More stories, less politics, please.

My wife and I recently watched a documentary about the Ptolemies, the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt from the death of Alexander the Great to Cleopatra. It reminded my wife of Mr Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise, a character in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. 

I love Potter, having read her as a child and to my children. I instantly went and re-read it, and fell in love again. Her anthropomorphised tales about nature are delightfully innocent and charming, and there is no social propaganda thrusting itself between the lines.

Jeremy Fisher is a frog who goes fishing for minnows so he can invite his friends Ptolemy Tortoise and Sir Isaac Newton to dinner. But disaster strikes when a large trout seizes him off his lily pad, and he narrowly escapes by shrugging off his rain jacket. His friends come to dinner but they don’t have fish.

Many people know Potter through Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, even if only the film and television versions. But my favourite story is The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, about a naïve duck who is invited for dinner by a long-tailed sandy-whiskered gentleman (a fox) and suspects nothing even when he asks her to bring sage and onion for stuffing. The story ends happily when Kep the border collie (obviously an appropriate hero) and two fox hounds rescue her.

Some will say I’m being nostalgic, but I confess I long for the time when stories, like those Potter wrote, were gentle, fun, and even silly – except for Jemima’s narrow escape, which has plenty of wisdom to impart to young readers. These days, it feels as though stories must serve some political agenda. I doubt this is an improvement over stories designed to impart a moral lesson – like Aesop’s fables.

More stories, less politics, please.

This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook. 

Image: Beatrix Potter (1908) via Project Gutenberg