“This plot is the main storyline in most of Potter’s tales and is directly linked to the need for enslaved people to steal food from their masters to survive.”īefore Zobel Marshall’s essay and book, American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit, there had only been two detailed pieces of research connecting Potter’s tales with Harris’s earlier folktales. “In Some Lady’s Garden (1883), for example, Brer Rabbit tricks Miss Janey into letting him into her father’s vegetable garden to steal English peas, sparrow grass (asparagus) and goobers (peanuts) by pretending to be a friend of her father, Mr Man, from the big white (master’s) house”, the academic said. Plot similarities between the two sets of stories abound, Zobel Marshall has noted. “Having analysed the plotting, language and characters in her tales, it’s clear that Potter was more than just inspired by these folktales,” Zobel Marshall said. In fact, as mentioned in Lear’s biography, Potter herself acknowledged that her story The Tale of Mr Tod, the sequel to the Tale of Peter Rabbit, contained “imitation of Uncle Remus” in a letter to her publisher. “I was amazed to realise how little comment there has been over the years about the many similarities between Potter’s tales and the Africa-originated Brer Rabbit folktales”, Zobel Marshall said.

By the early 19th century, the raw cotton used in these mills was sourced from the Americas, and Manchester’s economic success was deeply connected to the enslavement of African people. Rupert married a wealthy heiress, Helen Leech, whose family were also cotton mill owners. Potter’s grandfather, Edmund Potter, was a Manchester cotton mill owner whose wealth was inherited by Beatrix’s father, Rupert, a lawyer and photographer. It is therefore likely that her early contact with the Brer Rabbit tales (in comparison with the rest of the British public) was a result of her family roots in the cotton industry,” Zobel Marshall writes. “These stories had not been published in the UK when Beatrix Potter was a child. Linda Lear’s 2008 biography of Potter, A Life in Nature, notes that while her “first audience was British”, her work was strongly influenced by Harris – “whose Brer Rabbit stories she had loved as a child”.Ĭopies of Harris’s Brer Rabbit folktale collections, bearing her father’s bookplate, were found at Potter’s home in the Lake District after she died in 1943. The Uncle Remus stories, as they became known, thanks to the name of Harris’s fictional African American narrator, were familiar to Potter.

The tale of tiggy winkle