"The secret success of Peter Rabbit," Beatrix Potter wrote of her best-loved tale, was that "it was written to a child - not made to order".
The direct, uncondescending tone of her anthropomorphised animal stories has won over generations of children since the early 1900s, the heyday of British childhood. At once knowing and intimate, they might have come straight from the mouth of Mother Goose or Shakespeare's nurses. "What a funny sight it is to see a brood of ducklings with a hen!" begins one. "Listen to the story of Jemima Puddle-Duck, who was annoyed because the farmer's wife would not let her hatch her own eggs."
Potter often overlays the cautionary tale beloved of the Victorian nursery with subtle but scathing comment, often wittily captured in her acutely observed watercolours. Her tales depict a world of Toad of Toad Hall-ish characters seeking high-spirited adventure - but within well-defined boundaries.
Today children encounter Potter through a tangle of merchandise and staid rewritings, many of which omit her tales' less benign features. Unlike in Margery Williams's Velveteen Rabbit and AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Potter's protagonists derive from her observation of live animals, not nursery fancy. Her rural realism - as when Mr Bunny whips mischievous bunnies and tears handfuls of fur from a cat in The Tale of Benjamin Bunny - offends the politically correct. They tut-tut at Tommy Brock throwing scalding tea in The Tale of Mr Tod, as if the Grimms' sinister folk-tale violence had never darkened hearth or school.
Potter's characters often go too far. Most suffer the consequences. Peter Rabbit exuberantly - wilfully - courts danger, unlike his literary contemporary, Peter Pan, who shuns reality. The rabbit recklessly transgresses physical and behavioural boundaries, ravaging the McGregors' garden, and, worse, guzzling lettuce, unlike mannerly Edwardians, who admitted to no appetites, libidinous or otherwise.
The wages of folly are sometimes death: Mrs McGregor puts Peter's father in a pie. Peter, less unfortunate, loses his supper, his blue coat and his dignity (in the story's sequel, he ambles about wrapped ridiculously in a handkerchief). Peter Rabbit may be read as a biblical myth of man's first disobedience and the fruit of the forbidden garden.
Even hard-hearted readers warm to the maternal but inadequate Jemima, who wants to brood her eggs. "Unfortunately," the narrator announces matter-of-factly after she has been saved from a foxy gentleman (left), "the puppies rushed in and gobbled up.' No sympathy or happy endings for foolish Jemima. The Flopsy Bunnies' gluttony leads to near-tragedy. "It is said that the effect of eating too much lettuce is 'soporific'," declares our storyteller in simultaneously moralistic and jocose tone. Luckily, the nefarious fate Mr McGregor intended for the sleeping bunnies he bagged is averted.
In Potter's complex world, the bad are good company, the old unreliable and curmudgeonly, and (horrors!) the mischievous turn reflective. Can it be that the wayward Peter becomes the portentous adult who in Mr Tod opines stolidly that "My Uncle Bouncer has displayed a lamentable want of discretion for his years"? How Potter pokes fun at ageing pomposity.
Inimitable is her capacity for insouciant phrases brimming with irony. With masterful understatement we're told that the casually evil fox Mr Tod and badger Tommy Brock are "two disagreeable people". Social pretensions are held up to ridicule. The eponymous Johnny Town-Mouse dines on "eight courses; not much of anything, but truly elegant".
Potter's stringent irony is truly, disturbingly memorable. Jonathan Swift, author of A Modest Proposal, might not have disowned this utterance: "Tommy Brock did occasionally eat rabbit-pie; but it was only very little young ones occasionally, when other food was really scarce."
Mary Shine Thompson is research co-ordinator at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. She recently edited Skellig Sunset by Michael Kirby (Lilliput Press). Divided Worlds: Studies in Children's Literature, which she co-edited with Valerie Coghlan, is forthcoming (Four Courts Press)