“It was an old, old house, full of cupboards and passages. It is only today that I begin to notice the stark difference between the approach of this storybook and other children’s books such as “Chicka-Chicka Boom-Boom”, “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”, and “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus”, whom rely more on dreary repetition of a rigid syntactical pattern, themes of unprovoked happiness, and outright chaos in the case of the wasted Pigeon. The forte of “The Roly-Poly Pudding” lies in its imagination and ability to generate genuine fear in young children. I simply accepted the superior level of craftsmanship in this story as “normal”. Tom Kitten survives by a very close margin, to be scarred ever after by an obsessive fear of rodents.Īs a child, I was exposed to mostly quality children’s literature so I did not have the influx of mediocre children’s books that abound in today’s market as any standard of comparison. They bind Tom Kitten with cords, steal a pat of butter, a rolling pin, and dough from the house and are in the process of enveloping Tom Kitten in a cylindrical pastry when the mother cat becomes aware of Tom Kitten’s situation and enacts a rescue. The rat couple, Anna Maria and Samuel Whiskers, take it upon themselves to make the kitten into a roly-poly pudding for dinner. The crux of the plot is Tom Kitten’s ill-considered adventure up the chimney of the old house into a series of winding passageways, which eventually leads to his falling through a hole into a eerie room inhabited by two giant rats. The story takes place inside a mansion inhabited by a mother cat and her three children. “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding” was one story in a collection of other such stories contained within Peter Rabbit’s Giant Storybook.

Tom kitten and the roly poly pudding