Chapotraphouse

In 1909's The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies, Farmer McGregor is heard to remark to his wife "I shall sell them and buy myself baccy! Rabbit tobacco! I shall skin them and cut off their heads."

Now careful readers will no doubt remember that it is established clearly- all the way back in 1902's The Tale of Peter Rabbit- that the "rabbit tobacco" Mrs. Rabbit sells is "what we call lavender." This implies a number of interesting and seemingly improbable situations. Firstly, it is necessary to assume that either Farmer McGregor is somehow aware of the Rabbit world and their nomenclature, or entertain the possibility that the Beatrix Potter^1^ stories take place in a world where lavender is universally known as rabbit tobacco, and is perhaps smoked for its aeromatic properties. In this case, the person's referred to as "we" in "what we call lavender" would be any person from our world reading the story, as we in this world do not smoke lavender nor refer to lavender as "rabbit tobacco."

So, is this a plot hole? Has Ms. Potter made an error, possibly forgetting herself in the intervening years what "rabbit tobacco" is? It's perhaps impossible to determine textually. The relationship between the human and animal world is depicted inconsistently between stories^2^. We are expected to believe that farmer McGregor has no questions when hanging up Peter Rabbit's coat and shoes for a scarecrow, as he does in 1902's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and yet in 1904's The Tale of Benjamin Bunny he is baffled by the presence of footprints made from Benjamin Bunny's wooden clogs as they are "too ridiculously little." Even within a singular story there is some confusion: in 1905's The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle we see the human character Lucie ask questions of several farm animals and receives answers. These are not explicitly animal language or human language answers, and the fact that the answers were totally unhelpful either way makes it hard to discern if she was actually used to conversing with animals. The rest of the story is about Lucie conversing freely with Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, but apparently only realizing she is a hedgehog with shock after the encounter has ended. The narrator goes on to say that everybody assumed she was dreaming the interaction, suggesting it would be very unusual to spend time conversing in english with a hedgehog. (The unnamed narrator also confirms outright that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was not a figment of Lucie's imagination because the narrator is personal friends with her.)

Without textual support, we must decide for ourselves the nature of Farmer McGregor's "rabbit tobacco." The clearest and least complicated interpretation is that Farmer McGregor is a human who smokes lavender in a pipe, and he's just referring to lavender the way every person, human or animal, refers to it. The other possibility is my personal favourite, although generally Farmer McGregor is depicted as being too simple and brutish^3^ for wordplay; Farmer McGregor is aware of the animal habit of referring to lavender as "rabbit tobacco" and is making a rather cruel joke about how the regular, human tobacco he intends to buy is "rabbit tobacco" as he will be using the proceeds from killing and skinning the flopsy bunnies to purchase it.

I'd be very interested in hearing the opinions of fellow "potterheads" on the subject, because there is certainly a lack of clarity in the text itself. Thanks for reading!

^1^The reader will no doubt be equally amused and relieved that the author's smartphone keyboard here suggested "Beatrix Potterverse"- a suggestion declined by the author.

^2^ 1902's The Tailor of Gloucester includes a passage that "it is in the old story that all the beasts can talk, in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the morning (though there are very few folk that can hear them, or know what it is that they say)." The author did not factor this into examination of the Peter Rabbit stories for three reasons: it is from a work that probably predates the writing of the first Peter rabbit story, it seems to be a bit of Christmas related folklore as opposed to a fact that defines the world, and most significantly, it doesn't actually happen in the story. It comes off as a bizzare statement indeed when neither before or after the statement does any animal talk to any human. Possibly it was intending to justify the mice and the cat characters understanding each other, but unless every story written afterwards is set in the "night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the morning" it doesn't apply to our analysis. The fact is, various animals have no trouble communicating with other kinds of animals regardless of the time of day or year in any other story.

^3^ The narrator of these stories is generally not personified, aside from apparently knowing Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, so Farmer McGregor's characterization can be assumed to be basically from the perspective of the animals he terrorizes. For example, all of the interaction between Farmer McGregor and Mrs McGregor are accompanied with illustrations of the flopsy bunnies watching at the window, rather than depicting the actual events inside the farmhouse