The Tale of Two Bad Mice (Beatrix Potter Originals)

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The Tale of Two Bad Mice is number five in Beatrix Potter's series of 23 little books, the titles of which are as follows: And very early every morning— before anybody is awake—Hunca Munca comes with her dust-pan and her broom to sweep the dollies’ house! Helen Beatrix Potter was an English author, illustrator, mycologist, and conservationist who is best known for her children's books, which featured animal characters such as Peter Rabbit.

With Tom Thumb’s assistance she carried the bolster downstairs, and across the hearth-rug. It was difficult to squeeze the bolster into the mouse-hole; but they managed it somehow. The little mouse’s name was Tom Thumb. A minute later, Tom Thumb’s wife, Hunka Munka, popped her head out too and when she saw the room was empty, she and Tom squeezed through the hole and went over to the coal box by the fire.

Then Tom Thumb lost his temper. He put the ham in the middle of the floor, and hit it with the tongs and with the shovel—bang, bang, smash, smash! Sure, they break into the house of an inanimate object (big crime I know) and smash up her stuff. But who cares? She’s only a porcelain doll. And the two mice are only trying to feed their babies. If anything they’re the victims. They’ve been teased by the fake food in the windows and tempted by falsehood. When they realise they can’t get into it by normal means, they smash it up to try and eat it. I wouldn’t call them bad, opportunistic maybe but not bad. Then those mice set to work to do all the mischief they could—especially Tom Thumb! He took Jane’s clothes out of the chest of drawers in her bedroom, and he threw them out of the top floor window. How do you think the dolls felt when they came home to find everything in their little home ruined or stolen? So that is the story of the two Bad Mice,—but they were not so very very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke.

But Hunca Munca had a frugal mind. After pulling half the feathers out of Lucinda’s bolster, she remembered that she herself was in want of a feather bed. The doll's-house stood at the other side of the fire-place. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca went cautiously across the hearthrug. They pushed the front door--it was not fast.One of the most striking things about the tale is that the mice are "bad" - transgressive, as the OP notes. They are not merely bad in their destruction of the doll's house: there are also suggestions they are bad parents. They live in a squalid hole and have a large number of children. In contrast the doll's house that they enter is clean, polite and refined. The response of the mice to this is impulsive aggression and theft. The things they choose to steal are also instructive: they take food and bedding, but reject more refined objects like a bird cage and a book case. It is not hard to view this as a metaphor in which the mice represent the working class "vermin" and the dolls a more genteel middle or upper class society. The book's title characters are a female mouse named Hunca Munca and a male mouse named Tom Thumb. They enter a doll's house while its two occupants, dolls named Lucinda and Jane, are out. 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. As the fish would not come off the plate, they put it into the red-hot crinkly paper fire in the kitchen; but it would not burn either. Such a lovely dinner was laid out upon the table! There were tin spoons, and lead knives and forks, and two dolly-chairs--all SO convenient! Hunca moved a step closer to the layout. "The Chinese," she breathed, unable to contain her excitement any longer as she gazed at the doll's-house. Her ample breasts rose and fell under the thin synthasilk sweater. "I know you meet them all the time. You must have some... stuff."