The Potter Project

I grew up in the kind of household where I was given a cross-stitch sampler to do when I was nine years old. Where antique washboards and darning tools were artfully displayed on the wall. Where rotary fabric cutters were considered a newfangled contraption for lazy seamstresses. A house where the old-fashioned and antiquated were held in high regard.

But best of all, it was a household in which I received a new Beatrix Potter book every birthday, Christmas, and Easter until I had them all. They were the old-fashioned, greenback editions, and I loved to see them lined up in perfect numerical order on my bookshelf (a portent of my future career as a librarian, if ever there was one).

As for reading them, I found them enjoyable but cryptic. I was definitely entranced by the books’ charms — anthropormorphic animals in cute little outfits! — but puzzled by others. A world where pigs trotted off to sell themselves at the market? Where mice sewed buttonholes with “cherry twist” (which I was certain was some sort of Twizzler)? And what the heck was a “patty pan” or a “pinny”?

As I’ve grown up and had children of my own, I’ve passed on a few of the books to my kids, but only the “safe” ones — the ones that made sense to me in childhood — like The Tale of Miss Moppet or, of course, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The strange ones like The Roly-Poly Pudding or Little Pig Robinson? Sadly, they’re gathering dust.

Which brings me to the new project: a fresh re-reading of all 23 Beatrix Potter books, with the keen hope that the contrast between the child and adult perspective will prove, if not interesting or enlightening, at least bloggable.

Tomorrow: The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Or: Do As Your Mother Says or Someone Will Steal Your Clothes