The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse - Commentaries

Commentaries

Johnny Town-Mouse was the last of Potter's books in her early style. The rural scenes inspired Potter's best designs, and the author struck the right tone for children while incorporating subtler touches for adults. The book is a satire on human society, and a warning about the dangers and extravagances of life in the city.

Animal moral tales with their dramatic and psychological simplicity lend themselves easily to illustration and proliferated in the 19th century. In their symbolic qualities, many of Potter's animal characters trace their ancestry to Aesop's bestiary. Like Aesop, Potter observed human and animal behaviour with unsentimental common sense and wisdom, but, unlike Aesop (and more like Horace), she is not as neutral in her presentation of country versus city life. Her preference is obvious: the rural scenes are depicted from mouse-eye view with mouth-watering depictions of fruit and flowers, but the urban scenes are generally depicted from the human-eye level and justify Timmie Willie's fears of loud noise and huge objects. The reader cannot help but share (or envy) Potter's preference for country life when she presents it so attractively.

Potter makes it clear that Timmy Willie is justified in fearing the cat and the maid in the town house because they are his mortal enemies. Johnny Town-mouse however displays little discrimination in fearing the cows that provide milk for Timmy Willie's table or the "fearful racket" of the lawnmower that provides grass clippings for his bed. In the illustrations, Potter underscores the absurdity of Johnny's fears by placing both the cows and the lawnmower in the distance and never close enough to be threats.

In children's literature (for whatever reasons), country life is generally adjudged far healthier for the young than city life. Nostalgia for the purity and innocence of childhood and a longing for a distant past when life was believed simpler often colour this particular conception of country life. Potter chose to make this conception of the past her way of life when she left the complexities of London life for the simple life in the village of Sawrey. Her depiction of the pleasures of country life in Johnny Town-Mouse places her in the literary tradition of the nostalgic and the reminiscent.