The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots
Kitty is a serious, well-behaved young black cat who belongs to a kind old lady. The old lady calls her *Kitty*; Kitty calls herself Miss Catherine St. Quintin. By moonlight she puts on a Norfolk jacket and little fur-lined boots, slips out of the locked wash-house, and goes hunting with a pop-gun. Her gun goes off accidentally several times. She nearly shoots Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Eventually she gets caught in a steel trap set by Mr. Tod, loses one boot and a claw, and is cured of poaching forever.
Beatrix wrote it on the 23rd of February 1914 — "a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life, and goes out hunting with a little gun on moonlight nights." The story was set in type. Galley proofs were printed. Then Beatrix's father died on the 9th of May 1914, her mother needed her, the First World War broke out, and only one picture was ever finished — the frontispiece.
The manuscript and its single illustration were tucked into the Frederick Warne archive, where they sat for a hundred and one years. In 2015 a curator named Jo Hanks rediscovered them at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Frederick Warne published the book in 2016 — Beatrix's 150th-anniversary year — with new illustrations by Quentin Blake.
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- Posthumous edition
- 2016, Frederick Warne & Co. — 102 years after the manuscript
- Original manuscript date
- 23 February 1914
- Beatrix's surviving illustration
- One only: the frontispiece
- Modern illustrations
- By Quentin Blake, the long-time illustrator of Roald Dahl
- Cameo characters
- Mr. Tod, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Ribby, Tabitha Twitchit
Curiosities
- ❦Miss Catherine has many names. The old lady calls her Kitty. Her common-cat companion Cheesebox calls her "Q". Another, Winkiepeeps, calls her "Squintums." Her own preferred title is "Miss Catherine St. Quintin."
- ❦Beatrix's letter to Harold Warne is the only contemporary description: "Miss Kitty ends in a trap, loses one of her boots and a claw, which cures her of poaching."
- ❦The story was held back partly because Beatrix's editors didn't love it: "I was a good deal damped by neither you nor Fruing seeming to care much for the story, and then it was too late to think about another."
- ❦The frontispiece — the only finished picture — shows Kitty in her Norfolk jacket and fur-lined boots. It was found pinned, untouched, in the archive a century later.
- ❦The cat-villain Mr. Worry Ragman, "a little knowing terrier who drove about the country in a little rattling cart," buys "rabbit skins and mole skins, rags and bones, and (oh shocking) feathers and eggs from Cheesebox and from Winkiepeeps, and from Tommy Brock the badger and Mr. Tod the fox."
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