The Tale Of Mrs Tittlemouse

''The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse'' is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, and published by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1910. The tale is about housekeeping and insect pests in the home, and reflects Potter's own sense of tidiness and her abhorrence of insect infestations. The character of Mrs. Thomasina Tittlemouse debuted in 1909 in a small but crucial role in '' The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies'', and Potter decided to give her a tale of her own the following year. Her meticulous illustrations of the insects may have been drawn for their own sake, or to provoke horror and disgust in her juvenile readers. 25,000 copies of the tale were initially released in July 1910 and another 15,000 between November 1910 and November 1911 in Potter's typical small book format.

Mrs. Tittlemouse is a woodmouse who lives in a "funny house" of long passages and storerooms beneath a hedge. Her efforts to keep her dwelling tidy are thwarted by insect and arachnid intruders who create all sorts of messes about the place: a lost beetle leaves dirty footprints in a passage and a spider inquiring after Miss Muffet leaves bits of cobweb here and there. Her toad neighbour Mr. Jackson lets himself into her parlour, stays for dinner, and searches her storerooms for honey but leaves a mess behind. Poor Mrs. Tittlemouse wonders if her home will ever be tidy again, but after a good night's sleep, she gives her house a fortnight's spring cleaning, polishes her little tin spoons, and holds a party for her friends.

Potter's life had become complicated with the demands of ageing parents and the business of operating a farm before the composition of ''Mrs. Tittlemouse'', and, as a consequence, her literary and artistic productivity began a decline following the tale's publication. She continued to publish sporadically but much of her work was drawn from decades-old concepts and illustrations. ''Mrs. Tittlemouse'' marks the end of her two-books-a-year output for Warnes. Scholars find the book's depictions of the insects its great attraction. One critic finds a "nightmarish quality" in the tale reflected in Mrs. Tittlemouse's almost endless war waged against insect pests. Characters from the tale have been modelled as porcelain figurines by Beswick Pottery beginning in 1948, and the mouse's image appeared on a Huntley & Palmer biscuit tin in 1955. Other merchandise has been marketed depicting Mrs. Tittlemouse and her friends. Mrs. Tittlemouse was a character in a 1971 ballet film and her tale was adapted to an animated television series in 1992.

Plot

''Mrs. Tittlemouse'' is a tale in which no humans play a part and one in which events are treated as though they have occurred since time immemorial and far from human observance. It is a simple story, and one likely to appeal to young children.

Mrs. Tittlemouse is a "most terribly tidy little mouse always sweeping and dusting the soft sandy floors" in the "yards and yards" of passages and storerooms, nut-cellars, and seed-cellars in her "funny house" amongst the roots of a hedge. She has a kitchen, a parlour, a pantry, a larder, and a bedroom where she keeps her dust-pan and brush next to her little box bed. She tries to keep her house tidy, but insect intruders leave dirty footprints on the floors and all sorts of messes about the place.

A beetle is shooed away, a ladybird is exorcised with "Fly away home! Your house is on fire!", and a spider inquiring after Miss Muffet is turned away with little ceremony. In a distant passage, Mrs. Tittlemouse meets Babbitty Bumble, a bumblebee who has taken up residence with three or four other bees in one of the empty storerooms. Mrs. Tittlemouse tries to pull out their nest but they buzz fiercely at her, and she retreats to deal with the matter after dinner.

In her parlour, she finds her toad neighbour Mr. Jackson sitting before the fire in her rocking chair. Mr. Jackson lives in "a drain below the hedge, in a very dirty wet ditch". His coat tails drip with water and he leaves wet footmarks on Mrs. Tittlemouse's parlour floor. She follows him about with a mop and dish-cloth.

Mrs. Tittlemouse allows Mr. Jackson to stay for dinner, but the food is not to his liking, and he rummages about the cupboard searching for the honey he can smell. He discovers a butterfly in the sugar bowl, but when he finds the bees, he makes a big mess pulling out their nest. Mrs. Tittlemouse fears she "shall go distracted" as a result of the turmoil and takes refuge in the nut-cellar. When she finally ventures forth, she discovers everybody has left but her house is a mess. She takes some moss, beeswax, and twigs to partly close up her front door to keep Mr. Jackson out. Exhausted, she goes to bed wondering if her house will ever be tidy again.

The fastidious little mouse spends a fortnight spring cleaning. She rubs the furniture with beeswax and polishes her little tin spoons, then holds a party for five other little wood-mice wearing their Regency finery. Mr. Jackson attends but is forced to sit outside because Mrs. Tittlemouse has narrowed her door. He takes no offence at being excluded from the parlour. Acorn-cupfuls of honeydew are passed through the window to him and he toasts Mrs. Tittlemouse's good health.

Background

Helen Beatrix Potter was born on 28 July 1866 in London to barrister Rupert William Potter and his wife Helen (Leech) Potter. She was educated by governesses and tutors, and passed a quiet and solitary childhood reading, painting, drawing, tending a nursery menagerie of small animals, and visiting museums and art exhibitions. Her interests in the natural world and country life were nurtured with holiday trips to Scotland, the English Lake District, and Camfield Place, the Hertfordshire home of her paternal grandparents.

Potter's adolescence was a quiet as her childhood. She grew into a spinsterish young woman whose parents groomed her to be a permanent resident and housekeeper in their home. She wanted to lead a useful life independent of her parents and considered a career in mycology, but the all-male scientific community regarded her as an amateur and she abandoned fungi. She continued to paint and draw, and experienced her first professional artistic success in 1890 when she sold six designs of humanised animals to a greeting card publisher.

In 1900, Potter revised a tale about a rabbit named Peter she had written for a child in 1893, and prepared a dummy book of it in imitation of Helen Bannerman's 1889 best-seller ''The Story of Little Black Sambo''. Unable to find a buyer, she published the book for family and friends at her own expense in December 1901. Frederick Warne & Co. had earlier rejected the tale, but, anxious to compete in the booming small format children's book market, reconsidered and accepted it following the recommendation of their prominent children's book artist L. Leslie Brooke. Potter agreed to colour the pen and ink illustrations of the private edition, and chose the then-new Hentschel three-colour process for reproducing her watercolours.Hobbs 1989, p. 15 On 2 October 1902 ''The Tale of Peter Rabbit'' was released.

Potter continued to publish children's books with Warnes and used her sales profits and a small legacy from an aunt to buy Hill Top, a working farm of 34 acres (13.85 ha) in the Lake District in July 1905. On 25 August, Potter's fiancé and editor Norman Warne died suddenly; she became very depressed and was ill for many weeks, but rallied to complete the last few tales she had planned or discussed with him.

Development and publication

In the years following Warne's death and the purchase of Hill Top, Potter produced tales and illustrations inspired by her farm, its woodland surroundings, and nearby villages.MacDonald 1986, p. 75 She provided Warnes with two books per annum, but, by 1910, she was juggling the demands of ageing parents with the business of operating Hill Top, and, as a result, her literary and artistic productivity began to decline. She published only one book in 1910, ''The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse'', and wrote to a friend on New Year's Day 1911:

I did not succeed in finishing more than one book last year ... I find it very difficult lately to get the drawings done. I do not seem to be able to go into the country for a long enough time to do a sufficient amount of sketching and when I was at Bowness last summer I spent most of my time upon the road going backwards & forwards to the farm – which was amusing, but not satisfactory for work.

Mrs. Tittlemouse actually made her debut in 1909 in Potter's '' The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies'' where she rescued the six children of Benjamin and Flopsy Bunny from Mr. McGregor's grasp and was rewarded for her heroism with a quantity of rabbit wool at Christmas. In the last illustration, she is wearing a cloak and hood, and a muff and mittens fashioned from the wool. Mrs. Tittlemouse is a key (not a central) character in the tale, but a character incompletely personified, and one whose story Potter chose to develop in 1910.MacDonald 1986, p. 118

Potter was an unsentimental naturalist who thought no creature either good or bad, and had no qualms describing earwigs in Mrs. Tittlemouse's passage or woodlice in her pantry. Her publisher Harold Warne however had different ideas about what was appropriate for a children's book. He had become accustomed to Potter's unusual choice of animal subjects through the years, but, ever sensitive to public reaction, thought she had gone a bit too far in ''Mrs. Tittlemouse'' with the earwig and the woodlice. The earwig was, at his behest, transmogrified into a beetle and the woodlice into "creepy-crawly people" hiding in Mrs. Tittlemouse's plate rack. "I can alter the text, when I get the proofs," she wrote, "and will erase the offensive word 'wood-lice'!" Potter argued for the generic term "slaters" for the woodlice, but was overruled. It was decided that an illustration of a centipede (Miss Maggie Manylegs) would be withdrawn and replaced with a butterfly.

Potter usually tested a new work on an audience by writing the tale into an exercise book, pasting a few watercolour or pen and ink illustrations into the volume, and presenting the whole as a gift to a child. In the case of ''Mrs. Tittlemouse'', Potter wrote the tale in a small leather-covered notebook with twenty-one pages of text and eight watercolours as a New Year's gift for Warne's youngest daughter, Nellie. Its inscription read, "For Nellie with love and best wishes for A Happy New Year. Jan. 1. 1910".Linder 1971, p. 206

The family called it "Nellie's little book" and, when the book was published with twenty-six colour pictures, the dedication remained the same. 25,000 copies of ''The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse'' were released in July 1910 and available in a small book format in either blue-grey or buff paper boards at 1/- or decorated cloth at 1/6. 10,000 copies were released in November 1910 and another 5,000 copies in November 1911.Linder 1971, p. 429 Potter was pleased with the bound copies she received. "The buff is the prettiest colour, though it may not keep so clean", she wrote to Warnes, "I think it should prove popular with little girls."Linder 1971, p. 207 Her father wrote to the Warne children that his daughter's sense of humour was ever-fresh and never dull.Lear 2007, p. 235

Potter intended to follow ''Mrs. Tittlemouse'' with a tale about a pig in a large format book similar to the original '' Ginger and Pickles''. On one occasion, she passed an hour sketching inside the pig sty at Hill Top while the pig nibbled at her boots. She abandoned the pig book after fruitless attempts to make progress on it, and, instead, occupied the winter of 1910–11 with supervising the production of '' Peter Rabbit's Painting Book'', and the composition of '' The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes''.Taylor 1987, p. 144

Almost sixty years after the publication of ''Mrs. Tittlemouse'', the character appeared in the 1971 Royal Ballet film, '' The Tales of Beatrix Potter'', and, in 1992, her tale and '' The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies'' were integrated into a single animated episode for the BBC
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