The Tale of Little Pig Robinson

Pig Robinson is sent to market with vegetables and finds himself shanghaied onto a ship called *The Pound of Candles*, bound for the tropics. The cook plans to eat him. The ship's cat takes pity on him, helps him escape, and Pig Robinson rows ashore on a remote island, where he lives happily — until the day a small green boat arrives, carrying an Owl, a Pussycat, and a runcible spoon.

The book has a strange double timeline. Although it was the *last* of Beatrix's stories published in the Peter Rabbit series, in 1930, it was one of the *first* she ever wrote — earliest drafts from 1893, when she was twenty-seven. The seed of it is even older: a letter she sent her father from Ilfracombe in April 1883, when she was seventeen, describing "an old lady who seemed very anxious to get her coal," driving her horse and cart full-speed into the harbour. Years later Beatrix found the letter and pencilled on it: "Worth keeping, an early impression leading to Pig Robinson."

The coastal scenes in the book are a composite of several seaside towns Beatrix had visited over forty years: Ilfracombe (the steps to the harbour), Teignmouth (the shipping), Sidmouth (the model for "Stymouth"), Lyme Regis (the steep street and thatched cottages), Hastings (the tall wooden net-drying shed). And the story itself was inspired by Edward Lear's *The Owl and the Pussy-Cat* — which Beatrix had illustrated for her own amusement in the 1890s.