| The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin | |
|---|---|
First edition cover |
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| Author(s) | Beatrix Potter |
| Illustrator | Beatrix Potter |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Children's literature |
| Publisher | Frederick Warne & Co. |
| Publication date | August 1903 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| 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 and first published by Frederick Warne & Co. in August 1903. The story is about an impertinent red squirrel named Nutkin and his narrow escape from an owl called Old Brown. The book followed Potter's hugely successful The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and was an instant hit. The now familiar endpapers of the Peter Rabbit series were introduced in the book.
Squirrel Nutkin had its origins in a story and picture letter Potter sent Norah Moore, the daughter of her former governess, Annie Carter Moore. The background illustrations were modelled on Derwentwater and St. Herbert's Island in the Lake District.
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 its explanations of Squirrel Nutkin's short tail and characteristics of squirrel behaviour. An abbreviated version of the tale appeared as a segment in the 1971 ballet film, The Tales of Beatrix Potter.
Contents |
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 impertinently 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 every day as well, Nutkin taunts the owl with another sing-song riddle. Eventually, Nutkin annoys Old Brown once too often. The owl seizes Nutkin and tries to skin him alive. Nutkin escapes, but not without losing most of his tail.
In 1901, Potter passed her summer holiday at the country estate of Lingholm in the Lake District and from there sent a story and picture letter about a red squirrel colony in Cumberland to Norah Moore, the daughter of her former governess, Annie Moore. The letter was an elaboration of an earlier one 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, the landscape around Lingholm, and St Herbert's Island which would eventually become Owl Island in Squirrel Nutkin.[1][note 1]
The success of the privately printed edition of Peter Rabbit in 1901, and the certainty of its future release as a trade edition by Warne, stimulated a period of great creativity in Potter, and she proposed at least three new books to Warne between the summer of 1901 and Christmas 1902.[1] She enjoyed working on two or three story ideas at the same time,[2] and, in December 1902, privately printed a tale about a poor tailor and the mice in his shop called The Tailor of Gloucester.[3] In November 1902, a month before the private printing of The Tailor, she gave her publisher Norman Warne a version of her squirrel book; he liked the story but thought it was too long and contained too many riddles.[2] He encouraged her to continue the squirrel drawings.[4]
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.[4] She tried to improve her drawings of Nutkin’s nemesis, Old Brown, by sketching owls at the London Zoological Gardens.[5]
Warne published The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin in August 1903 with a run of 10,000 deluxe edition copies bound in an elaborate pansy-dotted fabric Potter personally selected and described as "a flowered lavender chintz, very pretty". Full-coloured endpapers were introduced in the books (against Potter’s better judgement) that depicted her storybook characters in a chain bordering the edges of the papers. Warne was delighted with the commercial potential of the endpapers as new characters hinting at titles to come could be worked into the design at any time.[6][7]
Squirrel Nutkin was an instant success. The publisher received amusing and enthusiastic letters from young readers, which were forwarded to Potter. She 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."[6]
Scholar M. Daphne Kutzer points out that The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, like its companion piece, The Tailor of Gloucester, reflects Potter's interest in fairy tales, rhymes, and riddles, and sheds light on her embedded social and political themes. Like The Tailor, the tale is set in a locale dear to Potter’s heart. Unlike The Tailor (but more akin to The Tale of Peter Rabbit), Squirrel Nutkin is about rebellion and its consequences.[8]
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 to outwit an antagonist. The author 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.[9][note 2]
Like Peter Rabbit and The Tailor, food is central to the plot in Squirrel Nutkin: the squirrels gather nuts for food, and they bring food (dead mice, moles, and minnows among other things) as offerings to Old Brown. Ironically, 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 nuts. They thus appear as "obedient, obsequious servants of a ruler".[9] 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.[10]
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 willingly play by Old Brown’s rules. Nutkin's behaviour is not only that of a disobedient child but that of the rebellious working-class people of Potter's own day.
Squirrel Nutkin shares some of the immediacy of the storytelling in Peter Rabbit, and that immediacy is attributed to the origins of both tales in picture and story 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 Derwentwater and its environs.[4] 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 falls into the category of pourquoi tales as it explains why Nutkin's tail is shorter than those of other squirrels. The folk tale is suggested in the secret of squirrel language and the reasons they throw nuts at each other and at humans.[6]
The tale differs significantly 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, 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.[11] 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.[5]