Beatrix Potter’s Hedgehogs

"This book is Judy Taylor again. The original idea for it was to celebrate Judy’s 80th birthday. Over the years and all over the world she gave talks about Beatrix Potter on many different subjects and we chose one of her unpublished talks to make into a little booklet. The Society has produced all sorts of publications over its 40 years, but for a choice of five books like this most of them are a bit too specialised, because they tend to be collections of the Society’s international conference papers, for example. Hedgehogs is a subject that’s of interest to everybody and the talk is reasonably lighthearted as well as informative. It’s suitable for a birthday and it celebrates Judy Taylor, without whom we would know much less about Beatrix Potter than we do. What’s interesting about it to the general reader is that it illustrates everything we’ve been talking about up to now in one short little 24-page illustrated booklet. It starts with Beatrix Potter’s interest in hedgehogs from the natural history point of view and her observations about them in nature and in real life. She had a pet hedgehog called Mrs Tiggy, whom she wrote about in letters to children and sketched and whose behaviour she examined. When she started writing her little books, one of them included a hedgehog based partly on Mrs Tiggy and this became The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle . So, straight away you’ve got the transfer from real life to little-book life, which is the pattern that nearly all the little books followed. “She had a pet hedgehog called Mrs Tiggy, whom she wrote about in letters to children and sketched and whose behaviour she examined” The booklet illustrates every aspect of Beatrix Potter’s own interests, but it also goes on to show how incredibly astute she was as a businesswoman, and there are examples here of her marketing ideas. And, although Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is an early book [1905] and was written before Potter really became a farmer or a landowner in the Lake District, it is set in the Lake District with all the background in the pictures based on sketches made during a Lake District holiday. So, tied up in one subject you’ve got all the themes running through Beatrix Potter’s life. I thought that it was a good example to use and the illustrations are lovely."