The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit
A fierce bad rabbit steals a carrot from a gentle good rabbit. He thinks he has won. But there is a hunter in the wood with a gun, and the hunter has not yet noticed that a rabbit has stolen a vegetable. The whole story is fourteen pictures and fourteen short pages. It is over in five minutes. It does not need any more.
Beatrix wrote it in February 1906 for Louie, the small daughter of her publisher Harold Warne. Louie had complained that Peter Rabbit was "much too good a rabbit" and she wanted a story about a really naughty one. So Beatrix made one — and bound the manuscript into a folding wallet, fourteen pictures across a single linen strip, like a small Roman scroll for a modern child.
The shops refused to stock the panoramic format — "they got unrolled and were so bad to fold up again," Beatrix said later. By 1916 it had been rebound as a regular book, the same size as Peter Rabbit. It is the shortest of all her tales.
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Particulars
- First privately printed
- 1906, panoramic form (linen strip folded concertina-wise into a wallet)
- First book edition
- 1916, Frederick Warne & Co.
- Format
- 14 pictures + 14 short pages
- Manuscript date
- 23 February 1906
- Written for
- Louie Warne (daughter of Harold Warne), who wanted a naughty rabbit
Curiosities
- ❦Louie Warne told Aunt Beatrix that Peter Rabbit "was much too good a rabbit, and she wanted a story about a really naughty one!" Beatrix obliged.
- ❦Originally published as a panoramic strip — fourteen pictures mounted on linen, folded concertina-style into a tuck-flap wallet. "Shops sensibly refused to stock them, because they got unrolled and so bad to fold up again."
- ❦Rebound as a regular book ten years later, in 1916.
- ❦After her marriage, Beatrix wrote to Warne: "My husband undertakes to hold a gun properly, which was a defect in the Bad Rabbit pictures." A new drawing was made — but never used.
- ❦The original bound manuscript was a Christmas present for Louie — the only copy in the wallet form her father had specially made.
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