The Tailor of Gloucester (Beatrix Potter Originals)

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I think this is my favorite of all of Beatrix Potter's lovely illustrated tales - and it was the author's favorite too! It has a Christmastime setting and a nice message about the spirit of the season, so it was great to revisit it. A part of the Beatrix Potter 50p collection the Tailor of Gloucester is highly sought after, but how much is it worth today? Each plaque features mice based on the original illustrations drawn by Potter for The Tailor of Gloucester , re-drawn by award-winning local artist Ella Daniel Lowe. Rebecca Barrett, south west regional director at Historic England who is behind the trail, said: 'Beatrix Potter is loved all over the world and is still popular with children Mew! Mew!” interrupted Simpkin, and he scratched at the door. But the key was under the tailor’s pillow; he could not get in.

But although he sewed fine silk for his neighbors, he himself was very, very poor. He cut his coats without waste; according to his embroidered cloth, they were very small ends and snippets that lay about upon the table—“Too narrow breadths for nought—except waistcoats for mice,” said the tailor. The story goes that local tailor John Pritchard, whose shop was located at number 45 Westgate Street in the late 1880s, left an unfinished waistcoat in his shop one Saturday evening. The garment was discreetly finished by his apprentices who had opted to bunk down in the shop after a jolly session in a nearby pub rather than venturing home. They managed to finish all but one buttonhole before running out of thread, leaving a note for the tailor reading 'no more twist', which was the Victorian tailor's term for sewing thread. By nightfall all the pieces of material and buttons were neatly laid on the table, ready to be sewn together in the morning and the tailor set off home, leaving the empty shop to the little brown mice, for behind the wooden panels of the houses of Gloucester was a maze of secret passages, staircases and trap-doors that the mice used to travel from house to house. The tailor was fond of the mice and always left snippets of material for them to make clothes of their own.

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Then the tailor started; for suddenly, interrupting him, from the ​dresser at the other side of the kitchen came a number of little noises— Because you are fond of fairytales, and have been ill, I have made you a story all for yourself—a new one that nobody has read before. Please enjoy this charming Christmas tale, told and illustrated by Britain's foremost children's book author and illustrator. All that night long Simpkin hunted and searched through the kitchen, peeping into cupboards and under the wainscot, and into the tea-pot where he had hidden that twist; but still he found never a mouse! Then the tailor started; for suddenly, interrupting him, from the dresser at the other side of the kitchen came a number of little noises—

In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets—when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta—there lived a tailor in Gloucester..." But the tailor came out of his shop and shuffled home through the snow; he lived quite near by in College Court, next the doorway to College Green. And although it was not a big house, the tailor was so poor he only rented the kitchen.

Everything was finished except just one single cherry-colored buttonhole, and where that buttonhole was wanting there was pinned a scrap of paper with these words—in little teeny weeny writing— Ian Holm played the tailor in a live-action TV adaptation in 1989 which included Thora Hird and Jude Law in an early part as the Mayor's stableboy.