The Tale of Ginger and Pickles

The Tale of Ginger and Pickles

First edition cover
Author	Beatrix Potter
Illustrator	Beatrix Potter
Country	England
Language	English
Genre	Children's literature
Publisher	Frederick Warne & Co.
Publication date	1909
Media type	Print (hardcover)
Preceded by	The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies
Followed by	The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse

The Tale of Ginger and Pickles (originally, Ginger and Pickles) is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, and first published by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1909. The book tells of two shopkeepers who extend unlimited credit to their customers and, as a result, are forced to go out of business. It was originally published in a large format which permitted Potter the opportunity to lavish great detail on the illustrations and also allowed her to include black-and-white vignettes. Potter filled the tale with characters from her previous books. The book was eventually republished in the standard small format of the Peter Rabbit series and was adapted to drama in 1931.

Helen Beatrix Potter was born to wealth and privilege on July 28, 1866 in London to barrister Rupert Potter and his wife Helen (Leech) Potter. Raised by a series of governesses, Beatrix filled her hours with reading, painting, drawing, and tending a schoolroom menagerie of small mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Summer holidays in Scotland or the Lake District and long visits to her grandparents' Camfield Place home in Hertfordshire cultivated her love for and observation of the natural world. As a young woman, she was discouraged from seeking higher education, and groomed instead to be a permanent resident and housekeeper in her parents' London home.

While summering with family in Perthshire in 1893, the 27-year-old Potter sent a story and picture letter about a disobedient young rabbit to the son of her former governess Annie Carter Moore, and continued to send similar letters to the boy and his siblings over the following years. Mrs. Moore recognized the literary value of the letters and urged her former charge to publish them. Potter developed the 1893 letter into The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and worked up a dummy book based on the small book format and style of Helen Bannerman's bestselling Little Black Sambo (1899) with its pages of simple texts opposite appropriate pictures.

The late Victorian and early Edwardian children's book market was flooded by inexpensive small format books with profusions of illustrations made possible by technological advances in colour reproduction. The publishing firm of Frederick Warne & Co. wanted to compete in this lucrative market and chose to publish Peter Rabbit after receiving an enthusiastic endorsement from their prominent children's book artist L. Leslie Brooke. The illustrations were reproduced by the then-new Hentschel three-colour process which favoured a painterly rather than a linear style and was kinder to watercolours than chromolithography.