Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes

A small brown mouse who steals into Somebody's cupboard. An old hedgehog with no cushion to stick his pins in. A very small old lady who almost certainly was a mouse. Toads having tea on toadstools. Beatrix's first book of nursery rhymes — six short verses, illustrated in her quiet watercolour, about the smallest creatures in her world.

The book has a long quiet history. Beatrix first proposed it on the 1st of January 1904, suggesting to Norman Warne that "if neither the cat nor the mice would do, one might fall back on the rhymes — Appley Dapply." The mice were chosen instead, but she went on writing the rhymes. By late 1904 she had thirty of them in an exercise book; Norman Warne approved twenty-one with his initials in the margin. They planned a large-format book with bevelled edges and framed borders for each verse.

Then Norman Warne died in August 1905. The book was set aside untouched. Twelve years passed. In 1917, Fruing Warne asked for another book and Beatrix offered the old rhymes back — scaled down to the size of *Miss Moppet*. "Half a loaf is better than no bread," she wrote, "and such bread too."