A Few of the Author's Favorite Things: Clothes, Fetishism, and The Tailor of Gloucester

I ought to make something good of the coat. I have been delighted to find that I may draw some most beautiful 18th Century clothes at the South Kensington Museum. I had been looking at them for a long time in an inconvenient dark corner of the Goldsmith's Court, but had no idea they could be taken out of the case. The clerk says I could have any article put on a table in one of the offices, which will be most convenient.

Beatrix Potter (qtd. in Lane, Tale 73–74)

It is well known that the cherry-colored coat, taffeta-lined waistcoat, and miniature mouse-dresses in Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester are visual representations of real clothes. Indeed, many of the material objects that served as models for Tailor's textual world are still extant: as Judy Taylor and her co-authors joyously proclaim, "we are able to see the original costumes which she drew, together with her sketches and finished book pictures" at the Victoria and Albert Museum (110).¹ An exhibition in 2003 and 2004 allowed gallery-goers to do just that.² What has been less often remarked upon is the enraptured tone in which the "delighted" Potter wrote of drawing and poring over these "most beautiful" clothes "out of the case" in a 1903 letter to Norman Warne. The writer seems engaged in a personal and passionate relationship with the material object that colors Tailor as a book.

Significantly Tailor's current Warne dust jacket—along with sundry other promotional materials—records that the work was the author's "own favourite among her books."³ But the volume is in reality an unexpected, even anomalous, text in Potter's oeuvre, as readers' mixed responses to it suggest. In contrast to the compact, child-friendly Tale of Peter Rabbit, the story's length was a problem for younger readers, although "'children of the right age—12'" enjoyed it (Linder, "Introduction" 8). Aptly, the book was complimented in a trade journal for tailors, and Potter called this review "one of the few compliments . . . that I value one halfpenny" (qtd. in Kutzer 11). Tailor was "most in request amongst old ladies" at public readings (Potter qtd. in Lane, Magic Years 117); apparently the author even subsequently admitted that her own favorite was "not everybody's book" (qtd. in Taylor et al. 163). The text seems to have elicited a mixture of resistance and partisan enthusiasm, this enthusiasm coming, somehow, from peculiar quarters: preadolescents, tailors, and old ladies rather than younger children.

Potter analysts identify many divergences from the other "little books." M. Daphne Kutzer's monograph, for example, names three principal points of departure: the human protagonist, the urban setting, and the specificity of its "historical moment" in "a recognizable Regency England" (11).⁴ Kutzer further identifies the book's illustrations as exceptional, "by far the most detailed and gorgeous of any to appear in her novels" (23). Like Kutzer, Taylor and her co-writers stress the exceptionality of the period setting, observing the "timelessness" of the rest of Potter's stories, while making a more general claim for Tailor's status as "one of her more complicated tales" (108–9). Humphrey Carpenter unequivocally insists that the story "bears remarkably little resemblance in theme and style to the rest of her work" (283), while Katherine R. Chandler singles the volume out (along with The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse) as categorically unlike the other stories, which she calls "ordinary narratives staged in ordinary settings, uncomplicated by magic or fairies or deus ex machina conclusions" (289).

Interestingly, another critic positions Tailor in somewhat uneasy relation to Potter's other stories via the very objects that I wish to discuss here: clothes. Carole Scott argues that clothes in Potter's writing usually "highlight the delicate interaction between animal nature and civilized behavior" and "direct our thoughts toward the relationship between the individual and the social world" (192). Clothes are frequently experienced as a restriction or "constraint" for Potter's animal characters (194). Tailor departs from...