The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck
Jemima Puddle-Duck wants to hatch her own eggs. The farmer's wife will not let her, so she sets off to find a quiet place of her own. She meets a charming gentleman with sandy whiskers who offers her a comfortable shed and his very best wishes for her family. Jemima does not yet know what foxes look like.
Beatrix wrote it in 1908, walking the lanes of her own farm. Jemima was a real duck. So was Kep the collie. So were Mrs. Cannon at the back door and her children Ralph and Betsy in the yard — all three appear in the pictures. The book is the closest portrait of Hill Top Farm in any of her work.
"Jemima Puddle-Duck is her poem about the farm itself," wrote her biographer Margaret Lane. "Anyone who is curious to reconstruct its exact appearance in those days can do so from the pictures." It still looks the same today. When Beatrix died, her ashes were scattered close to Jemima's wood.
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Particulars
- Trade edition
- 1908, Frederick Warne & Co.
- Setting
- Hill Top Farm, Sawrey (every location is real)
- Dedication
- "A Farmyard Tale for Ralph and Betsy" — the Cannon children, who lived at Hill Top
- Manuscript
- Paper-covered exercise book at Hill Top, with a real photograph of Jemima slipped inside
- Position in series
- Second book set at Hill Top — the most autobiographical
Curiosities
- ❦Beatrix's cousin Caroline was at Hill Top while the book was being written and "went round about with her to find a suitable spot for the nest." Caroline took home one of Kep the collie's puppies — "the dearest and cleverest dog I ever had."
- ❦Beatrix wrote two opening lines and chose the simpler one. The unused alternative read: "What a gratifying thing it is in these days to meet with a female devoted to family life!"
- ❦In the original text she wrote that Jemima "was aggrieved." She crossed it out: "Aggrieved is a better word, but do children understand it?"
- ❦One small reader, Mollie Wight, wore the book out before her third birthday and took "Pudding Duck" as her imaginary friend. When Mollie tried to give Pudding Duck up for school, the duck "died" — and then Mollie brought her back. Mrs. Heelis came to visit and they had long talks about woodland friends.
- ❦On her last birthday, aged 77, Beatrix came across a group of village children acting out the story. A little girl named Florence Dawson was playing Jemima. Beatrix gave her an inscribed copy: "For 'Jemima' at Sawrey Camp from Beatrix Potter, July 28th, '43."
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