The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Other Stories

The pitch

A rabbit in a blue jacket squeezes under a garden gate his father never came back from. Ten complete tales follow — a squirrel who taunts an owl until it costs him his tail, a duck who trusts a fox, two mice who wreck a doll’s house over a ham made of plaster — each about a thousand words, each with a painting of Potter’s own on nearly every page.

What to know

These are picture books and we have kept them that way: 262 of Potter’s watercolors, at full size, facing the text the way she arranged them. A child of six can read a tale alone, and a child of three can follow it in your lap, which is why this one carries the parent-reads tag. Her sentences are short but her words are not simplified (a rabbit is “implored to exert himself”), and children take that vocabulary in happily when it arrives in the middle of a chase. Ten of Potter’s twenty-three little books are here, all from her first decade, 1902 to 1909. The complete set is a fine thing to own on paper.

Life when written

Potter was twenty-seven, living where an unmarried daughter of her class was expected to live — her parents’ house in West Brompton, London — and on holiday in Scotland when she heard that Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of her former governess, was recovering from scarlet fever. On 4 September 1893 she sent him an eight-page illustrated letter, opening: “I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits.” Four years later the Linnean Society would not let her read her own paper on fungus spores in the room; a man read it aloud for her, because she was a woman. At least six publishers turned down Peter Rabbit, so she printed it herself in 1901; Warne took it in 1902, and by 1905 the little books had bought her a farm in the Lake District.