chastised him for a lack of originality. At the time, her eyesight was deteriorating and her days were heavily invested in operating her farm; her restraint with Aris may be attributed to her desire to enlist him as a collaborator.