The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter

The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter is nineteen of her animal tales in one long bedtime reading, from Peter Rabbit to Pigling Bland.

Peter Rabbit squeezes under Mr. McGregor's gate, and his cousin Benjamin Bunny goes back with him for the clothes he left behind. Squirrel Nutkin pushes his luck with Old Brown the owl. The Tailor of Gloucester finds his waistcoat finished by mice. Two bad mice wreck a doll's house, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle takes in washing, Jeremy Fisher goes fishing from a lily pad, and Tom Kitten cannot keep his clothes on for the length of a garden path. Jemima Puddle-Duck trusts a gentleman with sandy whiskers. The Flopsy Bunnies fall asleep in the wrong place, Mrs. Tittlemouse tidies her burrow, and Timmy Tiptoes gets shut inside a tree. There are shorter pieces too, Miss Moppet and the Fierce Bad Rabbit, and longer ones, the Roly-Poly Pudding, Mr. Tod, and the pie and the patty-pan, before Pigling Bland and the shopkeepers Ginger and Pickles close the set.

The stakes stay the size of a garden. There are scrapes, a chase round a vegetable patch, a fox with plans for a duck, a kitten who very nearly becomes a rat’s dinner, but each one is over inside a few pages, and nobody you are following ends up in the pie. Potter wrote and painted these between 1902 and 1913, many of them at her farm in the Lake District, and they still work because the animals behave like neighbors with fur: proud, curious, often foolish, and usually forgiven.

The treasury is meant for children, and this reading was made with restless ones in mind, but the tales are short enough and old enough that grown-ups get the same drowsy comfort from them. Calming music runs under the stories. Most are over in a few minutes; Mr. Tod and Pigling Bland take their time. That is nineteen chances to fall asleep, and no need to find out how any of them end.