Potter never observed the tale's indigenous North American mammals in nature, and, as a result, her depictions are thought stiff and unnatural.

By 1911, the demands of her aging parents and the business operations at her working farm, Hill Top, occupied much of Potter's time and attention to the exclusion of nearly everything else, and are accounted as some of the reasons for the author's declining artistry and her lack of interest in producing children's books.

She was educated by governesses and tutors, and passed a quiet childhood reading, painting, drawing, tending a nursery menagerie of small animals, and visiting museums and art exhibitions.

Her interests in the natural world and country life were nurtured with holidays in Scotland, the Lake District, and Camfield Place, the Hertfordshire home of her paternal grandparents.

[2] She continued to paint and draw, and experienced her first professional artistic success in 1890 when she sold six designs of humanized animals to a greeting card publisher.

[3] She hoped to lead a useful life independent of her parents, and tentatively considered a career in mycology, but the all-male scientific community regarded her as nothing more than an amateur and she abandoned fungi.

[6] Potter agreed to colour the pen and ink illustrations of her privately printed edition, chose the then-new Hentschel three-colour process for reproducing her watercolours,[7] and in October 1902 The Tale of Peter Rabbit was released.

[8] Potter continued to publish with Warnes, and, in August 1905, used sales profits and a small legacy from an aunt to buy Hill Top, a working farm of 34 acres (13.85 ha) at Sawrey in the Lake District.

[9] In the years immediately following its purchase, she produced tales and illustrations inspired by the farm, its woodland surroundings, and nearby villages.

[10] Potter produced two books per annum for Warne, but by 1910 she was juggling the demands of aging parents with the business of operating Hill Top, and her literary and artistic productivity began to decline.

"[11] She intended to follow Mrs. Tittlemouse with a tale about a pig in a large format book similar to the original Ginger and Pickles, but was forced to abandon the project after several unproductive attempts at composition.

Instead, she occupied the winter of 1910–11 with supervising the production of Peter Rabbit's Painting Book, and composing Timmy Tiptoes, a tale about indigenous North American mammals.

She revised the text, and wrote publisher Harold Warne: "I have compressed the words in the earlier pages, but it seems unavoidable to have a good deal of nuts.

Instead, she relied on specimens in the London Zoological Gardens as models, and checked photographs in reference books including one from the firm of taxidermist Rowland Ward.

[12] At the end of July 1911, she sent the text and most of the illustrations to Warne from Lindeth Howe, (now a 4 star hotel) her parents' summering place in Windermere.

"There is no need to apologize for criticism," she wrote, "But there is no doubt the animals strongly resemble rabbits, the head which you question was copied from a photograph in the book.

Timmy Tiptoes is "a little fat comfortable grey squirrel" living in a nest thatched with leaves in the top of a tall tree with his little wife, Goody.

The other squirrels take notice, suspect Timmy of robbing others of their hoards, rush upon him, scratch and cuff him, chase him up a tree, and stuff him with great difficulty through the woodpecker's hole.

Chippy Hackee, a small striped chipmunk, tends him with kindness, mentioning that it has been raining nuts through the top of tree and he has also "found a few buried".

Timmy now keeps the family nuts "fastened up with a little padlock", and Goody is seen in the accompanying illustration sitting outside the nest tending three tiny babies.

In addition to the miniaturists, Potter once admitted that the Pre-Raphaelites, with their "somewhat niggling but absolutely genuine admiration for copying natural detail", had influenced her style.

[22] The inclusion of an American black bear-looking creature in the tale and its depiction in the illustrations only emphasize Potter's awkward struggle with subject matter she had not directly observed in nature or of which she had little knowledge.

[15] Judy Taylor and her collaborators on Beatrix Potter 1866-1943: The Artist and Her World conclude that Timmy Tiptoes is "an uneasy book" and one in which the animals do not fit naturally into the background.

Though their relationship may reflect the non-monogamous mating habits of eastern chipmunks and offer a contrast with the happy pairing of Timmy and Goody, it is an obstacle in the flow of the tale.

[23] The reader is forced to question the stability of the Hackee union: Chippy stays away from home long after Timmy's situation is resolved and returns to his wife only after being frightened from the tree by a bear entirely superfluous to the tale.

At home, Chippy suffers with a head cold, but Mrs. Hackee's lack of expression in the illustration leaves the reader wondering how she took his abrupt return.

After the reader discovers Goody is the happy mother of triplets and Timmy has made the decision to keep his nuts under lock and key, he may wonder what sort of fate the future holds for the Hackees.

[15] M. Daphne Kutzer, Professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh and author of Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code (2003), detects some similarities to The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903).

In 1947, Frederick Warne & Co. granted Beswick Pottery of Longton, Staffordshire rights and licences to produce the Potter characters in porcelain.

[29] In the middle 1980s, the Italian firm of ANRI manufactured ornaments and figurines of Timmy Tiptoes composed of a synthetic substance called Toriart.