The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, and first published by Frederick Warne & Co. in July 1909. After two full-length tales about rabbits, Potter had grown weary of the subject and was reluctant to write another. She realized however that children most enjoyed her rabbit stories and pictures, and so reached back to characters and plot elements from The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902) and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904) to create The Flopsy Bunnies. A semi-formal garden of archways and flowerbeds in Wales at the home of her uncle and aunt became the background for the illustrations.
In The Flopsy Bunnies, Benjamin Bunny and his cousin Flopsy are the parents of six young rabbits called simply the Flopsy Bunnies. The story concerns how the Flopsy Bunnies, while raiding a rubbish heap of rotting vegetables, fall asleep and are captured by Mr. McGregor who places them in a sack. While McGregor is distracted, the six are freed by Thomasina Tittlemouse, a woodmouse, and the sack is filled with rotten vegetables and a brush by Benjamin and Flopsy. At home, Mr. McGregor proudly presents the sack to his wife, but receives a sharp scolding when she discovers its actual content.
Modern critical commentary varies. One critic points out that the faces of the rabbits are expressionless while another argues that the cock of an ear or the position of a tail conveys what the faces lack. One critic believes the tale lacks the vitality of The Tale of Peter Rabbit which sprang from a picture and story letter to a child. Most agree though that the depictions of the garden are exquisite and some of the finest illustrations Potter created.
Background
The Tale of Peter Rabbit and its three sequels are the best known and most successful of Potter's books. The author had an affinity for rabbits; she lived with them as pets and observed them closely for years. Though she once wrote that rabbits were creatures of "warm volatile temperaments" and were "shallow and extremely transparent", she invested her rabbits with a variety of characterizations consistent with the nature of the animal. All the rabbit tales were inspired in part by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, which Potter began illustrating as early as 1893 in an attempt to find career direction and probably because they featured a rabbit as principal player. Although she incorporated Harris's "rabbit-tobacco" and his "lippity-clippity, clippity-lippity" (as "lippity-lippity") into her literary vocabulary, she was unable to bring his characters to the English country garden as Victorian gentlemen – they remained inexorably fixed in the Antebellum American South as slaves and slave owners. Harris's wily Br'er Rabbit is motivated by vengeance and wins by cunning, but Potter's rabbits have no such motivation and succeed due to their adventurous spirit and pure luck.
Helen Beatrix Potter was born in Kensington, London on 28 July 1866 to wealthy parents, and educated at home by a series of governesses and tutors. She displayed artistic talent early, drawing and sketching mammals, insects, reptiles and amphibians, flowers and plants. In the early 1890s, she enjoyed her first professional artistic success when she sold six designs to a greeting card publisher. On 16 December 1901, she privately issued The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and, on 2 October 1902, a trade edition of the tale was released by Frederick Warne & Co. to great success. She published tales similar in content, style, and format for Warnes in the years to follow, and, in 1904, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, a sequel to Peter Rabbit. In July 1905, Potter bought Hill Top, a working farm in the Lake District with the profits from her books and a small legacy left her by an aunt; the farm became her home away from London and her artistic retreat. In a few years, Potter had established her own career, income, and home.
Early in the autumn of 1908, Potter wrote her publisher Harold Warne that she had several ideas for new books. She sent him the text of The Faithful Dove, a tale set in Rye she had composed years earlier and for which she had produced a group of sketches. With it, she included a sequel to The Tale of Benjamin Bunny starring Benjamin's offspring, The Flopsy Bunnies. Though she had complained at times that the rabbit characters had become "wearisome", she had written a young fan, William Warner, that children liked her rabbits best and that she ought to write another rabbit book. The third tale she sent Warne was about the village shop in Sawrey. "I should like to get rid of one of them," she wrote Warne about her story ideas, "When a thing is once printed I dismiss it from my dreams! & don't care what becomes of the reviewers. But an accumulation of half finished ideas is bothersome." The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and the story about the shop (eventually The Tale of Ginger and Pickles) were chosen for publication in 1909. The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies was finished in March 1909 and published in July of the same year.
In conjunction with the tale, Potter created a series of letters from The Flopsy Bunnies decreasing in size and competence of execution according to each bunny's position in the family. The letters from the youngest fifth and sixth bunnies are miniature epistles of nothing but scribbles and kisses. Thomasina Tittlemouse, the tale's "resourceful" heroine, became the main character of her own book in 1910 titled The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse.
Plot In The Flopsy Bunnies, Benjamin Bunny (son of Old Mr. Bunny) and Peter Rabbit are adults, and Benjamin has married his cousin Flopsy (one of Peter's sisters). As for Peter, Mopsy, and Cotton-Tail, they haven't been married yet and still live with their mother (Mrs. Josephine Rabbit). (However, Peter becomes an uncle and his sisters—Mopsy and Cotton-Tail—are aunts.) The couple (as Benjamin had become a father) are the parents of six young rabbits generally called The Flopsy Bunnies. Benjamin and Flopsy are "very improvident and cheerful" and have some difficulty feeding their brood. At times, they turn to Peter Rabbit (who has gone into business as a florist and keeps a nursery garden), but there are days when Peter cannot spare cabbages.In the original frontispiece to the tale, a sign over the garden tended by Peter and his mother reads, "Peter Rabbit and Mother – Florists – Gardens neatly razed. Borders devastated by the night or year". The illustration was eventually replaced (probably in the third printing) because of the difficulty in lettering the noticeboard in non-English editions. It is then that the Flopsy Bunnies cross the field to Mr. McGregor's rubbish heap of rotten vegetables.
One day they find and feast on lettuces that have shot into flower, and, under their "soporific" influence, fall asleep in the rubbish heap, though Benjamin puts a sack over his head. Mr. McGregor discovers them by accident when tipping grass-clippings down and places them in a sack and ties it shut then sets the sack aside while attending to another matter. Benjamin and Flopsy are unable to help their children, but a "resourceful" wood mouse called Thomasina Tittlemouse, gnaws a hole in the sack and the bunnies escape. The rabbit family (Benjamin, Flopsy, and the Flopsy bunnies) fill the sack with rotten vegetables (two decayed turnips and three rotten vegetable marrows) and an old blacking-brush to trick Mr. McGregor into thinking the Flopsy Bunnies are still in the sack. Then the animals mend the hole which Thomasina Tittlemouse made. Afterwards, they hide under a bush to observe Mr. McGregor's reaction.
Mr. McGregor does not notice the replacement (as the bunnies have replaced the six baby rabbits with the rotten vegetables), and carries the sack home (still thinking he has the six baby rabbits), continually counting the six rabbits (he says, "One, two, three, four, five, six leetle fat rabbits!"). The McGregors do not know that the youngest Flopsy Bunny is out there and eavesdropping. His wife Mrs. McGregor (thinking the rotten vegetables are the six rabbits) claims the skins for herself, intending to line her old cloak with them. However, she reaches into the sack and feels the vegetables (which she had thrown out the day before) and discovers them. When she feels the rotten vegetables and brush, she becomes very, very, angry and accuses her husband of playing a trick on her (saying to him, "You silly man! You've made a fool out of me! And you have done it on purpose!"). Mr. McGregor also becomes very angry. He discovers one of the rotten marrows. After one look at it, he throws it out the window. When he does, he hits one of the Flopsy bunnies after saying the Flopsy bunnies have "gotten the better of him". (He says, "THEY'VE GOTTEN THE BETTER OF ME...! ...AGAIN!".) The marrow hits the youngest of the eavesdropping bunnies who has been sitting on the window-sill. (Mrs. McGregor blamed Mr. McGregor, followed by Mr. McGregor who blamed one of the Flopsy bunnies, and followed by one of the Flopsy bunnies who was hit by the thrown marrow—thrown by Mr. McGregor—and carried off in his parents's arms.) When it hits the youngest Flopsy bunny, it breaks his arm. Their parents decide it is time to go home. Then the McGregors are defeated once again. After the Flopsy bunnies return home, the McGregors (now defeated) play the blame game on each other. (In the video, the McGregors play the blame game.) At Christmas, they send the heroic little wood mouse a quantity of rabbit-wool. She makes herself a cloak and a hood, and a muff and mittens.
Scholar M. Daphne Kutzer points out that Mr. McGregor's role is larger in The Flopsy Bunnies than in the two previous rabbit books, but he inspires less fear in The Flopsy Bunnies than in Peter Rabbit because his role as fearsome antagonist is diminished when he becomes a comic foil in the book's final scenes. Nonetheless, for young readers, he is still a frightening figure because he has captured not only vulnerable sleeping bunnies but bunnies whose parents have failed to adequately protect them.
Illustrations In February 1909, Potter went to Hill Top, where, kept indoors by the inclement weather, she worked diligently on the illustrations for The Flopsy Bunnies. Various gardens became the backgrounds for Peter Rabbit (Camfield Place, Lakefield, Lingholm, Tenby in South Wales, Bedwell Lodge, and Gwaenynog), and Fawe Park in Keswick became the background for Benjamin Bunny, but the background for The Flopsy Bunnies was a semi-formal garden of archways, walks, and flowerbeds in Wales at Denbigh at the estate called Gwaenynog. Gwaenynog was the home of the Burtons, Potter's uncle and aunt, and, while on holiday in 1909, Potter sketched their walled garden, and, once at home, decided to move Peter and Benjamin and their families to Wales for another Peter Rabbit sequel. A number of her preliminary sketches still survive.
Since her first visit to Gwaenynog fourteen years before the composition of The Flopsy Bunnies, Potter had sketched the garden many times. She described it following a visit in 1895: "The garden is very large, two-thirds surrounded by a red brick wall with many apricots, and an inner circle of old grey apple trees on espaliers. It is very productive but not tidy, the prettiest kind of garden, where bright old-fashioned flowers grow amongst the currant bushes." Early in 1909 she wrote to her publisher, "I have done lots of sketches – not all to the purpose – and will now endeavour to finish up the F. Bunnies without further delay."