The Tale of Tom Kitten
Mrs. Tabitha Twitchit dresses her three kittens in their Sunday best — clean white pinafores and tight little jackets — for a fine garden party. But kittens cannot be trusted with fine clothes, and a passing family of ducks is about to make matters worse.
Beatrix wrote it in the summer of 1906, in the first months after she bought Hill Top Farm. The garden in the book is the garden she was planting that very summer — flagstones, foxgloves, a stone wall at the bottom where small kittens might sit. She borrowed a kitten from one of the masons working on the house ("a most fearful pickle") to use as a model. She named him in her dedication: "Dedicated to all Pickles — especially to those that get upon my garden wall."
The pictures are her first quiet love letter to Hill Top. The fireplaces, the dresser, the wicket gate, the slate-paved porch — all real. She would soon spend the rest of her life there.
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Particulars
- Trade edition
- 1907, Frederick Warne & Co.
- Setting
- Hill Top farmhouse and garden, Sawrey
- Dedication
- "Dedicated to all Pickles — especially to those that get upon my garden wall"
- Manuscript
- Twenty-four pencil sketches pasted into a "penny" exercise book
- Position in series
- Her first book set at Hill Top
Curiosities
- ❦The book was started in Sawrey, abandoned at Lingholm during a family holiday — "a curious and unpleasant place for atmosphere, very stuffy and at the same time very windy" — and only finished when she got home to her own farm.
- ❦The duck pictures were painted in London — she used ducks belonging to a distant cousin who lived at Putney Park.
- ❦In one pencil sketch, the three Puddle-Ducks looked at the kittens. By the time Beatrix copied it into the book, all three had turned around and were standing with their backs to the wall.
- ❦When she received her finished copy, she wrote to Warne: "Some of the pictures are very bad, but the book as a whole is passable, and the ducks help it out."
- ❦She was buying lavender and violets for the garden the same week she finished the drawings: "Mrs. Satterthwaite says stolen plants always grow."
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