Class in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Kindle Edition of The Wind in the Willows, published by Pook Press

(N.B. This article may be difficult for the visually impaired/those using screen-readers due to the use of images of text. I apologise, and am working to improve this.)

When I sat down to read The Wind in the Willows for this week, I did so under the impression that I was familiar with this story, having read and watched versions of it with all three of my children. I found, though, that reading something to your child is a very different thing to a critical close-reading of something, and I had a couple of realisations.

The first of these was in relation to the influence of the Romantic poets on the extensive descriptions of nature, the landscape, and the river in the book, which begin in the first chapter as Mole leaves his home and begins to explore. These descriptions have many elements of ‘the picturesque’[1], and Tess Cosslett points out in ‘Arcadias?’ [2] that the text is ‘full of allusions to the romantic poets’ and ‘deploys [a] romanticised view of nature’ (2006, p.151). This can be seen in many long passages, such as this one from Chapter Three ‘The Wild Wood’ which is full of anthropomorphic descriptions of plants and scenery reminiscent of Wordsworth and Keats:

The Romantics’ influence is also evident in the reactions of the animals, particularly Rat and Mole, to nature and the landscape. In Chapter One, ‘The Riverbank’, for example, Mole’s breathless ‘O my! O my! O my!’ is clearly an invocation of the Romantic concept of ‘the sublime’, where the beauty of the natural world is such that one’s conscious self is too awe-inspired for rational thought and response must come instead from one’s inner spirit.

This veneration of ‘nature’ is linked to my other realisation about The Wind in the Willows. In an essay called ‘The Blue Guide’[1], Roland Barthes links ‘the cult of nature’ with the ‘bourgeois’ promoting of the mountains’ and ‘Protestant morality’ – i.e. enjoyment of the natural world is very much a middle-class pursuit. The Wind in the Willows vehemently emphasises this in several ways.

First in the sense of ownership of The River which the Rat shows in the first chapter. Having described it in all seasons, he claims that the river ‘bank is so crowded nowadays that many people are moving away altogether. O no it isn’t what it used to be, at all’ which can be seen as a forerunner of the ‘NIMBYism’ of the middle-classes [2]. Much more obvious though is the oppression of the working-classes, represented by the residents of the Wild Wood, and the denigration of the aristocracy represented by Toad. Further on in Chapter One, Mole asks about the Wild Wood.

This presents the Wild Wood as a sort of slum, ‘a bad area’ where decent people – ‘we river-bankers’- don’t go, and where the residents ‘break out sometimes’. Further into the story Mole becomes lost in the Wild Wood and feels threatened and terrified when being observed by these ‘untrustworthy’ residents, although he is never actually threatened by them, other than in his imagination. At the very end, after ‘the uprising’ of the weasels, stoats and ferrets, we come to this passage.

The Wild Wood has been ‘successfully tamed’ and the middle-classes can feel safe and secure there, now they are treated ‘respectfully’ by the ‘mother-weasels’…

The denigration of working-class values can also be seen in the repeated references to Badger’s manners and forms of speech, which constantly slip outside of expected middle-class norms, and are only allowed because of who he is. This is made clear through the third person omniscient narrator, who appeals directly to the reader in Chapter Four ‘Mr Badger’ – ‘We know … that he was wrong’.

It is not only the working-classes who are attacked in this text, however. The aristocracy are also criticised, shamed and somewhat oppressed in this tale, as seen through the responses of Badger, Rat and Mole to Toad’s attitudes and exploits.

When Rat and Mole are telling Badger of Toad’s obsession with cars in Chapter Four, two things are made clear – firstly that wasting money is a Bad Thing, and secondly, that Toad is incompetent.

This plays into middle-class ideas of the aristocracy as idle and profligate wastrels, and Badger especially does not approve of this. When Badger eventually confronts Toad about his behaviour, he brings up more issues dear to the hearts of the middle-classes – reputation and rationality.

Toad must be ‘brought to reason’ to protect his friends’ reputations, and eventually, when Badger’s representations fail to induce the required rationality, he is accused of madness and locked up.

I see this as not only a denigration of the aristocracy’s profligacy, but also reminiscent of the ‘Madwoman in the Attic’ [1] – the aristocracy being feminised by a comparison with an insane female who must be locked away until she has been sufficiently subdued by masculine Reason.

At the end, it seems that Toad has been fully rehabilitated by the middle-class characters, he refuses to ‘perform’ in his old way and displays the proper manners.

In this book then, middle-class values are privileged over all others. From the links to the Romantic poets and their ‘cult of nature’, the suppression of the working-classes, and the ridicule of the aristocracy and their idleness, irrationality and profligacy, we are directed to see middle-class ways as ‘natural’ and ‘right’.

Some interesting links –

The Wind in the Willows animation which my kids made me watch repeatedly a couple of decades ago. The ending to this is different to the one given in the book – YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab7axFMVWa0

The Tale of Samuel Whiskers animation, where the varying sizes of the characters in the different parts of the story which Tess Cosslett mentions in ‘Arcadias?’ is much clearer than in the static illustrations of the book – YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svTvX2tkBZM

Tess Cosslett’s book, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786-1914, containing the ‘Arcadias?’ chapter is available online via the Roehampton library – https://capitadiscovery.co.uk/roehampton/items/873132?query=Talking+animals+in+British+children%27s+fiction%2C+1786-1914&resultsUri=items%3Fquery%3DTalking%2Banimals%2Bin%2BBritish%2Bchildren%2527s%2Bfiction%252C%2B1786-1914%26facet%255B0%255D%3Dfulltext%253Ayes%26target%3Dcatalogue&facet%5B0%5D=fulltext%3Ayes&target=catalogue

Author Jan Needle’s take on The Wind in the Willows from the perspective of the Wild Wood residents –

‘It’s 1908 and times are hard. All very well for the leisured River Bankers with their hobbies, excursions and private incomes but young Baxter Ferret has to work long and hard to support his widowed mother and hungry siblings. Baxter is a ferret with a passion. He loves engines and when his employer buys the splendid Throgmorton Squeezer lorry Baxter willingly dedicates himself to its maintenance. That’s until he meets the lunatic Mr Toad driving out of control on a dark night on the edge of the Wild Wood.’

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TSvAngEACAAJ&dq=Wild+Wood+Jan+Needle&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjW4bOd3b7lAhX_SxUIHehDCTEQ6AEIKzAA

Apologies for the squiffy numbering of the footnotes. I hope they still work!

[1] C/F Gilbert and Gubar’s text of the same name

[1] Barthes, R., (2009), in Lavers, A. (trans), Mythologies, London, Vintage

[2] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/middle-classes-exploit-nimby-s-charter-rfrh8bg0q

[1] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/picturesque

[2] Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786-1914, Routledge, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/roehampton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4817605.

The purpose of this blog

I have created this blog as coursework for the module ‘Form and Genre 2’, a part of the MA in Children’s Literature for Roehampton University. As such, the content can be considered as ‘for educational purposes’. Images used are either already available in the public domain, or I have used snippets of less than 10% from larger images.

I am hoping that the blog will appeal to my former classmates from the Open University’s ‘Children’s Literature’ module, some of whom are considering further study in this field, but also any other students or interested parties in the field of children’s literature.

Witches and olfactory symbolism in Robert Westall’s The Devil on the Road

First published in 1978, I was introduced to Robert Westall’s The Devil on the Road, at school in 1985. This was the first timeslip novel I had read which was aimed at young adults, rather than a child audience.

The main protagonist, and first-person narrator, is John Webster, a nineteen year old university student. Webster is very down-to-earth; he informs the reader in the first three pages that he is not a Neanderthal just because he studies engineering and plays rugby, that he loves his motorbike which he acquired through his own hard work, and that he goes looking for ‘Lady Chance’ in his vacations (p.1-3).It’s on one of these trips ‘into the wide blue yonder’ looking for Lady Chance (p.3) that John Webster finds himself drawn into the Suffolk countryside, and eventually back in time to 1647, after a series of traffic jams and breakdowns push him to take shelter in what appears to be an old barn.

In a similar way that the timeslip experience in Charlotte Sometimes is ‘resolutely linked to her very specific locality’ (Levy, Mendlesohn, p.123) – a bed in a boarding school – and couldn’t happen anywhere else, so John Webster’s slip back in time could only occur in the vicinity of this very specific ‘barn’ in Suffolk. In Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (2016), Farah Mendlesohn and Michael Levy point out this link between place or locality in timeslip fantasies, arguing that timeslip novels of the 1960s were ‘playing with Englishness/Britishness’ and engaged in ‘the construction of a previously rejected indigenous, and often localist, identity’ (p.122). Devil on the Road seems to engage in this practice, as the area around the barn is drawn in detail, in both past and present. Landscape and natural features are shown to have continuity through time, whilst also being subject to change, as seen in the circle of trees Webster witnesses ‘in their youth’ and then three hundred years later ‘the same trees; only sixty feet higher’ (Westall, p.78). The built environment is also shown to have continuity, as ‘Vaser’s barn’ is restored to ‘Vavasour’s Manor’ and the village street still exists albeit with ruins either side. The clock also ties past and present, as Webster realises in the past that ‘it was the same clock that chimed every day. Derek had told me it was four hundred years old’ (p.107). The ‘localist identity’ that Levy and Mendlesohn refer to is constructed by the villagers of New Besingtree, who despite the modernity of their shops and lives seem content to slip back into a time of ‘yarb-mothers’ and Cunning men, and a system of barter.

However, where other timeslip novels seem to hark back to the times in which the protagonist finds themselves, The Devil on the Road does the opposite. The world of the past that John Webster arrives in may lack the noise and smell of twentieth-century machinery, but Webster likes machinery. And when he discovers that the notorious-in-the-future ‘Witchfinder General’ Matthew Hopkins is about to visit Old Besingtree, threatening the life of the lovely Johanna, it is to modern machinery and weapons that he turns to save her life. Very little about the past is shown in a positive light, other than the landscape; Webster is exposed to filth and malnutrition, violence and death. The Witchfinder scenes are authentic – Westall draws ‘most of the dialogue’ from Hopkins’ ‘own writings, or those of his ilk’(p.247) – and frightening, making the reader as urgent as Webster to effect a rescue.

Frontispiece from Matthew Hopkins’ *The Discovery of Witches* (1647), reproduced at the end of The Devil on the Road

Westall clearly sympathises with the plight of the ‘witches’ in their persecution and murder, saying in his Author’s Note that ‘the social dynamics that Hopkins manipulated remain dormant in our society’ and that ‘wherever minorities exist, despised, […] and not understood, there is witch-hunt potential’ (p.248), but ultimately John Webster refuses the commitment that Johanna Vavasour needs to maintain her place in the present, and so condemns her to return to this brutal past.

This doesn’t come as a surprise, although Webster himself describes it as cowardice, as the abandonment is foreshadowed by the use of olfactory symbolism linking scent negatively to both witchcraft and seduction. Constance Classen, in ‘The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories’, writes of ‘…the association commonly made between the sexuality of the witch and her impure odor…’ (p.144) and this association is shown every time John Webster is sexually tempted by Mistress Johanna, leading to his withdrawal. When they first meet, John notices that ‘under her stiff, scratchy grey dress, her bosom swelled’, but soon notes that ‘she ponged pretty strongly […] of damp and mildew, lavender and cow-dung’ and he tries to withdraw (Westall, p.105). Later in the story, Johanna issues ‘a very sexy invitation’ by pushing her nose into John’s ear, and John is at the point of accepting this invitation when ‘the smell of her came up to me, strong. The smell of lavender and cowdung, woodsmoke and mildew’, and again he abruptly withdraws from the contact (p.199). By now, John is aware of Johanna’s actual use of witchcraft and realises that ‘every time [he] got to the brink’ of sexual activity and therefore commitment, ‘something held [him] back’ and ‘the moment [he] held her close, that old smell would come back: lavender and cowdung, woodsmoke and mildew’ (p.213). Classen points out that the ‘odor of sweet-scented flowers, suggestive of freshness and bounty, […] is generally considered attractive […] while the odor of decay, with its implications of disease and death, is generally considered repellent.’ (p.159), and in Webster’s description the sweet-scented lavender is far outweighed by the repellent cowdung, woodsmoke and mildew.

As I said, with these olfactory clues throughout the text, combined with Johanna’s manipulation of both time and John through witchcraft, it comes as no surprise when John decamps back to his modern life of motorbikes and rugger. And I think that although the text is sympathetic in highlighting the plight of the women who were essentially murdered by Hopkins for money, Johanna herself becomes something of a caricature of a witch with the combination of sexuality and bad smell, and the manipulation of men through sorcery.

References in this post

Classen, C., ‘The Odor of the Other: Olfactory Symbolism and Cultural Categories’, Ethos, Vol. 20, No. 2, Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association, (1992) pp. 133-166 https://www.jstor.org/stable/640383

Jütte, R., ‘The sense of smell in historical perspective’ in F. G. Barth et al. (eds.), Sensory Perception, Vienna, Springer, (2012) pp.313-330 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-211-99751-2_18

Levy, M. and Mendlesohn, F. Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2016)

Westall, R., The Devil on the Road, Middlesex, Puffin, (1981)

Implicit racism in Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park and Willy the Wimp. Or not…?

Those readers who studied the Open University’s ‘EA300 Children’s Literature’ module will remember looking closely at Anthony Browne’s 1998 picturebook Voices in the Park. For those who don’t know, this is a picturebook which looks at a visit to the park from four different perspectives; a mother and her son, and a father and his daughter, and these central characters are all anthropomorphised gorillas/simians. The ‘overt’ or ‘surface’ ideology of the book – the social, political or moral values clearly shown by the author/illustrator – seems to be about class. The mother is shown to be middle-class, well-dressed, and uptight, while her son is repressed and miserable, whereas the father is working-class, unemployed, but more relaxed in his supervision, while his daughter has fun and cheers everyone up. What disturbed me about the book, however, was its use of anthropomorphised gorillas and what could be seen as ‘passive ideology’ – the unintended and unexamined values and assumptions which can pervade a text.

My problem is this; there has been a very long history in the West of associating people of colour with apes, gorillas, and other simians, which goes back beyond Darwin’s Origin of the Species, in order to dehumanise, and legitimise the oppression of black people by white people. And although I don’t believe that Browne set out with the intent to be racist, or purposefully equate people of colour with his simian protagonists, there are elements in both Voices in the Park and Willy the Wimp’s illustrations which I see as problematic.

Take this illustration of Charles and his mother, for example. Examining closely the section of it enlarged below, in the background there is clearly a white, human man walking between the trees.

Or, looking at the background of this picture of Charles walking through the park, there are two groups of white humans visible in the background.

Why is this? If the picturebook is about animal protagonists, why are there white humans in the background? Moebius, in his ‘Picturebook Codes’ calls these ‘tacit witnesses’ seen in ‘the fringes or background of the picture[s]’ (2009, p.316), and what they are witnessing is one gorilla family attempting to conform to white, middle-class values and being miserable, and another gorilla family not conforming to those values and experiencing unemployment and depression. It is all too easy to see these gorillas as representations of black people in opposition to the white ‘witnesses’ in the background.

While researching for this post, I found that many critics and researchers have reviewed or studied Voices in the Park and Browne’s other picturebooks featuring simians such as Willy the Wimp, few seem to have commented on the use of gorillas as protagonists, and I have only found one that has seen the issue as problematic. Ellen Handler Spitz, in her 1999 book Inside Picture Books, found Browne’s Willy the Wimp (1984) problematic in a number of ways relating to gender and violence, but also particularly took note of the illustration of Willy’s confrontation with a ‘suburban gorilla gang’(p.5).

Spitz argues that this image can be read as ‘a gang of big, tough, black kids who are beating up on a sissy white boy’ and that there is ‘no escaping the racial slur’(p.192). She points out the clothing of the gang members, and a look at the website of The Los Angeles Police department confirms that ‘white T-shirts and Levis with upturned cuffs’ are possibly ‘indicators of … gang involvement’ and that ‘”Blood” gangs generally use red accessories, such as caps or bandanas, to identify themselves’ (see LAPD website). It appears to me to be inescapable that this illustration in particular is equating black gang members with gorillas.

It could be argued that in Willy the Wimp all of the characters are simian whether dark hued or pale, while in Voices in the Park confusion is created by the strangely human and white arms of the ‘Dad’, and that making a connection between simian characters and people of colour in fact implicates the white reader, as they all too quickly make the leap from clothed ape to black person, of which more later. However, while researching for this post, I came across a study which hugely emphasises the impact that even vague associations like this can have in society and on individual lives. The study was published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2008, by Eberhardt, Goff, Jackson and Williams, and is titled ‘Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences’. Rather than attempt to explain the whole study, I have copied the abstract below:

Historical representations explicitly depicting Blacks as apelike have largely disappeared in the United States, yet a mental association between Blacks and apes remains. Here, the authors demonstrate that U.S. citizens implicitly associate Blacks and apes. In a series of laboratory studies, the authors reveal how this association influences study participants’ basic cognitive processes and significantly alters their judgments in criminal justice contexts. Specifically, this Black–ape association alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against Black suspects. In an archival study of actual criminal cases, the authors show that news articles written about Blacks who are convicted of capital crimes are more likely to contain ape-relevant language than news articles written about White convicts. Moreover, those who are implicitly portrayed as more apelike in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

In particular, Study 4 of 6 found that even where individuals had no prior knowledge of the Black/ape stereotype, ‘individuals mentally associate Blacks and apes’ and that ‘this implicit association is not due to personalised, implicit attitudes and can operate beneath conscious awareness’ (p.304). This shows that even those who believe themselves not to be racist can fall into this trap, and as above makes this author question whether the associations made in the picturebooks discussed above are in fact a problem created by their author/illustrator, or whether they are a problem created by this white reader. Regardless, the authors of the article conclude that ‘the present research foregrounds dehumanisation as a factor in producing implicit racial bias’ and they ‘associate it with deadly outcomes [in the US]’ and they thereby connect ‘the literatures of stereotyping, implicit processes, and dehumanisation with real-world social injustices.’ (p.305). I would suggest therefore, that the use of anthropomorphised simians should be used with extreme care in children’s books. Their conclusions also explain the reasoning behind the recent social media uproar over Mr Danny Baker’s ill-advised Twitter post (see The Guardian for details), which resulted in several longform blog posts explaining the history of this association (like this one on The Conversation). It is to be hoped that with more education this insidious association will truly be relegated to the past, but we also need to be conscious of our own ‘implicit associations’ and the effects they have.

References in this post

Browne, A., (1998), Voices in the Park. London: Picture Corgi.

Browne A., (2014), Willy the Wimp, London, Walker Books

Goff, P. A., Eberhardt, J. L., Williams, M. J., & Jackson, M. C. (2008). ‘Not yet human: Implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 292-306.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.292

Los Angeles Police Department , ‘How Are Gangs Identified’ http://www.lapdonline.org/get_informed/content_basic_view/23468 Accessed 7/5/2019

Moebius, W. (2009) ‘Picturebook Codes’ in Maybin, J. and Watson, N. J. (eds) Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 311-20

Spitz, E. H., (1999), Inside Picture Books, New Haven, CT Yale University Press.

Absence at the Heart of Peter Rabbit.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter, 1902) is a book which I have known intimately for 40+ years, having read it as a child, and then re-read it uncountable times to my own children. It is a book full of rabbits, except for one page. I am going to look more closely at the absence on this page and its significance to the overall story, with reference to Carole Scott’s chapter ‘An Unusual Hero: Perspective and Point of View in The Tale of Peter Rabbit‘ in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit: A Children’s Classic at 100

The cover of the original edition of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit.

Although at first reading The Tale of Peter Rabbit appears to be a simple tale of the consequences of disobeying your mother, upon closer reading it is a much more complex text, which pits the marginalised against the dominant order. This challenge to the centre is immediate, as Peter Rabbit is told from the point of view of the marginalised non-human; the tale starts and ends with the rabbits, rather than with the human, land-owning Mr McGregor. This puts them higher in the narrative hierarchy, meaning that the reader is prompted to go away with their values rather than those of Mr McGregor. Also, the voice of the narrator, which appears to be that of ‘the powerful class and paternalistic authority of which Mr McGregor is representative’ (Scott, p.23), and who would normally be seen as the most authoritative voice, is ‘intentionally undermine[d]’ by the ‘perspective of the illustrations’ (Scott, p.26) throughout, as the illustrations present the narrative from Peter’s point of view. In this way, the text reverses the centre/margins dichotomy by allowing the marginal rabbits to take the place of the centre.

The tale opens then, with Mrs Rabbit instructing her children to stay away from Mr McGregor’s garden. The illustration on page 10 (shown below) clearly and brutally explains the reason for this admonition, and why Mrs Rabbit is so concerned that her offspring conform to this rule.

The illustration is ostensibly a happy, family scene. The traditional middle-class family is depicted, with a rosy cheeked mother and child, about to enjoy a plentiful meal, and the family dog, with nose in the air as if to inhale the aroma of the beautiful pie. This could be seen as the best that the centre has to offer; there is no sign of conflict, the family appears well fed and content. Yet, crossing the division of the white gutter to the verbal text on page 11, the reader finds that all is not as it appears. The verbal text is the voice of Mrs Rabbit, and the idea of the beautiful and attractive pie is shattered as we are told that Mr Rabbit, Peter’s father, was ‘put in a pie by Mrs McGregor’ (Potter, p.11). This, then, is the reason that Mrs Rabbit is so conformist; this is the danger of crossing the boundary between the wild woodland of the marginal characters and the owned, cultivated space of Mr McGregor’s garden.

“Your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter, page 11

The written text prompts us to reexamine the illustration with an awareness of the darker aspects of the seemingly happy family meal. There is a rabbit in this picture, contrary to first impressions, and it is in the pie. The figure of the black dog, presented as a family pet begging for scraps could also be read as the ominous shaggy, black dog of many folk tales and legends (see ‘black dogs’, Simpson, 2000), which is said to be an omen of death. This can be seen as a ‘return of the repressed’, a visual reminder that the apparently happy family meal and picture of middle-class contentment depends upon the death of the ‘other’ that it disavows.

It is also significant that Mr McGregor is represented only by his hands, which appear to be very large, and signify the power and brutality they have wielded in taking a life. Perhaps the illustration also has some kind of revenge on Mr McGregor, by reducing his humanity to just a pair of hands. Of further significance, the limited view we have of Mr McGregor foregrounds the idea that there is more to this situation than the picture represents. In this way the picture draws attention to its own absences, that is, the restricted and narrow nature of the bourgeois worldview which only sustains itself by a process of rejection of the other.

Placing this illustration so close to the beginning of the tale, along with Mrs Rabbit’s warning words, means that the reader is aware throughout Peter’s exploits of the danger in which he stands, and of the contradiction of the McGregors’ attempts to exclude the marginalised rabbits, upon which they also depend to create sustenance for the happy family scene depicted. As Carole Scott states, this is a powerful critique of the ‘landed sector of society defending its borders from property-less rabble’ (Scott, p.20).

This is the situation which Mrs Rabbit understandably seeks to shield her offspring from, but to do so means accepting their marginalised and excluded position. As a whole, however, the text presents an alternative to this; Peter’s transgression, and crucially his escape, can be seen as a celebration of resistance, however dangerous, while the text’s clever foregrounding of its own absences, or the limits of its own representation, and implicitly the limits of the McGregors’ world view, serves to disrupt the authority of the centre.

Bibliography

Potter, B. (2002 [1902]) Peter Rabbit. London, Penguin.

Scott, Carole. “An Unusual Hero: Perspective and Point of View in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.” in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit: A Children’s Classic at 100. Ed. Margaret Mackey. Lanham, Md.: The Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2002. 19-30.

Simpson, J. and Roud, S. “black dogs” A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.