“To Half Believe and Wholly Play”: Dialectics of Reality in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Two Bad Mice

What a great deal we lose in growing wise!

On June 24, 1884, the seventeen year-old Beatrix Potter recorded in her heavily encrypted journal that the Reverend William Gaskell—a Unitarian minister and treasured family friend, of whom she had been inordinately fond—had been buried that day. In a photograph taken with Gaskell at age ten, a serious young Beatrix leans toward her friend, perfectly comfortable as he holds her in his firm embrace, one hand around her waist and the other clasping her hand (Fig. 1, left). In the previous year Potter had suffered the loss of a grandfather and an uncle; the departure for boarding school of her only sibling, her eleven year-old brother Bertram; the leave-taking of her beloved governess; and, just a few months before Gaskell's burial, the death of another precious relative, her grandmother Jane Leech, which Potter duly noted in her journal with the briefest of comments: “There will be no one soon” (Potter, 1989b, p. 62). It was only after Rev. Gaskell's death that she entrusted to her journal an emotional outpouring, setting loose a raft of memories of happy times together, and asking herself,

Shall I really never see him again? but he is gone with almost every other, home is gone for me, the little girl does not bound about now, and live in fairyland, and

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occasionally wonder in a curious carefree manner…[on] what life means…It is all gone, and he is resting quietly with our fathers. I have begun the dark journey of life. (Potter, 1989b, p. 94)

And a dark journey it would be. Potter took ill, suffering from sleeplessness, fatigue, and headaches, “neuralgia” and “odious” moods for the better part of the two years following Gaskell's death, during which she lost much of her hair, the rest of which was cropped short. A photograph from that time of a hollow-eyed Potter speaks of a private anguish—relieved, perhaps, by what rests in the palm of h