The Tale of Peter Rabbit
The
Tale of Peter Rabbit is a children's
book written and illustrated by Beatrix
Potter that follows mischievous and
disobedient young Peter Rabbit
as he gets into, and is chased about, the garden of Mr.
McGregor. He escapes and returns home to his
mother, who puts him to bed after offering him chamomile tea. The tale was
written for five-year-old Noel Moore, son of Potter's former governess Annie
Carter Moore, in 1893. It was revised and privately
printed by Potter in 1901 after several
publishers' rejections, but was printed in a trade edition by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1902.
The book was a success, and multiple reprints were issued in the years
immediately following its debut. It has been translated into 36 languages,[1]
and with 45 million copies sold it is one of the best-selling books in history.[2]
Since
its release the book has generated considerable merchandise for both children
and adults, including toys, dishes, foods, clothing, and videos. Potter was one
of the first to be responsible for such merchandise when she patented a Peter
Rabbit doll in 1903 and followed it almost immediately with a Peter Rabbit
board game. Peter Rabbit is a favorite for children of all ages the tales of
which there are many are often read to children as 'bedtime stories' They
however can be enjoyed by all ages through the hit movie that was released a
few years ago
Plot
The
story focuses on a family of anthropomorphic rabbits. The widowed mother rabbit
warns her four rabbit children, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter not to enter the vegetable garden of a man named Mr.
McGregor, whose wife, she tells them, put their father in a pie after he
entered. Her triplets (Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail) obediently refrain from
entering the garden, but Peter enters the garden to snack on some vegetables. Peter ends up eating more than what is good for him and
goes looking for parsley to cure his stomach ache. Peter is spotted by Mr.
McGregor and loses his jacket and shoes while trying to escape. He hides in a
watering can in a shed, but then has to run away again when Mr. McGregor finds
him, and ends up completely lost. After sneaking past a cat, Peter sees the
gate where he entered the garden from a distance and heads for it, despite
being spotted and chased by Mr. McGregor again. With difficulty he wriggles
under the gate, and escapes from the garden, but he spots his abandoned
clothing being used to dress Mr. McGregor's scarecrow. After returning home, a sick Peter is sent to bed by his
mother, after she tells him that his jacket and shoes are the second jacket and
pair of shoes that he has lost in a fortnight. His mother also takes note that
he was not feeling too well, and deduces that he had definitely been to Mr
McGregor's garden. To cure his stomachache, Mrs. Rabbit gives him chamomile
tea which is revealed to be one
teaspoon and gives a dose of it to Peter. Peter's sisters, meanwhile, receive a
scrumptuous dinner of milk, bread and blackberries.
Composition
The
story was inspired by a pet rabbit Potter had as a child, which she named Peter
Piper.[3] Through the 1890s, Potter sent illustrated story letters to
the children of her former governess, Annie Moore. In 1900, Moore, realizing the commercial
potential of Potter's stories, suggested they be made into books. Potter
embraced the suggestion, and, borrowing her complete correspondence (which had
been carefully preserved by the Moore children), selected a letter written on 4
September 1893 to five-year-old Noel that featured a tale about a rabbit named
Peter. Potter biographer Linda
Lear explains: "The original letter
was too short to make a proper book so [Potter] added some text and made new
black-and-white illustrations...and made it more suspenseful. These changes
slowed the narrative down, added intrigue, and gave a greater sense of the
passage of time. Then she copied it out into a stiff-covered exercise book, and
painted a coloured frontispiece showing Mrs Rabbit dosing Peter with camomile
tea".[4]
Publication history
Private publication
As
Lear explains, Potter titled The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor's
Garden and sent it to publishers, but "her manuscript was
returned ... including Frederick Warne & Co. ... who nearly a
decade earlier had shown some interest in her artwork. Some publishers wanted a
shorter book, others a longer one. But most wanted coloured illustrations which
by 1900 were both popular and affordable".[5] The several rejections were frustrating to Potter, who knew
exactly how her book should look (she had adopted the format and style of Helen
Bannerman's Little Black Sambo) "and how much it should cost".[6] She decided to publish the book herself, and on 16 December
1901 the first 250 copies of her privately printed The Tale of Peter Rabbit
were "ready for distribution to family and friends".[7]
First commercial edition
In
1901, as Lear explains, a Potter family friend and sometime poet, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley,
set Potter's tale into "rather dreadful didactic verse and submitted it,
along with Potter's illustrations and half her revised manuscript, to Frederick
Warne & Co.," who had been among the original rejecters.[8] Warne editors declined Rawnsley's version "but asked
to see the complete Potter manuscript" – their interest stimulated by the
opportunity The Tale of Peter Rabbit offered the publisher to compete
with the success of Helen Bannerman's wildly popular Little Black Sambo
and other small-format children's books then on the market. When Warne inquired
about the lack of colour illustrations in the book, Potter replied that
rabbit-brown and green were not good subjects for colouration. Warne declined
the book but left open the possibility of future publication.[9]
Warne
wanted colour illustrations throughout the "bunny book" (as the firm
referred to the tale) and suggested cutting the illustrations "from
forty-two to thirty-two ... and marked which ones might best be eliminated".[9] Potter initially resisted the idea of colour illustrations,
but then realized her stubborn stance was a mistake. She sent Warne
"several colour illustrations, along with a copy of her privately printed
edition" which Warne then handed to their eminent children's book
illustrator L. Leslie Brooke
for his professional opinion. Brooke was impressed with Potter's work.
Fortuitously, his recommendation coincided with a sudden surge in the small
picture-book market.[10]
Meanwhile,
Potter continued to distribute her privately printed edition to family and
friends, with the celebrated creator of Sherlock
Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle,
acquiring a copy for his children. When the first private printing of 250
copies was sold out, another 200 were prepared.[11] She noted in an inscription in one copy that her beloved
pet rabbit Peter had died.[12]
Potter
arrived at an agreement with Warne for an initial commercial publication of
5,000 copies.[13] Negotiations dragged on into the following year, but a
contract was finally signed in June 1902.[12] Potter was closely involved in the publication of the
commercial edition – redrawing where necessary, making minor adjustments to the
prose and correcting punctuation. The blocks for the illustrations and text
were sent to printer
Edmund
Evans for engraving, and she made adjustments to the proofs when she received them. Lear writes that "Even before
the publication of the tale in early October 1902, the first 8,000 copies were
sold out. By the year's end there were 28,000 copies of The Tale of Peter
Rabbit in print. By the middle of 1903 there was a fifth edition sporting
coloured endpapers ... a sixth printing was produced within the month";
and a year after the first commercial publication there were 56,470 copies in
print.[14]
American copyright
Warne's
New York office "failed to register the copyright for The Tale of Peter Rabbit in the United
States"[This quote needs a
citation], and unlicensed
copies of the book "(from which Potter would receive no royalties) began to appear in the spring of 1903. There was nothing
anyone could do to stop them".[citation needed]
The
enormous financial loss "... [to Potter] only became evident over
time"[This quote needs a
citation]. The necessity of protecting her intellectual property hit
home after the successful 1903 publication of The Tale of Squirrel
Nutkin when her father returned from Burlington
Arcade in Mayfair at Christmas 1903 with a toy squirrel labelled
"Nutkin".[15]
Merchandising
Potter
asserted that her tales would one day be nursery classics, and part of the
"longevity of her books comes from strategy", writes Potter
biographer Ruth MacDonald.[16] She was the first to exploit the commercial possibilities
of her characters and tales; between 1903 and 1905 these included a Peter
Rabbit stuffed toy, an unpublished board game, and nursery wallpaper.[17]
Considerable
variations to the original format and version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit,
as well as spin-off merchandise, have been made available over the decades.
Variant versions include "pop-ups, toy theatres, and lift-the-flap
books". By 1998, modern technology had made available "videos, audio
cassette, a CD-ROM, a computer program, and Internet sites", as described
by Margaret Mackey writing in The case of Peter Rabbit: changing conditions
of literature for children. She continues: "Warne and their
collaborators and competitors have produced a large collection of activity
books and a monthly educational magazine". A plethora of other Peter
Rabbit related merchandise exists, and "toy shops in the United States and
Britain have whole sections of [the] store specially signposted and earmarked
exclusively for Potter-related toys and merchandise".[18]
Unauthorized
copying of The Tale of Peter Rabbit has flourished over the decades,
including products only loosely associated with the original. In 1916, American
Louise A. Field cashed in on the popularity by writing books such as Peter
Rabbit Goes to School and Peter Rabbit and His Ma, the illustrations
of which showed him in his distinctive blue jacket.[19] In an animated movie by Golden
Films, The New Adventures of Peter
Rabbit, "Peter is given buck teeth, an American accent and a fourth
sister Hopsy." Another video "retelling of the tale casts Peter as a
Christian preacher singing songs about God and Jesus."[18]
Literary praise
Writing
in Storyteller: The Classic that Heralded America's Storytelling Revival,
in discussing the difference between stories that lend themselves well to
telling and stories that lend themselves well to reading, Ramon Ross explains
Peter Rabbit is a story created for reading. He believes Potter created a good
mix of suspense and tension, intermixed with lulls in the action. He goes on to
write that the writing style—"the economy of words, the crisp writing"—lends
itself well to a young audience.[20]
Lear
writes that Potter "had in fact created a new form of animal fable in: one in which anthropomorphic animals behave as real animals with true animal
instincts", and a form of fable with anatomically correct illustrations
drawn by a scientifically minded artist. She further states Peter Rabbit's
nature is familiar to rabbit enthusiasts "and endorsed by those who are
not ... because her portrayal speaks to some universal understanding of rabbity
behaviour."[21] She describes the tale as a "perfect marriage of word
and image" and "a triumph of fantasy and fact".[22]
According
to Stuart Jeffries, "...psychoanalytic critiques of her work have
multiplied since her death in 1943."[23] Carole Scott writes in Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit
that the reader cannot help but identify with rebellious little Peter and his
plight as all the illustrations are presented from his low-to-the-ground view,
most feature Peter in close-up and within touching distance, and Mr. McGregor
is distanced from the reader by always being depicted on the far side of Peter.
Scott explains: "This identification dramatically instills fear and
tension in the reader, and interacts with the frequently distanced voice of the
verbal narrative", sometimes with contradictory effects.[24] In the verbal narrative and the illustration for the moment
when Mr. McGregor attempts to trap Peter under a garden sieve, for example, the
verbal narrative presents the murderous intent of Mr. McGregor as a
matter-of-fact, everyday occurrence while the illustration presents the
desperate moment from the terrified view of a small animal in fear of his life
– a view that is reinforced by the birds that take flight to the left and the
right.[25]
In
the illustration of Peter standing by the locked door, the verbal narrative
describes the scene without the flippancy evident in the moment of the sieve.
The inability to overcome obstacles is presented in the verbal narrative with
objective matter-of-factness and the statement, "Peter began to cry"
is offered without irony or attitude, thus drawing the reader closer to Peter's
emotions and plight. The illustration depicts an unclothed Peter standing
upright against the door, one foot upon the other with a tear running from his
eye. Without his clothes, Peter is only a small, wild animal but his tears, his
emotions, and his human posture intensifies the reader's identification with
him. Here, verbal narrative and illustration work in harmony rather than in
disharmony.[26] Scott suggests Potter's tale has encouraged many
generations of children to "self-indulgence, disobedience, transgression
of social boundaries and ethics, and assertion of their wild, unpredictable
nature against the constrictions of civilized living."[27]
Frank
Delaney notes "a self-containment" in Potter's writing reflective of
an uninterested mother and a lonely childhood spent in the company of pets.[28] John Bidwell, curator at the Morgan Library & Museum in
New York, observed "...the sardonic humor that makes Beatrix Potter so
much fun for kids and grown-ups."[29]
Adaptations
In
1938, shortly after the success of Snow White and the
Seven Dwarfs, Walt
Disney became interested in making an
animated film based on The Tale of Peter Rabbit. However, in a letter to
a friend, Potter wrote that she refused Walt Disney's "scheme to film
Peter Rabbit", saying, "I am not very hopeful about the result. They
propose to use cartoons; it seems that a succession of figures can be joggled
together to give an impression of motion. I don't think the pictures would be
satisfactory... I am not troubling myself about it!"[30]
In
1935, the story was loosely adapted in the Merrie
Melodies short film, Country Boy. It
shows some modifications in relation to Beatrix Potter's original story, most
notably the Rabbit family surname is changed to "Cottontail" and
Peter having two brothers and a sister rather than 3 sisters. In 1971, Peter
Rabbit appeared as a character in the ballet film The Tales of Beatrix
Potter. In late 1991, HBO aired an animated musical adaptation of The Tale of
Peter Rabbit, narrated by Carol
Burnett,[31] as part of the network's Storybook Musicals series, which was later released to VHS by Family Home Entertainment under HBO licence.[32] In 1992, the tale was adapted to animation again for the BBC anthology
series, The World of Peter
Rabbit and Friends. In 2006,
Peter Rabbit was heavily referenced in a biopic about Beatrix Potter entitled Miss
Potter. In December 2012, a new CGI-animated
children's TV series titled Peter Rabbit premiered on Nickelodeon, with a full series run beginning in February 2013.[33][34] Peter was voiced by Colin DePaula throughout Season 1 and
recanted by L. Parker Lucas for Season 2 in the US version. In the U.K. version
he is voiced by Connor Fitzgerald.
In
February 2018, a 3D
live-action/CGI animated
feature film titled Peter Rabbit,
directed by Will Gluck,
was released. Voice roles were played by James
Corden, Daisy
Ridley, Margot
Robbie, and Elizabeth
Debicki, and live action roles played by Domhnall
Gleeson, Rose
Byrne, and Sam
Neill.[35]
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