![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Although this work was first published in the twentieth century, I am sneaking it in as it began its life as an illustrated letter sent to a sick child in the 1890s.
As is well known, Potter lived a life of extreme isolation. Her parents’ ideas of what a middle class girl should do precluded pretty much every human activity, except, as it turned out, keeping small pets and doing watercolour illustrations of them. So she obsessively studied animals (including dissecting them and reconstructing their bodies - which her parents did not know about) and practised drawing.
Which I suppose is all to the good for the world because eventually it occurred to her that her little tales could be printed. She paid for the first edition herself and then it was picked up and she became a publishing phenomenon.
The nicest thing about the Peter Rabbit books is, I think, that they are deliberately designed to be small enough to be held by a small child. This fits with her aesthetic which includes many extreme close ups done in miniature.
The illustrations are, of course, fabulous and, I believe, reliable best sellers in postcard form at the Tate. They show anatomical exactness and plausible animal behaviour, while being in a fantasy world. The moment when Peter loses his shoes and runs on all fours and goes faster is an example of the merging of the two worlds.
The prose is also great, with only a spare sentence or two on each page. Her style echoes the James version Bible, especially her fondness for semi-colons.
Potter does not talk down at all. There is a death joke on third page. And the vocabulary is great. I love the sparrows who implore him to exert himself.
As is well known, Potter lived a life of extreme isolation. Her parents’ ideas of what a middle class girl should do precluded pretty much every human activity, except, as it turned out, keeping small pets and doing watercolour illustrations of them. So she obsessively studied animals (including dissecting them and reconstructing their bodies - which her parents did not know about) and practised drawing.
Which I suppose is all to the good for the world because eventually it occurred to her that her little tales could be printed. She paid for the first edition herself and then it was picked up and she became a publishing phenomenon.
The nicest thing about the Peter Rabbit books is, I think, that they are deliberately designed to be small enough to be held by a small child. This fits with her aesthetic which includes many extreme close ups done in miniature.
The illustrations are, of course, fabulous and, I believe, reliable best sellers in postcard form at the Tate. They show anatomical exactness and plausible animal behaviour, while being in a fantasy world. The moment when Peter loses his shoes and runs on all fours and goes faster is an example of the merging of the two worlds.
The prose is also great, with only a spare sentence or two on each page. Her style echoes the James version Bible, especially her fondness for semi-colons.
Potter does not talk down at all. There is a death joke on third page. And the vocabulary is great. I love the sparrows who implore him to exert himself.
