The Tailor of Gloucester
Read The Tailor of Gloucester Online
Authors: Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter
loved the countryside and she spent much of
her otherwise conventional Victorian childhood drawing and studying animals. Her passion for the
natural world lay behind the creation of her famous series of little books. A particular source of
inspiration was the English Lake District where she lived for the last thirty years of her life as a
farmer and land conservationist, working with the National Trust.
She described
The Tailor of Gloucester
as her own favourite among her books. It was based on the true story of a tailor who left the unsewn pieces of a coat in his shop and found that the garment had been mysteriously finished for him in the night. It turned out that the real tailor’s assistants were his apprentices, but in Beatrix Potter’s version of the story the secret helpers are skilful little brown mice.
my dear freda
,
Because you are fond of fairy-tales, and have been ill, I
have made you a story all for yourself â a new one that nobody has read before.
And the queerest thing about it is â that I heard it in
Gloucestershire, and that it is true â at least about the tailor, the waistcoat, and the “No more
twist!”
Christmas, 1901
The Tailor of Gloucester
I
n the
time
of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets — when gentlemen
wore ruffles, and goldlaced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta — there lived a tailor in Gloucester.
He sat in the window of a little shop in Westgate Street, cross-legged on a table,
from morning till dark.
All day long while the light lasted he sewed and snippeted, piecing out his satin and
pompadour, and lute-string; stuffs had strange names, and were very expensive in the days of the Tailor of
Gloucester.
But although he sewed fine silk for his neighbours, he himself was very, very poor — a
little old man in spectacles, with a pinched face, old crooked fingers, and a suit of threadbare
clothes.
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.
One bitter cold day near Christmas-time the tailor began to make a coat — a coat of
cherry-coloured corded silk embroidered with pansies and roses, and a cream-coloured satin waistcoat —
trimmed with gauze and green worsted chenille — for the Mayor of Gloucester.
The tailor worked and worked, and he talked to himself. He measured the silk, and
turned it round and round, and trimmed it into shape with his shears; the table was all littered with
cherry-coloured snippets.
“No breadth at all, and cut on the cross; it is no breadth at all; tippets for mice
and ribbons for mobs! for mice!” said the Tailor of Gloucester.
When the snow-flakes came down against the small leaded window-panes and shut out the
light, the tailor had done his day’s work; all the silk and satin lay cut out upon the table.
There were twelve pieces for the coat and four
pieces for the waistcoat; and there were pocket flaps and cuffs, and buttons all in order. For the lining of
the coat there was fine yellow taffeta; and for the button-holes of the waistcoat, there was cherry-coloured
twist. And everything was ready to sew together in the morning, all measured and sufficient — except that
there was wanting just one single skein of cherry-coloured twisted silk.
The tailor came out of his shop at dark, for he did not sleep there at nights; he
fastened the window and locked the door, and took away the key. No one lived there at night but little brown
mice, and they run in and out without any keys!
For behind the wooden wainscots of all the old houses in Gloucester, there are little
mouse staircases and secret trap-doors; and the mice run from house to house through those long narrow
passages; they can run all over the town without going into the streets.
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.
He lived alone with his cat; it was called Simpkin.