The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse - Development and Publication

Development and Publication

In the years following Warne's death and the purchase of Hill Top, Potter produced tales and illustrations inspired by her farm, its woodland surroundings, and nearby villages. She provided Warnes with two books per annum, but, by 1910, she was juggling the demands of ageing parents with the business of operating Hill Top, and, as a result, her literary and artistic productivity began to decline. She published only one book in 1910, The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse, and wrote to a friend on New Year's Day 1911:

I did not succeed in finishing more than one book last year ... I find it very difficult lately to get the drawings done. I do not seem to be able to go into the country for a long enough time to do a sufficient amount of sketching and when I was at Bowness last summer I spent most of my time upon the road going backwards & forwards to the farm – which was amusing, but not satisfactory for work.

Mrs. Tittlemouse actually made her debut in 1909 in Potter's The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies where she rescued the six children of Benjamin and Flopsy Bunny from Mr. McGregor's grasp and was rewarded for her heroism with a quantity of rabbit wool at Christmas. In the last illustration, she is wearing a cloak and hood, and a muff and mittens fashioned from the wool. Mrs. Tittlemouse is a key (not a central) character in the tale, but a character incompletely personified, and one whose story Potter chose to develop in 1910.

Potter was an unsentimental naturalist who thought no creature either good or bad, and had no qualms describing earwigs in Mrs. Tittlemouse's passage or woodlice in her pantry. Her publisher Harold Warne however had different ideas about what was appropriate for a children's book. He had become accustomed to Potter's unusual choice of animal subjects through the years, but, ever sensitive to public reaction, thought she had gone a bit too far in Mrs. Tittlemouse with the earwig and the woodlice. The earwig was, at his behest, transmogrified into a beetle and the woodlice into "creepy-crawly people" hiding in Mrs. Tittlemouse's plate rack. "I can alter the text, when I get the proofs," she wrote, "and will erase the offensive word 'wood-lice'!" Potter argued for the generic term "slaters" for the woodlice, but was overruled. It was decided that an illustration of a centipede (Miss Maggie Manylegs) would be withdrawn and replaced with a butterfly.

Potter usually tested a new work on an audience by writing the tale into an exercise book, pasting a few watercolour or pen and ink illustrations into the volume, and presenting the whole as a gift to a child. In the case of Mrs. Tittlemouse, Potter wrote the tale in a small leather-covered notebook 150 by 85 millimetres (5.9 in × 3.3 in) with twenty-one pages of text and eight watercolours as a New Year's gift for Warne's youngest daughter, Nellie. Its inscription read, "For Nellie with love and best wishes for A Happy New Year. Jan. 1st. 1910".

The family called it "Nellie's little book" and, when the book was published with twenty-six colour pictures, the dedication remained the same. 25,000 copies of The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse were released in July 1910 and available in a 138 by 104 millimetres (5.4 in × 4.1 in) small book format in either blue-grey or buff paper boards at 1/- or decorated cloth at 1/6. 10,000 copies were released in November 1910 and another 5,000 copies in November 1911. Potter was pleased with the bound copies she received. "The buff is the prettiest colour, though it may not keep so clean", she wrote to Warnes, "I think it should prove popular with little girls." Her father wrote to the Warne children that his daughter's sense of humour was ever-fresh and never dull.

Potter intended to follow Mrs. Tittlemouse with a tale about a pig in a large format book similar to the original Ginger and Pickles. On one occasion, she passed an hour sketching inside the pig sty at Hill Top while the pig nibbled at her boots. She abandoned the pig book after fruitless attempts to make progress on it, and, instead, occupied the winter of 1910–11 with supervising the production of Peter Rabbit's Painting Book, and the composition of The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes.

Almost sixty years after the publication of Mrs. Tittlemouse, the character appeared in the 1971 Royal Ballet film, The Tales of Beatrix Potter, and, in 1992, her tale and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies were integrated into a single animated episode for the BBC series, The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends.