It must have been 1967 when I first had the bejesus scared out of me by this tale - and then learned the strange attraction of re-exposing oneself to this waking nightmare. He is then captured by a pair of rats, who tie him up and set about turning him into "a kitten dumpling roly-poly pudding". In it, a mischievous and disobedient kitten, Tom, gets lost in the hidden places of "an old, old house, full of cupboards and passages". The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or, The Roly-Poly Pudding, I present as one of the most horrific stories in the history of literature.
In my case, it was with Potter that I learned that books were places of great terror. Authorial sadism, too: we can only gasp at Potter's unforgiving description of Jemima Puddle-Duck's stupidity, as she picks the very herbs with which "the sandy-coloured gentleman" hopes to stuff her. Potter's animals may be anthropomorphic to the point where they smoke pipes, but nature's savagery is never far away. This would be down to the content of the stories, which are far darker than any books with words such as "bunny" and "flopsy" in their titles have a right to be.
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