Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca destroy the plaster food. There is, however, no need for Jane to do any cooking because she and Lucinda do not eat and all of the food in the doll's house is made of plaster. Two dolls named Lucinda and Jane live in a doll's house. The doll characters Lucinda and Jane are also briefly referred to in Beatrix Potter's 1909 book The Tale of Ginger and Pickles. The Tale of Two Bad Mice has been adapted for film and television. The marriage never took place because Norman Warne died suddenly of lymphatic leukemia on August 25, 1905. It was while The Tale of Two Bad Mice was being prepared for publication that Beatrix Potter and Norman Warne fell in love with each other. Beatrix Potter used Winifred Warne's doll's house as a model for the one that appears in the illustrations in The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Norman Warne's decision may have been influenced by the fact that he was making a doll's house as a Christmas present for his four-year-old niece Winifred Warne at the time. Although Potter was initially somewhat reluctant to write another tale about mice so soon after the publication of The Tailor of Gloucester, both she and Warne agreed that The Tale of Two Bad Mice was the story idea that had the greatest potential. The other two ideas were later developed into Potter's 1905 book The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan and the first chapter of her 1929 book The Fairy Caravan. In December 1903, The Tale of Two Bad Mice was one of three ideas for a possible future book to be published along with The Tale of Benjamin Bunny in 1904 that Beatrix Potter submitted to her publisher Norman Warne. She kept them as pets and named them Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca after characters from Henry Fielding's 1730 play Tom Thumb.ฤก905 photograph of Winifred Warne and her doll's house. While visiting her cousin Caroline Hutton in Gloucestershire, Beatrix Potter rescued two mice from a cage-trap.
The story's origins can be traced back to June 1903. When the two mice find that all the food in the doll's house is artificial and inedible, they become angry and try to cause as much damage to the doll's house as they can. They enter a doll's house while its two occupants, dolls named Lucinda and Jane, are out. The book's title characters are a female mouse named Hunca Munca and a male mouse named Tom Thumb. The Tale of Two Bad Mice is a children's fantasy story by the British author and illustrator Beatrix Potter. Front cover of a 1904 edition of The Tale of Two Bad Mice.