Beatrix Potter

[Courtenay]

Well said, all of it, Anita. And hey, I figure, whoever Dr Emily Zobel Marshall is, I very much doubt she has written or will write anything that will still be in print and world-famous over 100 years after it was written. Unlike Beatrix Potter, Joel Chandler Harris, or indeed Enid Blyton!!

[Courtenay]

While I have a bit of time, I've been thinking more deeply about the claim that Beatrix Potter's stories owe an unacknowledged debt to Brer Rabbit, and in all honesty, I don't see how anyone who is familiar with both sets of stories could draw that conclusion. (I knew it was a cheap shot and a totally inaccurate one from the start, but my point is that that's all the more apparent the more one looks into it.)

Both Brer Rabbit and the Beatrix Potter "Tales" feature anthropomorphised animal characters, but that's about the only major similarity. In the Brer Rabbit stories, Brer Rabbit is pretty much the ultimate underdog (or under-rabbit?) trickster character. His enemies are the creatures who in real life would be a rabbit's predators — Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, Brer Bear, and occasionally humans — but in virtually every story (with only one or two exceptions I'm aware of), he outwits them all through his supreme cleverness and comes away laughing. These stories have their ultimate roots in West African folk tales, but in this specific context, they were originally told by and for people who were living in slavery. Is it any wonder they celebrate a character who always gets the better of the bigger and more powerful creatures who are constantly trying to kill and eat him?

Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, was writing as an Englishwoman who would have been a brilliant naturalist if that career path had been open to women in her era. Even apart from the different cultural setting, her animal characters are nothing like the ones in the Brer Rabbit stories. In all Beatrix's Tales, even though her animal characters wear clothes and live in furnished homes, the relations of predators and prey animals are pretty much exactly as they are in real life. One of the very few stories I can think of where the central characters directly outwit an enemy by their own cleverness is The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, in which Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny rescue Benjamin's children from Mr McGregor's sack and replace them with vegetables and an old brush (and as Anita has mentioned, yes, there are definitely shades there of the folk tale The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids, which also has no connection to Brer Rabbit). And even then, they're doing it at very real risk to themselves and there's nothing humorous in the way the tale is told — even if it has taught generations of children (myself included) the meaning of the word "soporific"!

In all Beatrix's other tales that involve prey and predators, though, there's no sense that the main characters are underdog geniuses who come out on top against the enemies who would easily kill and eat them in real life. Peter Rabbit has no option but to flee in terror when Mr McGregor sees him, turning his disobedient raid on the garden into a nightmare of repeated narrow escapes and frantic searching for the way out, at last barely escaping with his life (and with a stomachache from eating too much!). His cousin Benjamin Bunny is a good deal bolder, but his foray into the garden with Peter (to retrieve Peter's lost clothes) also goes horribly wrong and the two young rabbits are stuck for five hours with a load of onions under a basket with a cat sitting on top. Benjamin's father's thrashing of the cat is another of Beatrix's extremely rare departures from the usual predator-prey realism, but in this case it's not our heroes who overthrow the enemy, but a stern parental figure who whips the two naughty youngsters in turn. No-one would ever do that to Brer Rabbit!!

And what about some of Beatrix's other famous stories? Her squirrels in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin give gifts of food to Old Brown the owl while begging his permission to gather nuts on his island, precisely because he could easily kill and eat those squirrels any time he wants — which is what very nearly happens to "excessively impertinent" Nutkin when he pushes the owl's temper too far. Jemima Puddle-duck is completely taken in by the "sandy-whiskered gentleman" and never puts two and two together with the "vast quantity of feathers" in his woodshed, or with his request for sage and onions and other herbs that are used for stuffing roast duck. She and her eggs would have been the fox's dinner that day if Kep the collie (Beatrix's own favourite dog in real life) hadn't questioned her, realised who and what the "gentleman" was, and gone with the two young foxhounds to rescue the still totally oblivious Jemima!

Even in The Tale of Mr Tod, probably Beatrix's darkest story, where Benjamin and Peter again have to rescue Benjamin's young family, they only manage it because of the huge ongoing fight between the two villains, Tommy Brock and Mr Tod. Beatrix even emphasises at one stage that Peter and Benjamin "lost their heads completely" and "did the most foolish thing that they could have done", hiding in the tunnel they've dug under Mr Tod's kitchen floor as the fox himself is approaching. Not a hint of Brer Rabbit's ingenuity, let alone his swagger!

I'm preaching to the choir here, of course, but just thought it was worth probing further. In short, I can only conclude that claiming Beatrix Potter's stories are a rip-off of Brer Rabbit makes about as much sense as claiming Disney's The Lion King is a rip-off of the Chronicles of Narnia!

[Anita Bensoussane]

It's true that there are only vague similarities to the Brer Rabbit tales. A number of Beatrix Potter's stories feature rascally rabbits (though not a full-blown trickster rabbit) and a crafty fox or two - but the same can be said of many fables, folk stories and fairy tales from around the world. The Brer Rabbit stories themselves arose from earlier tales, as we've said.

There is a Brer Rabbit story that's a little bit like The Tale of Peter Rabbit in that Brer Rabbit goes into a garden to steal a man's vegetables, is caught but then escapes. However, the details, the structure and the style of language are completely different. It's called In Some Lady's Garden and can be read here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24430/2 ... h.htm#XXXI

[Courtenay]

Definitely no resemblance at all there to any of Beatrix Potter's stories, as you say, Anita. Seriously, the only thing Brer Rabbit has in common at all with Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny is that they're anthropomorphic rabbits who occasionally sneak into humans' vegetable gardens and are regularly threatened by foxes and other predators... just like non-anthropomorphic rabbits in real life!! That's what I meant by comparing this fiasco facetiously with the idea that The Lion King is a rip-off of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — because, er, yeah, they both feature a talking lion who rules over other talking animals and who has some sort of godlike aspect to him, yeah, so they must be the same story, obviously... (That was sarcasm, needless to say. At least, I haven't seen the estate of C.S. Lewis suing Disney for plagiarism and I suspect there's no way they would even think of doing so! )