For a while I completely forgot about the existence of the original stuffed toys that served as the basis for the characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A.A. Milne, only to come across them again in recent weeks. And so, here is the original Piglet, who, despite his rather battered and squashed appearance, was evidently a strikingly well-formed character before he ever featured in the books.

Looking at the photographs of all of the stuffed toys together (housed at the New York Public Library since 1987), it struck me that E.H. Shepard was very faithful to their silhouettes in his illustrations. Piglet is trickier to see clearly– his face must have looked quite different in his days of glory (and might he have worn a woollen vest as he does in the illustrations?).

Regardless, the way his arms stick up in the air, his proportions, and his size (he seems quite tiny!) give him the permanent air of a younger sibling who is struggling – short legs wiggling and tongue sticking out from the effort – to clamber onto a tall stool and failing.

My re-acquaintance with these toys was timely, as I am currently reading the Winnie-the-Pooh books to my children. My 10-year-old daughter usually reads on her own in the evenings, but for Pooh she has been making an exception. She likes to read out loud too, and so does my son (7), so we often take turns in reading Pooh Bear’s little songs and poems, one after the other, over and over – ‘Now me’, and ‘Now me again.’

Last night we read a chapter in which Piglet and Pooh are dragged along to the mist-covered Hundred Acre Wood by Rabbit, who has a rather mean plan to ‘lose’ Tigger so they can teach him a lesson and make him less bouncy.

My children particularly loved a passage, in which Piglet, Pooh and Rabbit are walking around in the mist, completely lost, but not admitting to it: 

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.

“Pooh!” he whispered.

“Yes, Piglet?”

“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

They both laughed and asked me to repeat it, and then we spent several minutes talking about Piglet and his relationship with Pooh, and how anxious he is all the time.

I have come to the Pooh books quite late with my son compared to when I first read them to my daughter, and it is interesting to see how differently they are engaging with them. The books seem to provide an instant feeling of calm, familiarity, and comfort, and my daughter is possibly enjoying them more at 10 than she did when she was younger. They are both incredibly fond of Piglet.

This original Piglet looks like he was chewed vigorously, dragged carelessly, battered fondly, and slept with religiously until he was threadbare and parts of him were missing. He looks like the ideal companion to look after, and to make you feel like perhaps you are not so little after all, not if there is someone as tiny as him around.

As I looked at the photographs and thought about Piglet’s original owner, the author’s son Christopher Robin Milne, an unsettling feeling surfaced and took its place alongside my well-rooted fondness for Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Looking at the actual playthings as objects that were used by a boy to play with proved particularly interesting.

Christopher Robin – what a specific name to be called, and what a mark to leave on a child!

He donated the toys to the publisher because he wanted to be surrounded by things he enjoyed as an adult rather than focusing on his childhood, and the publisher subsequently donated them to the New York Public Library (to the uproar of some in the UK). After learning about this voluntary donation, the feeling of ambivalence and invasiveness grew stronger – when I look at this Piglet, I see a personal, intimate object that belonged to a small boy, a strange thought at odds with all the noise surrounding it and all the money being made from it.

Christopher was brought up with a nanny until 1930, when, aged 9, he was sent off to boarding school. I looked into the commercial side of Pooh as an enterprise and grimaced when I saw that by that same year A.A. Milne had entered into a commercial agreement with Stephen Slesinger, known as the father of the licensing industry. There was a board game, recordings, dolls, crockery, and radio programmes, all of them featuring pictures of the Christopher Robin and friends. He had a very hard time at boarding school, as everyone knew about Christopher Robin, and he found it mortifying.

 In a 1980 interview with a local newspaper, Milne touches on the teasing and the bullying at school, and on trying to shed Christopher Robin and become someone in his own right, finally managing to after both parents died.  But he comes across as generous and patient too, saying “Yes, you could say it was a sacrifice – for all the pleasure the stories gave to millions of people I shall never know.”

Beyond the merchandising and machinery around it, the books themselves remain engaging in a way that I find fascinating. They are wonderful at showing characters who are permanently winging it – they have no idea of what they are supposed to be doing or saying, but they pretend to understand, just as most of us – children and adults – do every day, especially when confronted with new things. They pretend to make sense of the nonsense, and they nod vigorously. Piglet and Pooh seem to be aware that neither of them know what they are doing, and theirs is an unspoken agreement to reassure each other. The rhythm of the nonsense is perfectly observed, and there is a healthy amount of silliness.  

It is interesting to look at this Piglet and think of those years where he was just Christopher Robin Milne’s well-loved toy – a personal plaything that featured in stories created by his father just for him, before things got lost in the whirlwind.

 “Mummy?” croaked my daughter dramatically from her bedroom this morning.

 “Yes?”

 “Nothing, I just wanted to make sure of you”, she said. And then she half giggled, half cackled.

 Long live this Piglet.