The Tailor of Gloucester is an early story by Beatrix Potter.
It is about an impoverished tailor (who lives in Gloucester) who is hired to make a suit for the Mayor's wedding.
He runs into trouble when he falls too ill to work and his cat, Simpkin, hides the right kind of thread to finish the suit's button-holes, but fortunately he receives some unexpected help from the mice living in the wainscoting of his shop.
This book provides examples of:
- Arc Words: The tailor keeps mentioning that he has "no more twist!" in his despair at lacking the necessary thread for a suit, then later, the mice add it into their song.
- Butt-Monkey: Simpkin gets snowed on, which he hates, and spends most of the story very hangry because the mice he wanted to eat got away and the tailor is too sick to feed him, then the mice taunt him with their songs.
- Cats Are Mean: Simpkin doesn't give the tailor his twist, just because he's angry that the tailor set free the mice he planned on eating (However, he does feel bad about it later).
- Civilized Animal: Simpkin is a mixed example; he can only speak in meows, but he also wears clothes, walks on two legs, and runs errands for the tailor. The mice also wear clothes and sew, but live like real mice.
- The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: The tailor makes fancy clothing, but his own clothes are described as "threadbare".
- Costume Porn: The descriptions of the tailor's creations are gorgeous. Of course, this being a Beatrix Potter story, even the mice get in on the Costume Porn action.
- Dreaming of a White Christmas: The story takes place around Christmas, and it's snowing.
- Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Simpkin, when he goes out, wears a coat, pants, and boots.
- Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: The first buck mouse to be seen wears only a fancy coat.
- Have a Gay Old Time: While sick, the tailor periodically declares, "Alack!" which is an older version of the somewhat more familiar term "Alas!"
- Joke and Receive: The tailor jokingly remarks that nothing could be made out of his scraps except "waistcoats for mice"... and then some actual mice make waistcoats out of the fabric.
- Mad Libs Catchphrase: The tailor, when complaining about his poverty, describes himself as "worn to a ___".
- Musical Chores: The mice sing rhymes when they're sewing the buttonholes.
- My God, What Have I Done?: When the mice are busily sewing and teasing Simpkin with rhymes, he feels bad about having hidden the twist.
- Needlework Is for Old People: Zigzagged. The tailor is old, but the mice also do needlework and their ages vary.
- Nice Mice: They help the tailor when he's bedridden with illness and on a time crunch.
- No Name Given: The tailor is unnamed.
- Nursery Rhyme: When Simpkin temporarily gains the ability to talk due to vaguely-defined Christmas magic, he says, "Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle".
- Off with His Head!: Discussed when the mice, while teasing Simpkin with a song, claim he'd bite their heads off.
- Special Occasions Are Magic: Animals are granted the ability to speak on the night of Christmas Eve through some vaguely-defined magic.
- Stock Animal Diet: Simpkin wants to eat the mice, and it's implied he regularly does so when they haven't escaped or outsmarted him.
- Talking in Your Sleep: The story uses the "sleep-talking as illness symptom" version of the trope when it says that the tailor having a fever is the reason for his sleep-talking.
- Twisted Christmas: Subverted. It's getting close to Christmas, and the tailor is sick and bedridden, including on Christmas Eve... but when Simpkin arrives home from his late-night stroll, he finds that the tailor has made a full recovery. It also seems that the Mayor won't get his coat, but then the mice finish it up with no time to spare.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: The story is based on the tailor John Prichard, who arrived at his shop having found the mayor's suit completed over night. Although in real life, the work was done by his assistants, rather than mice, and he obviously didn't have a semi-anthropomorphic cat as a pet.
- Your Tomcat Is Pregnant: While it doesn't involve an animal getting pregnant, it does involve a character being mistaken about the sex of an animal — the mice refer to Simpkin as "she" in the song and call him "Miss" Pussy, when he's actually a tomcat.
