The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Opening)
Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
The opening lines introducing the four little Rabbits and their mother's warning about Mr. McGregor's garden.
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About this text
Beatrix Potter originally wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit as an illustrated letter to a sick child in 1893, and only self-published it as a book in 1901 after several publishers turned it down; Frederick Warne & Co. picked it up in 1902, the edition most modern printings follow. Potter both wrote and illustrated the book, and her prose is often noted for its plainness — she avoided softening vocabulary for children in a way many of her contemporaries did not.
The single long sentence of Mrs. Rabbit's warning is the most demanding part of this short excerpt: one continuous piece of dialogue that names the danger and explains it with a grim aside about Peter's father, all inside quotation marks. Copying dialogue punctuation correctly — the placement of commas and quotation marks around "said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning" — is real punctuation practice disguised as a story.
What to watch for
- 1 semicolon: a semicolon joins two complete thoughts that belong together, a pause longer than a comma but shorter than a period.
- 1 colon: a colon points ahead to what explains or completes the first half of the sentence.
- 4 quotation marks: quotation marks come in pairs and wrap exactly what someone says; check that every one that opens also closes.
- 2 apostrophes: sort each one into possession (the shepherd's staff) or a missing letter (don't = do not).
- Capital letters in the middle of a sentence: Rabbits, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, Peter, Mother. Ask why each one is capitalized before typing it.
- Longest word: "Cotton-tail" (11 letters). Try spelling it aloud once before reaching it.
- 3 lines averaging about 25 words each. Long lines: a younger child may do half the text per sitting.
Full text (reference)
Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter.
They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir-tree.
"Now my dears," said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, "you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor."