The Continuing Potter Tradition

Dryly stated, Beatrix Potter is important to the field of children's literature because she was the first to write and illustrate an enduring body of animal fantasy. To put it more subjectively, we might say that her characters beguile, her colors charm, her prose prickles. Without question, some of her creations have taken firm root in our culture: when it was reported that the Princess of Wales had decorated her nursery with Potter, we knew that for once royalty was not trend-setting, but merely observing preferences well established by generations of parents before her. Not surprisingly, more than forty years after her death in 1943, Potter continues to inspire research and critical appraisal. Two recent publications focus on entirely different aspects of her life and work: MacDonald's volume is the first book-length critical study of the twenty-three books in the Peter Rabbit series, while Beatrix Potter Studies I consists of seven unrelated essays on her various achievements as author, natural history artist, and conservationist. Neither piece offers a bold new perspective; yet each contributes importantly to our understanding of Potter and her work.

Ruth MacDonald's Beatrix Potter offers a skillful blending of biographical material with analysis of the Potter canon. Readers will find her insights intriguing. For instance, in her analysis of The Tale of Two Bad Mice, MacDonald suggests that the tension between the lively mice and the lifeless dolls reflects Potter's own sense of restraint in her parents' all-too-proper Victorian household, citing a letter from Potter in which she wrote that the dollhouse was "the kind of house where one cannot sit down without upsetting something, I know the sort." One particularly convincing analysis relates Pigling Bland and his escape with Pig-Wig to "over the hills and far away" as a kind of farewell to Potter's London life as dutiful daughter. Inasmuch as the book was published only months before her marriage at the age of 47 to Lake District solicitor William Heelis, and closes, as MacDonald shows, with an unprecedented sense of finality, the correlation seems plausible. MacDonald has worked out such relationships between the author's life and work more fully than have preceding Potter commentators; while such analysis must generally stay in the realm of supposition, it does at least open the books for us, revealing new aspects of plot, theme, and character which we might have overlooked.

MacDonald has sought to give equal play in her analysis to both the written and the visual aspects of Potter's books. She observes carefully, noticing such details as the "coronation teapot" that Ribby uses to serve tea to Duchess in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, or the distant presence of Potter herself in the background as Anna Maria and Samuel Whiskers escape from her house at the end of The Roly-Poly Pudding. She comments on colors, telling us, for instance, how Potter finally decided on brown—rather than a perhaps intrusive red or blue—for Lucy's cloak in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Her research into the progress of books leads to a discussion of how Potter reworked Lucy's figure countless times, sometimes even cutting out and pasting it in again on the original drawings, with a resulting blurriness that contrasts with the clearly delineated hedgehog. Yet MacDonald is in the difficult position of describing illustrations—colors, lines, details—without a single illustration in the Twayne text to clarify the points she makes. Thus, at times one comes to regard her work as a kind of guide book, particularly useful if one has Potter's own books near at hand as one reads.

Generally, McDonald writes deftly. Her vocabulary and syntax remain lively throughout what might easily pall, although occasionally an awkward or unclear sentence impedes the flow of her thought. She has organized the book intelligently, with a first chapter...