page_title: The Story of Miss Moppet
section_title: Development and publication
hierarchical_section_title: The Story of Miss Moppet / Development and publication
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of two illustration and a page of text from the original panoramic version of The Story of Miss Moppet
context_page_description: The Story of Miss Moppet is a tale about teasing, featuring a kitten and a mouse, that was written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter. It was published by Frederick Warne & Co for the 1906 Christmas season. Potter was born in London in 1866, and between 1902 and 1905 published a series of small-format children's books with Warne. In 1906, she experimented with an atypical panorama design for Miss Moppet, which booksellers disliked; the story was reprinted in 1916 in small book format.
  Miss Moppet, the story's eponymous main character, is a kitten teased by a mouse. While pursuing him she bumps her head on a cupboard. She then wraps a duster about her head, and sits before the fire "looking very ill". The curious mouse creeps closer, is captured, "and because the Mouse has teased Miss Moppet—Miss Moppet thinks she will tease the Mouse; which is not at all nice of Miss Moppet". She ties him up in the duster and tosses him about. However, the mouse makes his escape, and once safely out of reach, dances a jig atop the cupboard.
context_section_description: In 1906, as Potter was finishing The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, she considered developing books for a younger audience. Three stories were the result: The Story of Miss Moppet, The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit and The Sly Old Cat. Inspired by George Cruikshank's illustrations, she intended to have the stories published in "panoramic format in the style of Cruikshank's Comic Alphabet", as explained by Taylor. The panorama format consisted of "long strips of paper, on which the individual pages of pictures and text were arranged in order from left to right."
  Potter was at Hill Top in July 1906 during the development of Miss Moppet, and the kitten she borrowed as a model from a mason from Windermere was a difficult subject. "[A]n exasperating model", Potter wrote, "I have borrowed a Kitten and I am rather glad of the opportunity of working at the drawings. It is very young and pretty and a most fearful pickle." Biographer Linda Lear explains that "pickle" was a word Potter used to describe "free-thinking exuberant people, like her cousin Caroline, or mischievous kittens and small children." Potter used the same drawings of the kitten as a model for her next book, The Tale of Tom Kitten, which she dedicated in 1907 "to all Pickles—especially those that get upon my garden wall". Miss Moppet is one of Tom Kitten's sisters, and appears as a character in both books featuring him: The Tale of Tom Kitten and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding (1908).
  Potter was an admirer of American author Joel Chandler Harris and created a series of plates in the 1890s for his Uncle Remus stories, possibly in an attempt to find career direction. So deep was her admiration, Lear speculates the scene of Miss Moppet wrapping her head in the duster comes from a similar scene in an Uncle Remus tale in which Br'er Fox "feigns illness in a rocking chair, wrapped up with flannel". Potter was modeling her sketches from a young kitten and, wanting not to show cruelty, she wrote of the kitten: "She should catch him by the tail / less unpleasant". Children's literature scholar Peter Hunt writes that Potter was careful to protect her young audience from graphic details and she refused to depict death in her stories.
  Ten thousand copies of The Story of Miss Moppet were released in a panorama format priced at a shilling in November 1906, and another 10,000 copies in December 1906. There were no subsequent printings in the panorama format. The strip folded accordion-fashion into a grey cloth wallet measuring 108 by 89 millimetres (4.3 in × 3.5 in). When opened, the panorama strip measured 108 by 2,492 millimetres (4.3 in × 98.1 in). As Lear writes, Potter "experimented with a panorama format of fourteen pictures on one long strip of paper which folded into a wallet tied with a ribbon". Lear explains that the format "although popular with readers was ultimately unsuccessful, because shopkeepers found them difficult to keep folded". Potter referred to this fact late in life when she said, "Bad Rabbit and Moppet were originally printed on long strips—The shops sensibly refused to stock them because they got unrolled and so bad to fold up again". MacDonald points out that the fragile panorama format was inappropriate for very young children.
  Twenty thousand copies of The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit were published in panorama format in November and December 1906 in exactly the same measurements as Miss Moppet. Both were later published in a small-book 122 by 103 millimetres (4.8 in × 4.1 in) format. The Sly Old Cat was scheduled for publication in 1907 but fell victim to the pressures exerted by booksellers. It was set aside, but was proposed for publication in 1916 as The Story of the Sly Old Cat. Potter's eyesight was failing and she refused to develop it. The story was published in book format with Potter's 1906 rough sketches for the first time in 1971. It is not included in the standard 23-volume Peter Rabbit library.
  By 1916 Frederick Warne & Co had discontinued Miss Moppet in its panorama format, and republished the story in a book format t
caption: Panorama section of Miss Moppet (left to right): tossing the mouse in the duster, a text page, and discovering the mouse has escaped
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