Or this, at least, is what I thought when I flung the book across the room in disgust (only, intrigued, to pick it up again soon after). But The Tale of Tom Kitten does not teach adventurous disobedience rather it tells us that disobedience is punished with violence. In her book Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature, the novelist Alison Lurie writes that Potter's books teach that 'disobedience and exploration are more fun than good behaviour, and not really all that dangerous'. When they return naked, Tabitha says she is affronted, then hides them upstairs and tells her company that they have the measles.

They not only get dirty, but lose their clothes to some passing ducks. Their mother, Tabitha Twitchit, neurotically cleans them and dresses them up, then sends them out with the admonishment that they not get dirty. The book tells the story of three kittens who get into mischief.

Tom Kitten's ethical world is, I think, problematic. I started my daughter with the Tale of Tom Kitten, which her uncle had bought her as a present. The press release that came with a new biography by American academic Linda Lear explains that Potter was a cunning businesswoman: 'She was the first writer for children to see the potential market in merchandise 'spin offs' from literature to the toy market, and children's home products.' So Potter might have liked the fact that on eBay I recently found six Beatrix Potter drawer knobs for sale, each featuring a different character (starting bid: $14.99). We dry her with a Peter Rabbit bath towel courtesy of her nan. We feed our daughter tricolore baby pasta from the Peter Rabbit's Organics. The other was Little Red Riding Hood, in which we are asked to believe that the big bad wolf is scared off by the mere arrival of the girl's dad, and that granny and granddaughter emerge from their hiding place under the bed for an intergenerational group hug.Īlready our house teems with Potter merchandise. One was Jack and the Beanstalk, whose narrative has been shrunk into a shocking apologia for theft. First came two terrible, sanitised reworkings of fairytales in the Ladybird touch-and-feel library that made me suspicious of what moral agendas lay beneath. It's been a weird re-initiation into children's literature.

I came back to Beatrix Potter only recently, when reading to my 15-month-old daughter. Mr McCracken Peck seems to have forgotten, for instance, that Squirrel Nutkin is reduced to a gibbering wreck by the final page, hurling sticks at anyone who asks him how he lost his bushy tail (the reader knows: it was snipped off by Old Brown Owl). I have just one problem with that - the idea that Potter's world is in any way comforting.

Peter rabbit nutkin on the run