POTTER, Beatrix. The tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

POTTER, Beatrix. The tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. London: Frederick Warne and Co. 1905.

16mo. Publisher's lilac cloth with gilt lettering and border and pictorial label to front, gilt lettering to spine, Plate II pictorial endpapers, all edges gilt, in custom-made orange solander box ; pp. 85, [1], frontispiece and 26 colour illustrations by the author; a little splitting at gutter between gatherings, a couple of small marks internally, very good.

First edition, rare deluxe issue, with misspelling of 'How Keld' to p.20. The deluxe cloth binding was issued at 1s.6d, rather than 1s. for the standard binding. Lilac and brown cloth were used without priority.

Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is a hedgehog washerwoman inspired by Potter's own pet animal and a laundress employed by her family called Kitty MacDonald. In the story she is helped to distribute the clean laundry to the other animals by a little girl named Lucie, who is based on Lucie Carr, a child friend of Potter's to whom the book is dedicated. The setting of the book is the Newlands Valley in the Lake District, where the Carr family lived.

The story may have been conceived as early as 1886, but the earliest manuscript dates from 1902, and it was not until 1904 that she began on the illustrations. By 1905 she was able to present the book to Warne and Co. as 'a girl's book ... there must be a large audience of little girls. I think they would like the different clothes' (see Lear, pp. 186-8).

Linder p. 425; not in Quinby.
Lear, Linda, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, 2006.

SKU: 2126796