The Tale of Two Bad Mice - Development and Publication

Development and Publication

The Tale of Two Bad Mice had its genesis in June 1903 when Potter rescued two mice from a cage-trap in her cousin Caroline Hutton's kitchen at Harescombe Grange, Gloucestershire, and named them Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca after characters in Henry Fielding's play, Tom Thumb. Tom Thumb was never mentioned in Potter's letters after his rescue from the trap (he may have escaped) but Hunca Munca became a pet and a model; she developed an affectionate personality and displayed good housekeeping skills.

Between 26 November 1903 and 2 December 1903, Potter took a week's holiday in Hastings, and, though there is no evidence she did so, she may have taken one or both mice with her. She composed three tales in a stiff-covered exercise book during a week of relentless rain: Something very very NICE (which, after much revision, eventually became The Pie and the Patty-Pan in 1905), The Tale of Tuppenny (which eventually became Chapter 1 in The Fairy Caravan in 1929), and The Tale of Hunca Munca or The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Potter hoped one of the three tales would be chosen for publication in 1904 as a companion piece to Benjamin Bunny which was then a work in progress. "I have tried to make a cat story that would use some of the sketches of a cottage I drew the summer before last," she wrote her editor Norman Warne on 2 December, "There are two others in the copy book ... the dolls would make a funny one, but it is rather soon to have another mouse book?", referring to her recently published The Tailor of Gloucester.

Warne received and considered the three tales. Potter wrote him that the cat tale would be the easiest to put together from her existing sketches but preferred to develop the mouse tale. She alerted Warne that she was spending a week with a cousin at Melford Hall and would run the three tales past the children in the house. Warne favoured the mouse tale – perhaps because he was constructing a dollhouse in his basement workshop for his niece Winifred Warne – but for the moment, he delayed making a decision and turned his attention to the size of the second book for 1904 because Potter was complaining about being "cramped" with small drawings and was tempted to put more in them than they could hold. Warne suggested a 215 mm x 150 mm format similar to L. Leslie Brooke's recently published Johnny Crow's Garden, but, in the end, Potter opted for the mouse tale in a small format, instinctively aware the format would be more appropriate for a mouse tale and indicating it would be difficult to spread the mice over a large page. Before a final decision was made, Warne fashioned a large format dummy book called The Tale of the Doll's House and Hunca Munca with pictures and text snipped from The Tailor to give Potter a general impression of how a large format product would appear, but Potter remained adamant and the small format and the title The Tale of Two Bad Mice were finally chosen.

Just before New Year's 1904, Warne sent Potter a glass-fronted mouse house with a ladder to an upstairs nesting loft built to her specifications so she could easily observe and draw the mice. The dollhouse Potter used as a model was one Warne had built in his basement workshop as a Christmas gift for his four-year-old niece Winifred Warne. Potter had seen the house under construction and wanted to sketch it, but the house had been moved just before Christmas to Fruing Warne's home south of London in Surbiton. Norman Warne invited Potter to have lunch in Surbiton and sketch the dollhouse, but Mrs. Potter intervened. She had taken alarm at the growing intimacy between her daughter and Warne; as a consequence, she made the family carriage unavailable to her daughter, and refused to chaperone her to the home of those she considered her social inferiors. Potter declined the invitation and berated herself for not standing up to her mother. She became concerned that the whole project could be compromised.

On 12 February 1904 Potter wrote Warne and apologized for not accepting his invitation to Surbiton. She wrote progress was being made on the mouse tale, and once found Hunca Munca carrying a beribboned doll up the ladder into her nest. She noted that the mouse despised the plaster food. She assured him she could complete the book from photographs. On 18 February 1904 Warne bought the Lucinda and Jane dolls at a shop in Seven Dials and sent them to Potter. Potter wrote:

Thank you so much for the queer little dollies; they are exactly what I wanted ... I will provide a print dress and a smile for Jane; her little stumpy feet are so funny. I think I shall make a dear little book of it. I shall be glad to get done woth the rabbits ... I shall be very glad of the little stove and the ham; the work is always a very great pleasure anyhow.

The policeman doll was borrowed from Winifred Warne. She was reluctant to part with it but the doll was safely returned. Many years later she remembered Potter arriving at the house to borrow the doll:

She was very unfashionably dressed; and wore a coat and skirt and hat, and carried a man's umbrella. She came up to the nursery dressed in her outdoor clothes and asked if she might borrow the policeman doll; Nanny hunted for the doll and eventually found it. It was at least a foot high, and quite out of proportion to the doll's house."

On 25 February Warne sent plaster food and miniature furniture from Hamleys, a London toy shop. On 20 April the photographs of the dollhouse were delivered, and at the end of May Potter wrote Warne that eighteen of the mouse drawings were complete, and the remainder were in progress. By the middle of June proofs of the text had arrived, and after a few corrections, Potter wrote on 28 June that she was satisfied with the alterations. Proofs of the illustrations were delivered, and Potter was satisfied with them. In September 1904 20,000 copies of the book were published in two different bindings – one in paper boards and the other in a deluxe binding designed by Potter. The book was dedicated to Winifred Warne, "the girl who had the doll's house".

In the summer of 1905 Hunca Munca died after falling from a chandelier while playing with Potter. She wrote Warne on 21 July: "I have made a little doll of poor Hunca Munca. I cannot forgive myself for letting her tumble. I do so miss her. She fell off the chandelier; she managed to stagger up the staircase into your little house, but she died in my hand about ten minutes after. I think if I had broken my own neck it would have saved a deal of trouble."

Between 1907 and 1912 Potter wrote miniature letters to children as from characters in her books. The letters reveal more about their characters and their doings. Though many were probably lost or destroyed, a few are extant from the characters in Two Bad Mice. In one, Jane Dollcook has broken the soup tureen and both her legs; in another, Tom Thumb writes Lucinda asking her to spare a feather bed which she regrets she cannot send because the one he stole was never replaced. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca have nine children and the parents need another kettle for boiling water. Hunca Munca is apparently not a very conscientious housekeeper because Lucinda complains of dust on the mantlepiece.

In 1971, Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb appeared in a segment of the Royal Ballet film The Tales of Beatrix Potter, and, in 1995, the tale was adapted to animation and telecast on the BBC anthology series The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends.