Potter's tale pays homage to the leisurely summers her father and his companions passed sport fishing at rented country estates in Scotland.

He puts on a mackintosh and shiny galoshes, takes his rod and basket, and sets off with "enormous hops" to the place where he keeps his lily-pad boat.

A water beetle tweaks his toe, causing him to withdraw his legs, and rats rustling about in the rushes force him to seek a safer location.

Margaret Lane, author of The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter, notes, "Mr. Potter was fond of taking his friends fishing and Beatrix ... from an early age had been familiar with [the] hazards and excitements of angling and dry-fly fishing ... as a girl [she] had often enough had to endure her father and his friends relating their fishing adventures, and the picture of Mr Jeremy Fisher retailing his mishap to Sir Isaac Newton is so rich in observation, both of amphibians and elderly gentlemen, that one is ever afterwards prone to confuse them in memory".

"[6] Biographer Linda Lear writes Potter declared, "I have the greatest admiration for his work – a jealous appreciation; for I think that others, whose names are commonly bracketed with his, are not on the same plane at all as artist-illustrators".

Nature is described and illustrated truthfully: beautifully tranquil as well as unpredictably aggressive ....Its carefully coloured botanical backgrounds of water plants, a frog with anatomically correct turned-out feet, a trout that any self-respecting fisherman would enjoy snagging, and a rather frighteningly rendered water-beetle who tweaks Jeremy's dainty toes, all made it a delight to look at as well as to read.

[7] The origin of The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher lies in a story letter Potter wrote to a child in September 1893 while summering on the River Tay.

She wrote to him indicating Norman had approved the frog project: "We had thought of doing ... "Mr. Jeremy Fisher" to carry on the series of little [books].

but I think I had convinced Norman that I could make it a really pretty book with a good many flowers & water plants for backgrounds".

[17] M. Daphne Kutzer, Professor of English at State University of New York at Plattsburgh and author of Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code, observes that the social positions of Jeremy and his friends are established through the clothing they wear.

Although Potter sharply critiqued the upper class elsewhere, Kutzer observes that in Jeremy Fisher her tone is more moderate.

[18] Ruth K. MacDonald, Professor of English at New Mexico State University and author of Beatrix Potter points out that although Potter regarded the lives of her father and his friends as comical and even beneath notice, yet she clearly respected and valued their outdoor pursuits from the bemused treatment she accorded them in Jeremy Fisher.

She valued nature untouched by humans even more, MacDonald notes, as evidenced by the careful observation in the illustrations.

Jeremy Fisher was written without the many revisions typical of Potter's other productions, and the pictures appear effortless in their execution.

MacDonald writes, "Her ability to show human society without also implying its damaging effects on flora and fauna further underscores the book's felicitous composition and success".

But Potter makes the point that all creatures are prey, ending the story with Jeremy Fisher himself eating a grasshopper smothered in lady-bird sauce.

Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, a hedgehog washerwoman in another Potter tale, writes Master Fayle in the fourth letter:Dear Master Drew, If you please Sir I am a widow; & I think it very wrong that there is not any Mrs. Fisher, but I would not marry Mr. Jeremy not for worlds, the way he does live in that house all slippy-sloppy; not any lady would stand it, & not a bit of good starching his cravats.

The following year, he was released as a 37 inches (94 cm) "Giant" intended for store displays, and during the Beanie Baby era as a beanbag.

[27] As of 2010, all 23 of Potter's small format books remain in print, and are available as complete sets in presentation boxes,[28] and as a 400-page omnibus edition.

[29] The English language editions of the tales still bore the Frederick Warne imprint in 2010 though the company was bought by Penguin Books in 1983.

[31] The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher was published in French in 1940 as Jérémie Pêche-à-la-Ligne, and in Dutch as Jeremais de Hengelaar in 1946.

The tale was republished in Dutch in 1970 as Het Verhaal van Jeremais Hengelaar and was published in the Initial Teaching Alphabet in 1965.