格洛斯特的裁缝 (1903)

《格洛斯特的裁缝》（英语：The Tailor of Gloucester）是碧雅翠丝·波特创作的儿童绘本，于1903年出版。

故事简介

一位穷苦的老裁缝必须在圣诞夜前为市长赶制礼服。某日老裁缝意外将猫抓到的老鼠放走，而猫则将一段缝钮扣洞丝线藏起来。其后老裁缝生病了，但仍记挂着工作。最终猫因良心不安而归还那段丝线，而老鼠们则早将老裁缝的工作完成，除了那个失去丝线的钮扣洞；所以老裁缝能在最后一天轻松地完成工作，顺利交差。

创作背景

碧雅翠丝·波特创作本书的灵感来自于她拜访住在格洛斯特郡的亲戚时所听闻的故事。而书中市长婚礼的外衣是波特根据维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆内一件1780年代的男士背心描绘的。

改编作品

1989年电视电影《格洛斯特的裁缝》，于英国独立电视台首播，主角老裁缝由伊恩·霍尔姆饰演，其余演员还包括索拉·赫德和裘德·洛。

The Tailor of Gloucester is a Christmas children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, privately printed by the author in 1902, and published in a trade edition by Frederick Warne & Co. in October 1903. The story is about a tailor whose work on a waistcoat is finished by the grateful mice he rescues from his cat and was based on a real world incident involving a tailor and his assistants. For years, Potter declared that of all her books it was her personal favourite.

Plot

An elderly, impoverished tailor is commissioned by the Mayor of Gloucester to make a finely embroidered coat for his wedding on Christmas Day. After carefully cutting out all the pieces, he realizes he needs one more skein of cherry-coloured twist (loose yarn) for the button holes.

That evening, he asks his cat Simpkin to take their last penny and go buy some twist. While he's gone, the tailor discovers the cat has trapped some mice under teacups and frees them. Simpkin returns, only to find his dinner has disappeared, and angrily hides the twist as revenge. Unsure how he'll finish the coat with no more twist, the tailor goes to bed dejected.

That night, the tailor falls ill and is stuck in bed for days, unable to work. By Christmas Eve the coat has still not been finished. During the night the mice sneak into the tailor's workshop and repay him by sewing together the coat. Seeing their kindness, Simpkin feels guilty and gives his master back the twist.

The tailor wakes up on Christmas morning and finds the coat is ready, apart from the last button hole. Pinned to it is a scrap of paper that says, in the tiniest writing: "No more twist."

Composition

In the summer of 1901, Potter was working on The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, but took time to develop a tale about a poor tailor she heard in the Gloucestershire home of her cousin Caroline Hutton probably in 1897. The tale was finished by Christmas 1901, and given as a Christmas present to ten-year-old Freda Moore, the daughter of her former governess.

The tale was based on a real world incident involving John Prichard (1877–1934), a Gloucester tailor commissioned to make a suit for the new mayor. He returned to his shop on a Monday morning to find the suit completed except for one buttonhole. A note attached read, "No more twist". His assistants had finished the coat in the night, but Prichard encouraged a fiction that fairies had done the work and the incident became a local legend. Although Prichard was a contemporary of Potter's (he was about eleven years her junior and in his twenties when the incident took place), Potter's tailor is shown as "a little old man in spectacles, with a pinched face, old crooked fingers," and the action of The Tailor of Gloucester takes place in the 18th century.

Potter sketched the Gloucester street where the tailor's shop stood as well as cottage interiors, crockery, and furniture. The son of Hutton's coachman posed as a model for the tailor. In Chelsea, Potter was allowed to sketch the interior of a tailor's shop to whose proprietor she would later send a copy. She visited the costume department at the South Kensington Museum to refine her illustrations of 18th century dress.

Potter later borrowed Freda Moore's gift copy, revised the work, and privately printed the tale in December 1902. She marketed the book among family and friends and sent a copy to her publisher who made numerous cuts in both text and illustrations for the trade edition, chiefly among the tale's many nursery rhymes.

Publication history

Squirrel Nutkin was published in August 1903 and Tailor in October 1903. Both were published in deluxe editions bound in a flowered chintz of scattered pansies the author selected. The familiar illustrated endpapers of Potter characters in a chain bordering the edges of the page were introduced in both books against Potter's better judgement. However, Warne was delighted with the commercial potential of the endpapers because new characters hinting at future titles could be worked into the design at any time.