Mr. Jeremy Fisher and Beatrix Potter Persevere in the Face of Calamity

Frogs and toads are popular subjects of children’s books, and many of my favorite fictional characters are slippery amphibians. One of the earliest and most iconic is the protagonist of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher.

Most of Potter’s characters are furry or feathery, so Mr. Fisher stands out as a bit of an oddball. While he is not an unpleasant fellow, he lurks in the chilly damp of a home near the pond where water is always underfoot, and his delicacies of choice veer a bit toward the icky. He is not warm and fuzzy, and I can’t help thinking that this clammy main character may have been a reflection of Potter’s state of mind at the time.

Mr. Fisher is an agreeable fellow. He doesn’t seek out mischief the way that Peter Rabbit does. But calamity finds him nonetheless, blind-siding him with such force that he scarcely thinks he can survive it. As this book was written in the wake of the sudden death of her fiance, Norman Warne, I imagine that this was exactly how she felt while writing it.

While the frog’s bleak surroundings, from the rainy weather to the roasted grasshopper that Potter speculates must have tasted “nasty,” convey a general sense of gloom, it’s his undeserved catastrophe that really seems to hit home. Mr. Fisher’s decision to persevere in the face of adversity, making the best of his situation and salvaging his afternoon by still having a dinner party, is a sign of Potter emerging from her grief to face the world again.

The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher is filled with very striking details and images. For instance, there are the frog’s friends, a newt named Isaac Newton and a tortoise named Alderman Ptolemy, who reflect Potter’s admiration for scientists. There’s his slightly creepy choice of a butterfly sandwich for lunch and the wonderful illustration of him floating down the pond, using a lily pad for a boat and a reed for an oar.

For every two pages, there are four pictures of the troublesome trout who afflicts the frog, one in each corner. He faces one direction on the left pages and another on the right, but otherwise, he is the same. For those who have read it previously, his presence provides a sense of foreboding early in the book, while afterwards, it goes to show that the incident will always remain etched in Mr. Fisher’s mind.

Each pair of pages features one page with a paragraph of text and another with a large picture set in a circle or oval. The paintings are intricately detailed, with an array of browns and greens the most prominent colors. The writing is elegant, and while it’s not a very long book, she does slip in some unusual words - or at least words likely to prove unusual to modern young American readers - like “macintosh,” “goloshes,” “bobbit” and “larder”.

The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher is a somewhat unusual book in the Potter canon. It’s a tale of woe and resilience in which the protagonist does nothing to invite his troubles but must face them anyway and make the decision to overcome them. That he does so offers a note of hope for all who have fallen upon difficult circumstances.