beatrix potter

beatrix part one: a review of Beatrix Potter and the Unfortunate Tale of a Borrowed Guinea Pig + other guinea pig musings

~ jama ~ 19 Comments

My Dear Reader,

Since I’m a big Beatrix Potter fan, I was happy to see Beatrix Potter and the Unfortunate Tale of a Borrowed Guinea Pig by Deborah Hopkinson and Charlotte Voake published in time to celebrate Miss Potter’s 150th birthday this year.

I enjoyed the story immensely, but I must confess it reminded me of my own tragic guinea pig experience (*shudder*). But more on that later.

This charming cautionary tale is about the time young Beatrix, who loved to draw and paint wild as well as tame animals, borrowed a guinea pig from her neighbor to use as a live model. She and her younger brother Bertram had lots of pets in the third floor playroom/science lab/art studio of their London home — pets such as snakes, snails, bats, ducks, rabbits, hedgehogs and salamanders. Though Beatrix loved all these creatures, we are warned early on that “she did not always have the best of luck with them.”

We are given evidence of several animal mishaps via journal entries that note an escaped snake and newts, a family of dead and dried up snails, and even a bat which was dismembered by a jay. And what of the unfortunate guinea pig? Beatrix especially loved painting animals doing “ordinary, everyday things, like reading the newspaper, working in the garden, or taking tea. (And why not?).” And the day came when Beatrix just had to paint a guinea pig and they didn’t have one at 2 Bolton Gardens. Not to worry, though, as quite a few of them apparently lived in Miss Paget’s parlor.

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mrs. tiggy-winkle comes to tea

~ jama ~ 48 Comments

 

Just in case you were wondering, the reason we usually look so spiffy around here is because we have the best washerwoman.

Her name is Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and she hails from the Lake District. Do you know her too? A tidier, more conscientious “clear-starcher” you’d be hard pressed to find. The other day, when untimely Spring (?) snowflakes were drifting down from the sky, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle chanced by to deliver a freshly laundered stack of tea towels and table linens.

We couldn’t very well turn her out in a snowstorm, so we invited her in for tea. Coincidentally, Cornelius and I had just baked a fresh batch of Littletown-Farm Carrot Cookies. Every Easter we get into a “Peter Rabbit mood” and crave carrots. We found the cookie recipe in Peter Rabbit’s Natural Foods Cookbook, and since we’d made Fierce Bad Rabbit’s Carrot-Raisin Salad from that book many times before, we thought the cookies would also be a good bet.

lucie and tiggy large
“Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s hand, holding the tea-cup, was very very brown, and very very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap, there were hair-pins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.”

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happy birthday beatrix, or, cornelius learns a lesson

~ jama ~ 24 Comments

 

Today is Beatrix Potter’s 143rd birthday!!

I’m a huge fan and sucker for anything Beatrix related — books, china and pottery, apparel, figurines, stuffed animals, stickers, stationery, you name it. I’m so obsessed that I even named our dining room after one of my fave BP books. While other normal people decorate their dining rooms with sophisticated window treatments and/or floral centerpieces, ours boasts “Roly Poly Pudding” in blue and green stand up letters.

I can’t help it, really. Just seeing those three words makes me deeply happy. They’re adorable, delicious, so very British. And if any of our dinner guests misbehave, we can always roll them up in a pudding (mmwwwaahahahahaha)!


The Roly-Poly Pudding was the original name for this tale, first published in 1908. It’s all about the time Tom Kitten finds himself confronted under the attic floorboards by two very large rats, Samuel Whiskers and his wife, Anna Maria. They decide to butter him up and roll him in dough to make a delicious pudding. Roly poly, roly poly! The character of Samuel was based on Beatrix’s own fancy rat, Sammy, whom she describes as “the intelligent pink-eyed representative of a persecuted (but irrepressible) race and affectionate little friend, and most accomplished thief.” Irrepressible indeed, as he somehow got the book renamed in 1926. Typical rat.


Cornelius (licking his chops) convinces Kitty to re-enact the famous rolling scene.

Have you ever eaten a roly-poly pudding? It’s commonly known as Jam Roly-Poly, a simple dessert consisting of jam spread over dough, which is rolled up and baked. Celebrate Miss Potter’s birthday by making your own Jam Roly-Poly (recipe here). 


 photo by Chico68.

For the full effect, drown it in warm custard.


photo by Sandy49.

The animated version of The Tale of Samuel Whiskers can be found in three parts on YouTube (adorable, adorable). I’ve embedded the best part, where Tom gets rolled in the dough. If you prefer to watch it from the beginning, click here.

Happy Birthday, Beatrix!


Mosaic by lillipops.

Uh-oh.


Kitty gets the last roll!

 

                                      ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

tea with miss potter

~ jama ~ 16 Comments

“I do not remember a time when I did not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside.” ~ Beatrix Potter

Good morning!

Here’s a bracing cup of English Breakfast tea and a warm blueberry muffin to start your day!

The light, misty rain we’ve been getting recently reminds me of England. While sipping my tea, I remembered visiting Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top Farm located in Near Sawrey, in the Lake District. To get there, we drove through rolling farmland and wooded hillsides, everything so green, with stone houses nestled around every turn.

Potter at Hill Top (1913)

I might have read Peter Rabbit as a child, but only came to know the rest of Potter’s work as an adult. Making the pilgrimmage to Hill Top, which Potter purchased with money earned from her first few books, was my inner child’s dream come true. This was where Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Kitten, and Samuel Whiskers were born, and where Potter began to reclaim her life after her fiance, Norman Warne, died suddenly of leukemia.

More Beatrix, with poems, references and a recipe!