the V&A was approached, coincidentally, by a family looking for information about a couple of drawings they believed might be by Beatrix Potter – they even suspected one to be an illustration for The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Shortly before the recent announcement of the forthcoming publication of The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots (with illustrations by Quentin Blake) by Frederick Warne & Co. We know that Potter began ‘several drawings’ for the tale of Kitty-in-Boots yet, until now, only one finished drawing and two rough sketches have come to light. The finished frontispiece illustration has been reproduced several times, in particular in the published catalogue of the Linder Bequest, Beatrix Potter: the V&A Collection (1985).įrontispiece illustration for The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, 1914 (c) Victoria & Albert Museum with kind permission of Frederick Warne & Co He went on to publish the text of the story of Kitty-in-Boots in A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne, 1971), still the only comprehensive compendium of Potter’s fiction. (The V&A holds another preliminary drawing for the story on long-term loan from Frederick Warne.) Prior to bequeathing his collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1973 Linder exhibited a manuscript of Kitty-in-Boots in the Beatrix Potter Centenary Exhibition at the National Book League, London, in July 1966. Tod peering at Kitty over the ‘mossy tumble down wall’ and the only known finished illustration, believed to be the frontispiece. In the 1950s Linder amassed a huge collection of her drawings and manuscripts, including three manuscripts of the story of Kitty-in-Boots, the dummy book containing cuttings from the galley proof of the text, an unfinished drawing of Mr. What little we know about The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots we owe to the Potter scholar and enthusiast, Leslie Linder (1904-1973). Despite her efforts, Potter is known to have finished only one watercolour, and pencil annotations on the printed slips of text pasted into her dummy book for the story suggest that even the galley proof was not her intended final version of the story. Unfortunately, persistent poor health and the death of her father in May prevented consistent work on the book. The first draft required ‘compressing’ but Potter assured her publisher, Harold Warne, that the story had ‘plenty of variety’ and would ‘ illustrate very well’. By March 1914 Potter had drafted the story and begun ‘several drawings’. But this story was never published.įollowing her marriage in 1913 Potter began work on a new story ‘about a well-behaved prim black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life.’ At night, Kitty dresses in a ‘gentleman’s Norfolk jacket, and little fur-lined boots’ and slips out of the window to hunt game with an air gun. When the young Peter Rabbit encounters a white cat flicking his tail in The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) he keeps his distance (he had ‘heard about cats from his cousin, little Benjamin Bunny’), yet in another story an older and stouter Peter Rabbit outwits a cat and leads it straight into the clutches of the treacherous Mr. Tabitha Twitchit and her cousin, Ribby, are models of respectability but Tom Kitten is prone to scratching and the tailor of Gloucester’s cat, Simpkin, spits and growls – ‘I don’t consider cats thoroughly domesticated animals’. Cats feature in several of Beatrix Potter’s best-loved tales.
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