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| Author | Beatrix Potter |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Beatrix Potter |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's book |
| Publisher | Frederick Warne & Co. |
| Publication place | England |
| Published in English | August 1903 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| ISBN | NA Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
| Preceded by | The Tale of Peter Rabbit |
| Followed by | The Tailor of Gloucester |
The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943). The story is about an impertinent red squirrel named Nutkin and his narrow escape from an owl called Old Brown. The tale had its origins in a story and picture letter Potter sent to Norah Moore, the daughter of Potter's former governess Annie Moore. The book was published in a deluxe edition by Frederick Warne & Co. in August 1903, and was an instant success. One commentator has likened Squirrel Nutkin's impertinent behaviour to that of the rebellious working-class of Potter's own day, and another commentator has noted the tale's similarities to pourquoi tales and folk tales in the story's explanations of Squirrel Nutkin's short tail and characteristics of squirrel behaviour.
Background
Helen Beatrix Potter was born into the privileged world of wealth at 2 Bolton Gardens in south-west London on 28 July 1866 to Rupert William and Helen Leech Potter. She led a solitary life as a child, solacing herself with her nursery collection of books, and by painting and drawing. Periodic visits to her paternal grandparents’ home in Hertfordshire nurtured her interests in nature and country life. It was there that she learned the names of wildflowers and birds, and observed the lives of wild and domesticated animals. When Potter was five the family began an eleven year tradition of taking their summer holidays in Perthshire, Scotland, where Potter sketched birds' eggs, caterpillars, and anthropomorphic fantasy rabbits at play.
Wherever the family called home, Potter found time to maintain a menagerie of birds, amphibians, and small mammals. In 1889, at the suggestion of her brother Bertram, Potter sold six designs of her rabbit Benjamin H. Bouncer to the publisher Hildesheimer & Faulkner where they became greeting cards and the illustrations for a book of verse.
In 1893, Potter began eight illustrations for Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, completing the group in 1896. Harris would have great influence on her work during the following years with his 'rabbit tobacco', 'puddle-duck', and 'Cottontail' entering her own vocabulary. His tales would serve as a reference point for Potter's creation of a universe where animals and humans overlap. In 1901, Potter privately printed The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and, in early October 1902, the tale was published in a trade edition by Frederick Warne and Co..
Composition
In 1901, Potter passed her summer holiday at Lingholm and from there sent a story and picture letter about a red squirrel colony in Cumberland, England to Norah Moore, the daughter of her former governess Annie Moore. The letter was an elaboration of an earlier letter sent to Norah’s brother Noel about some American squirrels rafting down a river using their tails as sails. She copied Norah’s story into an exercise book, and spent the summer sketching squirrels and the local landscape around St Herbert's Island which would eventually become 'Owl Island' in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.
The success of the privately printed edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901 and the certainty of its future release as a trade edition by Warne, stimulated Potter to a period of great creativity, and she proposed at least three new books to Warne between the summer of 1901 and Christmas 1902. She enjoyed working on two or three story ideas at the same time, and, in December 1902, privately printed a tale about a poor tailor and the mice in his shop called The Tailor of Gloucester. The month before the private printing of The Tailor of Gloucester, in November 1902, she had given publisher Norman Warne a version of her squirrel book; he had liked the story but thought it was too long and contained too many riddles. He had encouraged her to continue the squirrel drawings however.
In January 1903, she wrote to a former neighbour that she was busy writing a tale about squirrels, and told the grandchildren of Edward Burne-Jones that she was drawing a little squirrel at home. She had built the animal a house from a soap box and had hung it in a large birdcage so she could observe and sketch the animal at any hour. She tried to improve her drawings of Nutkin’s nemesis, Old Brown, by sketching owls at the London Zoological Gardens.
St Herbert's Island
Formerly the isolated home of the anchorite monk Herbert of Derwentwater (d. 20 March 687), St Herbert's Island lies in the centre of Derwent Water south of Keswick, Cumbria, and was the model for Potter's Owl Island in Squirrel Nutkin. Remains of a circular stone building at the centre of the island may be the monk’s cell, and, from the mainland, monks would set forth from Friar’s Craig to visit Herbert’s island hermitage. Potter sketched and photographed the Island of St. Herbert from both sides of the lake, from the shores at Lingholm, and from the fells on the opposite side of the lake. The island and its surroundings can be accurately identified from Potter's illustrations. Old Brown’s gnarled tree and the forest detritus was photographed in black-and-white by Potter. The tree stood in the centre of the island for many years after Potter's visit.
Publication
Warne published The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin in August 1903 and the trade edition of The Tailor of Gloucester in October 1903. Both were deluxe editions bound in an elaborate pansy-dotted fabric Potter personally selected. She described the books as "bound in a flowered lavender chintz, very pretty". Full-coloured endpapers were introduced in the books (against Potter’s better judgement) that depicted Potter characters in a chain bordering the edges of the papers. Warne was delighted with the commercial potential of the endpapers as new characters worked into the design could hint at titles to come. The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin was an instant success, with a run of 10,000 copies. Potter was delighted. Warne began receiving amusing and enthusiastic letters from young readers, which the firm forwarded to the author. Potter was pleased with the success of the book and wrote to Norman Warne, "I am delighted to hear such a good account of Nutkin. I never thought when drawing it that it would be such a success – though I think you always had a good opinion of it."
Plot summary
Squirrel Nutkin, his brother Twinkleberry, and their many cousins sail to Owl Island on little rafts they have constructed of twigs. They offer resident owl Old Brown a gift and ask his permission to do their nut-collecting on his island. Nutkin however dances about singing a silly riddle. Old Brown pays no attention to Nutkin, but permits the squirrels to go about their work. Every day for six days, the squirrels offer gifts to Old Brown, and each time as well, Nutkin taunts the owl with sing-song riddles. Eventually, Nutkin annoys Old Brown once too often. The owl captures Nutkin and tries to skin him alive. Nutkin escapes, but not without losing most of his tail.
Characters
- Squirrel Nutkin, an impertinent young red squirrel
- Old Brown, an owl and the principal denizen of Owl Island
- Twinkleberry, Nutkin’s brother
- Nutkin’s many nut-gathering cousins
Critical commentaries
In Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code, M. Daphne Kutzer states that she believes The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin sheds light on Potter’s embedded social and political themes, and, like The Tailor of Gloucester, reflects her interest in fairy tales, rhymes and riddles. The tale is set in a locale dear to Potter’s heart, as is The Tailor of Gloucester. Unlike The Tailor of Gloucester (but more akin to The Tale of Peter Rabbit), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin is about rebellion and its consequences.
The fairy tale connection in Squirrel Nutkin is less obvious than in 'The Tailor' which more closely resembles a Grimm Brothers tale such as "The Shoemaker and the Elves". In Squirrel Nutkin nevertheless, Potter employs several fairy tale motifs and narrative techniques, as well as an echo of Aesop’s Fables. Potter's tale, like many fairy tales, has a rural setting with a threatening figure living at the centre of a wood, and depends a good deal upon repetition: the squirrels arrive on Old Brown’s island on six consecutive days, they present an offering of food to the owl on each of those six days, and at each presentation Nutkin taunts Old Brown with a sing-song riddle that suggests the repetitive rhymes or incantations found in fairy tales, such as the chant to the mirror in "Snow White". Potter ends her tale, however, in a very non-traditional way: Nutkin is caught and punished rather than being required to complete a series of tasks or outwitting an antagonist, and, further breaks the traditional fairy tale mould by tacitly inviting her readers to solve the riddles—a task typically reserved for the fairy tale hero.
Like Peter Rabbit and The Tailor, in Squirrel Nutkin food is central to the plot: the squirrels gather nuts for food, and they bring food (dead mice, moles, and minnows among other things) as offerings to Old Brown. Kutzer points out the irony in the tale: the squirrels need the nuts in Old Brown’s domain but are in danger of being eaten by him. They bring the old owl foodstuffs to deflect his attention from their presence as potential meals. Issues of class structure and hierarchy play out in Potter’s work and Squirrel Nutkin is not exempt: the squirrels lay their offerings at Old Brown’s feet and address him with formal politeness to secure his permission to gather their nuts. They thus appear as "obedient, obsequious servants of a ruler". Unlike Peter Rabbit, there are no humans in Squirrel Nutkin but there is still a sense of hierarchy, class, and power, and a desire to overturn it. Old Brown resembles the nineteenth-century landowner to whom everything on the land belongs. To take it without permission was to poach and thus to invite severe penalty, for poaching was not only a violation of land and property but of sovereignty as well.
Nutkin however will have nothing of squirrel work, obeisance to Old Brown or of appeasement. He taunts Old Brown, heedless of the consequences. His behaviour stands in stark contrast to the other squirrels who are willing to play by Old Brown’s rules. As Kutzer indicates, his behaviour is that not only of a disobedient child but of the rebellious working-class people of Potter's own day.
Potter biographer Linda Lear writes in Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature that The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin shares some of the immediacy of the storytelling in The Tale of Peter Rabbit and attributes that immediacy to both tales' origins in picture letters for real children. Unlike Peter Rabbit's tale however, that of Squirrel Nutkin is a story about a very distinct place, the shores of Derwent Water and its environs. The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin was embellished not only with Potter's favourite riddles and rhymes, but with a local legend about squirrels appearing on St. Herbert's Island just when the nuts were ripe. The tale, Lear points out, falls into the category of pourquoi tales as it explains why Nutkin's tail is shorter than those of other squirrels. For Lear, it has the sense of a folk tale as it shares the secret of squirrel language and the reasons they throw nuts at each other and at humans.
The tale differs from Peter Rabbit in that the characters do not wear clothes and are only minimally anthropomorphized through their human-like behaviour. The squirrels live in their accurately drawn natural habitat, but Nutkin dances on his hind legs while the other characters behave like real animals. In Squirrel Nutkin, Potter approaches more closely than in any of her other books the kind of natural history writing that was popular in her day in which a story conveyed accurate information about the natural world to young readers. While the tale succeeds in this way, Lear points out that Nutkin is not as sympathetic a character as Peter for he is unapologetically rude to Old Brown and is fortunate to escape with only a shorter tail. Though the number of riddles were cut during the editorial process, the quality of the writing and the narrative pace nonetheless suffer from the many riddle interruptions of those retained. Potter did not shy away from depicting the violence of nature in the book, knowing it appealed to children. A surreal element exists in the tale with it being the first to make evident Potter’s sense of the sardonic.
References
- Footnotes
- Mackey 2002, p. 33 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMackey2002 (help)
- ^ Mackey 2002, p. 34 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMackey2002 (help)
- Mackey 2002, p. 35 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFMackey2002 (help)
- Lear 2007, p. 131
- Lear 2007, p. 152
- ^ Lear 2007, p. 156
- ^ Lear 2007, p. 159
- Lear 2007, p. 158
- ^ Lear 2007, p. 160
- ^ Lear 2007, p. 162
- Palmer 2000, p. 169
- Rees 2003, p. 179
- ^ Leaar 2007, p. 161 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFLeaar2007 (help)
- ^ Lear 2007, p. 164
- Lear 2007, p. 163
- Kutzer 2003, p. 24
- ^ Kutzer 2007, p. 25 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKutzer2007 (help); the solutions to the riddles are embedded in the text following each, gently emphasised in italics.
- Kutzer 2007, p. 26 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKutzer2007 (help)
- Bibliography
- Kutzer, M. Daphne (2003), Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code, London and New York: Routledge, ISBN 0-415-94352-3
- Lear, Linda (2007), Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, New York: St. Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0-312-36934-7
- Palmer, Martin (2000), The Spiritual Traveler: England, Scotland, Wales: The Guide to Sacred Sites and Pilgrim Routes in Britain, Mahwah, NJ: Hidden Spring, ISBN 1-58768-002-5 0
{{citation}}: Check|isbn=value: length (help) - Rees, Elizabeth (2003), An Essential Guide to Celtic Sites and Their Saints, New York and London: Burns & Oates, ISBN 0-86012-318-9
External links
- The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin at Project Gutenberg
- The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin at Internet Archive
- Visiting Cumbria: Photographs of Lingholm, Derwent Water, and environs