Was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle a Marxist?
By Nick Pelling
It is surely time to come to the defence of the scruffy eccentric creature who blunders about in a garden but can’t really give you a plausible explanation about what they are doing. Yes, the great British hedgehog. Let’s all celebrate because February 2 is National Hedgehog Day in the UK. (This should not be confused with the American Groundhog Day, which is a day when the news is about the same thing every day, but that doesn’t happen in this country.)
The hedgehog is surely one of our great national treasures and maybe we should all climb into hedgerows on the second day of February and give them a clap. The hedgehog may be small but it has some weighty significance. For some, the hedgehog has great spiritual symbolism. They are, after all, closer to Mother Earth than most of us. Some neo-Druids see their unfolding, from the ball position, as a symbol of the rise of the sun. The beautiful cycle of rebirth in the form of a small prickly mammal, perhaps.
Feminists have tended to seize upon the tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle: an oppressed washerwoman whose cute little cottage is, in fact, a laundry cum sweat shop. Not only does Mrs Tiggy-Winkle have to wash all the clothes of the wider voletariat, she is then forced to run a delivery service with only the help of a gormless privileged girl called Lucie. Mr Tiggy-Winkle is, of course, nowhere to be seen during all this unpaid work.
Alexas Fotos/unsplash
But the hedgehog also has a profound philosophical significance. Isaiah Berlin was one of the great minds of the twentieth century and, from his lofty position as a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he posited the theory that hedge-hog ideology was essentially totalitarian. In his book The Hedgehog and the Fox, published at the height of the Cold War in 1953, he explained how the spiny creature was at the heart of the Red Scare. According to Isaiah Berlin “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In other words, the hedgehog knows only one big explanatory idea, such as the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism; whilst the fox skips merrily from one idea to another in a jolly western world of free thought. Evidently then, the hedgehog, and people of the hedgehog outlook, are a threat to freedom. Doubtless, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle would have been a Marxist if she could have just thrown off the false consciousness imposed upon her by Beatrix Potter. Whether she was a Leninist, Trotskyite or Stalinist, would require more profound textual analysis.
But maybe, Isaiah Berlin has done the wee beastie a great disservice. A few years ago, the British people voted it as our most popular wild mammal. Indeed, as a great emblem for the nation, second only to Her Majesty. But, if Britain sees itself as a hedgehog, we are in big trouble. Because the hedgehog numbers are in steep decline. In 1950, we had approximately thirty million hedgehogs but now, the creature – and therefore the nation – is fading from former glory, reaching at best, one million. If we want to make Britain great again, I suggest simply put out saucers of milk and chopped cat food. More importantly, join the wider campaigns for re-wilding.
Those passionate devotees of the beastie who call for the arming of hedgehogs are just not understanding the hedgehog. If you think for a moment of the beast’s roll-into-a-ball strategy you surely must grasp that it is essentially a non-violent resistance strategy. (Sadly, the creature has yet to work out a programme of direct action – occupying the M25 is unlikely to work.)
As February unfolds let us all think about the plight of this scruffy creature. And try to help it. Remember, some scruffy, eccentric creatures are worth saving. Others should, perhaps, be left to historical extinction.
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