The proletarian mice try to eat the food the dolls left behind, but the ham and fish are actually made of plaster: they are an ornamental frippery of the rich. So the mice proceed to destroy the meal with fire tongs – it’s flavourless, lacking in nutrition, rigid and easily shattered – then rip up much of the rest of the dollhouse. The destruction of an artificial replica of a Victorian household suggests that, for Potter, Victorian domestic life is just as artificial. The mice emerge as the good guys when they compensate Lucinda and Jane Doll-Cook for the damage, and Hunca Munca goes so far as to sneak into the dollhouse each morning and tidy up, without the dolls’ awareness – “the kind of hyperreal turn Umberto Eco would have appreciated,” writes Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian. Like the working class, the mice are still driven by needs while the upper class that controls their destiny is driven by wants.

Patty-pans and patriarchy

When Lucinda and Jane Doll-Cook are away, they’re out driving in a perambulator. It’s hard to see that mode of transport as anything but Potter’s commentary on the infantilisation of women by proper society at the turn of the 20th Century. Another story, The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan may feature the strongest critique of women’s roles at that time. The two lead female characters conceal the truth from each other – that they both have reservations about their upcoming party. Duchess, a dog, tries to replace a pie baked by Ribby, a cat, with one of her own, since she thinks Ribby’s will be a mouse pie. It’s a complicated comedy of errors that climaxes when Duchess chokes on what she assumes is a “patty-pan” baked into her pie; she’s gagging on a symbol of female servitude. But it turns out she was actually served the mouse pie after all, with no patty-pan. Her choking is the response of a hypochondriac – an act symbolic of how something non-existent in the physical world, such as man-made social conventions, can still constrain to the point of gagging and hysteria. And how proper society forces women to lie to each other, and to themselves, to avoid giving offense.