Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) is one of the world's best-loved children's authors and illustrators. She wrote the majority of the twenty-three Original Peter Rabbit Books between 1901 and 1913. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Frederick Warne, 1902) is her most famous and best-loved tale.

On this sheet Potter has written out the nursery rhyme ‘I saw a ship a-sailing’, adding her own notes and ideas for illustrations. The captain is a guinea pig, the pilot a rat, the sailors are mice, and the passengers are rabbits. Potter noted on the sheet following the end of the rhyme:

‘All of which will have to be carefully drawn, but I think the words are lovely. Just imagine the white mice letting down the bags of comfits into the hold!’

According to the Beatrix Potter scholar Leslie Linder, the sheet was given to Marjorie Moore, the daughter of Potter’s friend and former governess, Annie Moore. The rhyme may have been intended for a book of rhymes that Potter worked on in 1904 and 1905 with the hope that it would be published. Her publisher (Frederick Warne & Co.) was keen to keep up her successful stream of original tales and after the death of Norman Warne, Beatrix’s editor and fiancé, in August 1905, the book was put to one side. Much later, in 1917, a developed version of the 1905 book of rhymes was published: Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes. ‘I saw a ship a-sailing’ does not appear, however.