The bunny rabbit, whose propensity for breeding is legendary, has
long served as a fertility symbol for the Spring. Bunnykins figures came
from the fertile imagination of a young woman whose father, Cuthbert
Bailey, happened to be the managing director of Royal Doulton. As a
child, Barbara Vernon Bailey had filled sketchbooks with drawings of the
countryside, and of the animals kept by her four brothers and two
sisters including pigs, cows, horses and ferrets, as well as the more
cuddly dogs, cats and guinea-pigs.I don’t know if we’re the only country whose media doesn’t take children’s books seriously, but certainly the situation is different in Germany. My publisher there often sends me double-page articles devoted to the work of just one children’s author or illustrator. America also appears more enlightened. I recently read a long serious article in The New York Times about British author-illustrator Rebecca Cobb’s Missing Mummy, a book about parental loss which received not one single print review in a British national paper.
