The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter was a working naturalist before she was an author, and the drawing came first. She kept rabbits and drew them constantly from life, including a Belgian hare called Peter Piper who went about on a lead; the book began as a picture letter to a sick child in 1893. She also worked seriously on fungi, made hundreds of scientific watercolours of them, and wrote a paper on spore germination that the Linnean Society would not let her read in person. That training is why the animals work. Peter is drawn with correct rabbit anatomy and rabbit behaviour, and the comedy comes from a real animal being put in a jacket rather than from a person being drawn as an animal. The gardens, walls and fells are Lake District and Hertfordshire landscapes she had painted from life.

The book was a letter before it was a book. In September 1893 Beatrix Potter wrote to Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of her former governess, who was ill, and told him a story about four rabbits because she could not think of anything else to write. She borrowed the letter back years later to make the book out of it. The rabbits were hers. She kept them as pets and drew them constantly from life, including a Belgian hare called Peter Piper who went about on a lead and who is the reason Peter behaves like a rabbit rather than like a small person. She published it herself first, in 1901, after six publishers turned it down.