The Tale of Two Bad Mice is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, and published by Frederick Warne & Co. in September 1904.

Potter took inspiration for the tale from two mice caught in a cage-trap in her cousin's home and a doll's house being constructed by her editor and publisher Norman Warne as a Christmas gift for his niece Winifred.

After finding the food on the dining room table made of plaster, they smash the dishes, throw the doll clothing out the window, tear the bolster, and carry off a number of articles to their mouse-hole.

The two mice atone for their crime spree by putting a crooked sixpence in the doll's stocking on Christmas Eve and sweeping the house every morning with a dust-pan and broom.

[1][2] Tom Thumb was never mentioned in Potter's letters after his rescue from the trap (he may have escaped) but Hunca Munca became a pet and a model; she developed an affectionate personality and displayed good housekeeping skills.

She alerted Warne that she was spending a week with a cousin at Melford Hall and would run the three tales past the children in the house.

[6] Just before New Year's 1904, Warne sent Potter a glass-fronted mouse house with a ladder to an upstairs nesting loft built to her specifications so she could easily observe and draw the mice.

She wrote that progress was being made on the mouse tale, and once found Hunca Munca carrying a beribboned doll up the ladder into her nest.

Many years later she remembered Potter arriving at the house to borrow the doll:She was very unfashionably dressed; and wore a coat and skirt and hat, and carried a man's umbrella.

[8][9] On April 20 the photographs of the doll's house were delivered, and at the end of May Potter wrote to Warne that eighteen of the mouse drawings were complete, and the remainder were in progress.

[11][12] Two Bad Mice reflects Potter's deepening happiness in her professional and personal relationship with Norman Warne and her delight in trouncing the rigors and strictures of middle class domesticity.

Potter enjoyed developing a tale that gave her the vicarious thrill of the sort of improper behaviour she would never have entertained in real life.

In one, Jane Dollcook has broken the soup tureen and both her legs; in another, Tom Thumb writes to Lucinda asking her to spare a feather bed which she regrets she cannot send because the one he stole was never replaced.

No one is in the Nursery when Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca, two mice living under the skirting board, peep out and cross the hearthrug to the dollhouse.

Tom Thumb scurries up the sootless chimney while Hunca Munca empties the kitchen canisters of their red and blue beads.

The narrator believes the mice are not "so very naughty after all": Tom Thumb pays for his crimes with a crooked sixpence placed in the doll's stocking on Christmas Eve and Hunca Munca atones for her hand in the destruction by cleaning the Dollhouse every morning with her dust-pan and broom.

Ruth K. MacDonald, author of Beatrix Potter (1986), believes the success of The Tale of Two Mice lies in the plentiful and meticulous miniature details of the doll's house in the illustrations.

In August 1905, Potter not only lost her editor and fiancé Norman Warne but purchased Hill Top, a working farm in the Lake District that became her home away from London and her artistic retreat.

Two Bad Mice may be viewed as an allegory in which Potter expresses not only her desire for her own home but her fears about and frustrations with domestic life.

[19] Kutzer observes the tale is marked with a "faint echo" of the larger class issues of the times, specifically labour unrest.

Social authority (the policeman doll) and domestic authority (the governess) are both ineffective against the desires of the mice: one illustration depicts the animals simply evading the policeman doll to prowl outside the house and another illustration depicts the mice instructing their children about the dangers of the governess's mousetrap.

Their repentance is merely show: Tom Thumb pays for his destruction with a useless crooked sixpence found under the rug and Hunca Munca cleans a house that is tidy to begin with.

[21] A reviewer in Bookman thought Two Bad Mice a pleasant change from Potter's rabbit books (Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny) and believed neither Tom Thumb or Hunca Munca were completely bad, noting they both looked innocent and lovable in Potter's twenty-seven watercolour drawings.

"[22] Potter confidently asserted her tales would one day be nursery classics, and part of the process in making them so was marketing strategy.

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

Beginning in 1983, Schmid released a series of small, flat hanging Christmas ornaments depicting various Potter characters including several Hunca Muncas.

In 1991, three music boxes were released: Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb in the dolls' bed (playing "Beautiful Dreamer"); Tom Thumb instructing his children about the dangers of mouse traps ("You've Got a Friend"); Hunca Munca spilling the beads from the pantry canister ("Everything is Beautiful"); and the two mice trying to cut the plaster ham ("Close to You").

Between 1992 and 1996, a number of Beatrix Potter's tales were turned into an animated television series and broadcast by the BBC, titled The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends.