Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter

I spoke too soon. Beatrix Potter, I suggested in an afterword to my 2016 biography of the author and illustrator, had escaped the distortions of sexual and racial revisionism that now blight so many eminent and long-dead British writers. But no longer.

Last week a specialist in postcolonial literature at a northern university accused Potter of failing to acknowledge her indebtedness to an oral storytelling tradition of enslaved Africans working on American plantations. Welcome, please, a new Potter for the 21st century: exploitative, colonialist, dishonest. Potter’s concealment, claims Dr Emily Zobel Marshall, ‘[feeds] into a damaging and recurring appropriation of Black cultural forms that continues today’.

Blimey. Zobel Marshall’s hypothesis rests on a comparative reading of several of Potter’s children’s books and the Brer Rabbit stories published by American folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, beginning in the 1880s, which celebrate the cunning of a trickster rabbit whose misdemeanours, like those of Peter Rabbit, include stealing food.