Animal magic

Graham Greene in his ground-breaking essay on Beatrix Potter published in 1933 writes of ‘her great comedies’, her ‘great near-tragedies’ and ‘her Tempest’ (Little Pig Robinson). He calls Peter Rabbit and his cousin Benjamin ‘two epic personalities’ and invokes Dickens, Forster, Cervantes, Rabelais and Henry James as well as Shakespeare. He gets some of his dates wrong, underrates The Tailor of Gloucester, quite unaccountably dismisses The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher as a failure, but considers Samuel Whiskers (The Roly-Poly Pudding) her masterpiece, and characteristically revels in her ‘dark period’ and her ‘gallery of scoundrels’, among whom he rather unfairly includes Mrs Tittlemouse’s muddy-footed neighbour, Mr Jackson the toad (‘No teeth, no teeth, no teeth!’). The essay, which is perhaps only partly, if at all, ironic, ignores Potter’s illustrations almost entirely and concentrates especially on her literary qualities, the ‘elusive style’, the ‘creation of atmosphere with still-life’, ‘those brief pregnant sentences, which have slipped, like proverbs, into common speech’.