The Tale of Two Bad Mice
Two mice — Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca — find a doll's house with the door wide open and the dolls' breakfast laid out on the table. The food turns out to be made of plaster. Tom Thumb's disappointment ends in a small but thorough rampage. The dolls watch, helpless.
Beatrix wrote it during a wet week's holiday at Hastings in late November 1903 — one of three stories scribbled in a single exercise book. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca were real mice, caught in the kitchen at her cousin's home in Gloucestershire. Beatrix rescued them from the cook, brought them back to London, and tamed them. Norman Warne, her editor, built her a glass-fronted cage so she could draw them through the front.
The doll's house in the book was the one Norman Warne had made for his small niece Winifred. The book is dedicated to her — "For the little girl who had the doll's house" — and it was during this book that Beatrix and Norman first worked closely together. They became engaged the following summer.
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Particulars
- Trade edition
- 1904, Frederick Warne & Co.
- Setting
- A doll's house, modelled on the one Norman Warne built for his niece Winifred
- Dedication
- "For the little girl who had the doll's house, W.M.L.W." (Winifred Mary Langrish Warne)
- Origin
- Written at 16 Robertson Terrace, Hastings, 26 November – 3 December 1903
- Models
- Two real mice, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, caught at Harescombe Grange
Curiosities
- ❦Beatrix asked Warne to add Winifred's full initials — W.M.L.W. — to the dedication: "would you not put her initials to show more clearly that it belonged to a real child."
- ❦Norman Warne built Beatrix a special glass-fronted cage with a ladder and an upstairs nest, so she could watch the mice while drawing.
- ❦Two Bad Mice was one of three stories she drafted in a single exercise book at Hastings during a rainy week. The other two became Pie and Patty-Pan and The Tale of Tuppenny.
- ❦Hunca Munca died in the summer of 1905. "She fell off the chandelier," Beatrix wrote to Norman. "She managed to stagger up the staircase into your little house, but she died in my hand about ten minutes after. I think if I had broken my own neck it would have saved a deal of trouble."
- ❦Beatrix designed the cloth-and-gold cover for the de luxe edition herself, sketching it from Melford Hall.
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