The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse (Beatrix Potter Originals)

Product Information

The story chronicles the hardships of the wood mouse Mrs. Tittlemouse, who tries to keep her home tidy. She turns away unwanted visitors: beetles, a ladybird, and a large spider seeking shelter from the rain. Along one of her passageways she runs into Babbitty Bumble, a bumblebee, and in a storeroom she comes across a nest of four more bees, whom she is unable to remove.

Mrs. Tittlemouse sends the uninvited ladybird away with a variant of the traditional nursery rhyme Ladybird, Ladybird: "Your house is on fire, Mother Ladybird! Fly away home to your children!". She then bumps into a spider who asks her: "Beg pardon, is this not Miss Muffet's?", a reference to the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet. But the untidiness was something dreadful—“Never did I see such a mess—smears of honey; and moss, and thistledown—and marks of big and little dirty feet— all over my nice clean house!”Mrs Thomasina Tittlemouse, a wood-mouse, lived in a funny house with yards of sandy passages among the roots of a hedge. She had a kitchen, a parlour, a pantry, a larder and she slept in a little box bed in her bedroom. Zizz, Wizz, Wizzz!” replied Babbitty Bumble in a peevish squeak. She sidled down a passage, and disappeared into a storeroom which had been used for acorns. She fetched soft soap, and flannel, and a new scrubbing brush from the storeroom. But she was too tired to do any more. First she fell asleep in her chair, and then she went to bed.

The 2018 Mrs Tittlemouse 50p coin was released in 2018 and is one of the fifteen coins minted in the Beatrix Potter 50p series between 2016 and 2020. Also, given the popularity of the Beatrix Potter coins, the coin is still highly sought after. The 2018 Mrs Tittlemouse 50p can still be found in your change and as collectors are adding them to their collections, the coin is becoming more scarce. Born into a wealthy household, Potter was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. She had numerous pets, and through holidays in Scotland and the Lake District, developed a love of landscape, flora, and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted. Because she was a woman, her parents discouraged intellectual development, but her study and paintings of fungi led her to be widely respected in the field of mycology. Beatrix Potter had in her youth made beautiful microscopic studies of insects, and this knowledge enabled her to produce delightful pictures of the many uninvited guests, from spiders to bees, found in Mrs. Tittlemouse's underground home.She swept, and scrubbed, and dusted; and she rubbed up the furniture with beeswax, and polished her little tin spoons.