The Tale of Two Bad Mice (Beatrix Potter Originals)

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Tom Thumb began to carve the ham but the knife was only a toy and it broke, hurting him. He put the hurt finger in his mouth. What a sight met the eyes of Jane and Lucinda! Lucinda sat upon the upset kitchen stove and stared; and Jane leant against the kitchen dresser and smiled--but neither of them made any remark. The book's title characters are a female mouse named Hunca Munca and a male mouse named Tom Thumb. They enter a doll's house while its two occupants, dolls named Lucinda and Jane, are out. When the two mice find that all the food in the doll's house is artificial and inedible, they become angry and try to cause as much damage to the doll's house as they can. And very early every morning — before anybody is awake — Hunca Munca comes with her dust-pan and her broom to sweep the Dollies' house!”

The Tail of ‘Too Bad’ Mike by Iain Cameron Williams. ‘'My inspiration for The Tail of 'Too Bad' Mike came from a visit I made to London's V&A Museum in 2009, where I saw a Beatrix Potter display. I was fascinated by her life, especially her philanthropy. After leaving the museum, as it was a sunny afternoon, I walked up to Hyde Park and lay down for a while on East Albert Lawn. One of Potter's book titles kept going around in my mind and sparked my imagination. The book was The Tale of Two Bad Mice. From it, I devised the title, The Tail of 'Too Bad' Mike. That was my starting point; from there, I concocted the imaginary world of 'Too Bad' Mike.’ Potter confidently asserted her tales would one day be nursery classics, and part of the process in making them so was marketing strategy. [23] She was the first to exploit the commercial possibilities of her characters and tales with a Peter Rabbit doll, a board game (The Game of Peter Rabbit), and a nursery wallpaper between 1903 and 1905. [24] Similar "side-shows" (as she termed the ancillary merchandise) were conducted over the following two decades. [25] What a sight met the eyes of Jane and Lucinda! Lucinda sat upon the upset kitchen stove and stared; and Jane leant against the kitchen dresser and smiled—but neither of them made any remark.But Hunca Munca had a frugal mind. After pulling half the feathers out of Lucinda’s bolster, she remembered that she herself was in want of a feather bed. First up, it is likely that Hunca Munca's name is not relevant to her role in the story. According to her biographer, Judy Taylor, Potter rescued two mice from a trap and decided to name them and keep them as pets. The development of the tale came some months later, when Potter observed that the female mouse kept a tidy nest and, when given the opportunity to explore, chose to "steal" a small doll rather than doll's house food. Given that the genesis of the story came from the mouse's behaviour, well after she was named, it is possible there is no strong link.

You see them often?" asked Hunca. Her tone was casual, but Tom immediately caught the edge in her voice. Celebrity Death Match Special: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch versus The Tale of Two Bad Mice Born into a wealthy household, Potter was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. She had numerous pets, and through holidays in Scotland and the Lake District, developed a love of landscape, flora, and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted. Because she was a woman, her parents discouraged intellectual development, but her study and paintings of fungi led her to be widely respected in the field of mycology. While Tom Thumb was up the chimney, Hunca Munca had another disappointment. She found some tiny canisters upon the dresser, labelled—Rice—Coffee—Sago—but when she turned them upside down, there was nothing inside except red and blue beads. One morning the dolls leave their dollhouse for a drive in their perambulator, pushed by the girl who lives in the Nursery. No one is in the Nursery when Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, two mice living under the skirting board, peep out and cross the hearthrug to the dollhouse. They open the door, enter, and "squeak for joy" when they discover the dining table set for dinner. Tom Thumb tries to cut some Ham, but it’s made of plaster and when his wife tries to help, she declares the ham is “as hard as the hams at the cheesemongers” and Tom Thumb smashes the ham. They try eating some Fish, but it’s glued to the plate. After realising all the food is made of plaster and uneatable, they smash the Lobsters, the Pears, the Oranges and the Pudding. The fish will not smash nor will it come off the plate, so they instead try burning it in the fire, but to no avail (the fire is not real). Tom Thumb scurries up the sootless chimney while Hunca Munca empties the kitchen canisters of their red and blue beads. Tom Thumb takes the dolls' dresses from the chest of drawers and tosses them out the window while Hunca Munca pulls the feathers from the dolls' bolster. In the midst of her mischief, Hunca Munca remembers she needs a bolster for her babies and the two take the dolls' bolster to their mouse-hole. They carry off several small odds and ends from the doll's-house including a cradle, however a bird cage and bookcase will not fit through the mouse-hole. The Nursery door suddenly opens and the dolls return in their perambulator with the Girl and her Governess.Between November 26, 1903 and December 2, 1903, Potter took a week's holiday in Hastings, and, though there is no evidence that she did so, she may have taken one or both mice with her. She composed three tales in a stiff-covered exercise book during a week of relentless rain: Something very very NICE (which, after much revision, eventually became The Pie and the Patty-Pan in 1905), The Tale of Tuppenny (which eventually became Chapter 1 in The Fairy Caravan in 1929), and The Tale of Hunca Munca or The Tale of Two Bad Mice. [3] [4] [5] Potter hoped that one of the three tales would be chosen for publication in 1904 as a companion piece to Benjamin Bunny, which was then a work in progress. "I have tried to make a cat story that would use some of the sketches of a cottage I drew the summer before last," she wrote to her editor Norman Warne on December 2, "There are two others in the copy book ... the dolls would make a funny one, but it is rather soon to have another mouse book?", referring to her recently published The Tailor of Gloucester. [5] Winifred Warne and the doll's house built by her uncle Norman Warne The Tale of Two Bad Mice is number five in Beatrix Potter's series of 23 little books, the titles of which are as follows:

One morning Lucinda and Jane had gone out for a drive in the doll’s perambulator. There was no one in the nursery, and it was very quiet. Presently there was a little scuffling, scratching noise in a corner near the fire-place, where there was a hole under the skirting-board. In December 1903, The Tale of Two Bad Mice was one of three ideas for a possible future book to be published along with The Tale of Benjamin Bunny in 1904 that Beatrix Potter submitted to her publisher Norman Warne. The other two ideas were later developed into Potter's 1905 book The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan and the first chapter of her 1929 book The Fairy Caravan. Although Potter was initially somewhat reluctant to write another tale about mice so soon after the publication of The Tailor of Gloucester, both she and Warne agreed that The Tale of Two Bad Mice was the story idea that had the greatest potential. Norman Warne's decision may have been influenced by the fact that he was making a doll's house as a Christmas present for his four-year-old niece Winifred Warne at the time. Beatrix Potter used Winifred Warne's doll's house as a model for the one that appears in the illustrations in The Tale of Two Bad Mice. The book is dedicated to Winifred Warne. Food first," she said, her eyes fixed on the table. "It looks good, doesn't it?" Tom had to agree. The sight of the glazed ham made his mouth water, and the lobsters were if anything even more appetizing. Why not? They had plenty of time. He seized a knife and started to carve the ham.

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So that is the story of the two Bad Mice,--but they were not so very very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke. This year is a little different. Three people who were present at my holiday table last year are no longer with us. My friend Eric passed last February. My grandmother passed in March, and my uncle passed in May. All three were relatively unexpected. Never in a million years would I have guessed that last Christmas would be the last holiday I would spend with any of them.