Why the academic accusing Beatrix Potter of stealing Peter Rabbit from a slave fable needs a good lie down

NOTHING LESS THAN A COUP IS TAKING PLACE IN BRITAIN Littlejohn in tomorrow’s Mail

Sometimes, with the greatest gentleness and respect, you want to buy a cup of tea for a wellmeaning campaigner — and explain to them that if they ever managed to rebuild the world as they want to, it would only become duller, sadder, lonelier and more mistrustful.

The latest cultural warrior in need of a calming brew and a chat is Dr emily Zobel marshall, ‘ Reader in Postcolonial Literature’ at Leeds Beckett University.

Emily has got it in for Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit. this is not because Peter is a thief, a vandal, a disobedient rascal who, when ordered to go blackberrying with his siblings, nips off to wreck Mr McGregor’s vegetable patch, falls in a watering can and turns up at home with a lost jacket, having overdosed on stolen parsley.

No: Peter’s fault is that the tales about him and his fellows are ‘cultural appropriation’, according to Dr Zobel marshall.

Although Peter, like Jemima Puddle-Duck and mrs tiggy-Winkle, may seem ‘quintessentially english’, such stories are ‘more than just inspired by’ similar fables told by African slaves toiling on American cotton plantations in the 19th century.

In a recent article on the Conversation website, Dr Zobel marshall points out that Potter, as a child, loved the tales of the ‘trickster hero’ Brer Rabbit.

For centuries in African oral traditions, this cunning rabbit outwitted his more physically powerful enemies. the American journalist Joel Chandler Harris, using an African-American nom de plume, ‘ Uncle Remus’, first published stories about Brer Rabbit in the 19th century. marshall reckons many of Potter’s tales are downright stolen from these Uncle Remus books. Wily rabbits getting the better of farmers reflect, she says, ‘the violence, resistance and survival tactics of the plantation life’.

Even Potter herself admitted in a letter that one of her Peter Rabbit stories, the tale of mr tod, had one ‘ principal defect . . . its imitation of Uncle Remus’.

To make matters worse, Potter’s family fortune historically came from cotton — woven in manchester and picked by slaves in the American Deep south in the early 19th century. this in part accounts for her youthful reading of Uncle Remus.

AS DR ZOBEL MARSHALL damningly puts it: ‘Her tales owe a debt to the Brer Rabbit stories . . . that needs to be fully acknowledged.’ Although Dr Zobel marshall is fairly convincing in her claims, her essay seems to be designed to whip up indignation and division between cultures — and, i suppose, supply a box-fresh new dose of white guilt (she herself is of martinican and British heritage).

Yet what i find most frustrating is that she is a respected expert on just this kind of cultural crossover. the academic should know that — like the folk tunes that crossed from Celtic shores to the Appalachian mountains and thence to Bob Dylan’s New York cellar gigs in the early 1960s — stories are nobody’s private property.

I feel the same about all those who condemn ‘cultural appropriation’: that modern sin of inappropriately borrowing a story, dress, custom or design from another society. it has been applied to everything from fancy dress to poetry to yoga, and those who fret tend only to be angry when the culture that picks it up is typically more ‘dominant’ than the other.

To them, it is wrong for a Western woman to wear a sari or a Chinese jacket, but perfectly all right for an indian lawyer or an African businessman to wear a pinstriped suit — a weird outfit created by the 19th- century British and european commercial classes.

Or take music. For the cultural police, it is praiseworthy for Chichi Nwanoku CBe to lead the ethnically diverse Chineke! orchestra playing mozart, but questionable for white rockers or jazzmen to pick up rhythms developed by black people.

Likewise, they look down with distaste at the British atrocity of chicken tikka masala, but would never call down fury on an indian chef’s shepherd’s pie. it is a peculiarly contemporary and patronising way of separating us all from one another. the literary world is currently terrified of letting authors create black, Asian or Latino characters unless they themselves enjoy the ‘lived experience’ of those races. Publishers’ anxieties around these issues are only getting worse.

Twelve years ago, in more innocent days, i wrote a novel, Regatta, in which i tried to get inside the feelings of a deprived black girl from south London standing astonished at seeing the open sea for the first time, and feeling the ripple of salt water around her toes. Now i’d probably be censored.

Of course, mockery is never right — ‘ blacking- up’ or parodying ethnic voices — and it’s bloody rude to boot. But most of what is damned as ‘cultural appropriation’ is better described by other words: admiring imitation, respectful enjoyment, empathy, flattery, fellowship.

Take that away and we will all live mentally and culturally in narrow, stifling, cramped spaces, afraid of everything new, unfamiliar and foreign.

If we don’t borrow and play around with other people’s stories, we will never accept that members of other races and cultures are people with the same rights and joys and desires we have. to see out of your own rut is a human need — and no one should try to deprive us of it.

Which brings me to another point that Dr Zobel marshall might well consider.

Looking at rabbits, she might glance eastward. there is a Chinese folk- saying: ‘ A cunning rabbit has three burrows.’ indian legends, too, feature sly bunnies. the Central American Zapotec people had their own crafty rabbit, and so did the Native American Cherokees, long before Africans were shipped in their millions to that continent, bringing their stories of Brer Rabbit with them.

You can go back even farther: to the sixth century BC, when the Greek author Aesop wrote his fables. there they are again, those vulnerable but artful rabbits.

FACE it, there is just something about these animals — nipping underground, popping up to steal your carrots, small and agile and lawless — that appeals to the universal human desire to duck, dive and outwit the strong.

Similarly, mice have a quality that makes humans, who sometimes feel weak and helpless, enjoy stories where the mouse wins.

Beatrix Potter has the hardworking little rodents finishing a suit overnight for the tailor of Gloucester. in Aesop, mice form a council of war, while another one rescues a lion by gnawing a trapper’s net.

I reckon you could land anywhere on earth and there would be someone telling a story about a rabbit, mouse, fox or cat. We have lived alongside them for millennia, admired their adaptability, learnt from their weaknesses and cunning to help us bear our own more complicated lot.

Folk tales are a universal possession. Humans have always passed them on, adjusting them for fun and for moral lessons. Beatrix Potter brilliantly illustrated them, gave them clothes and a beguiling background.

So why apologise? Why spread fear and division and the deadening caution that hampers human creativity?

Have that relaxing cup of tea, Dr Zobel marshall, and think on these things.