The Story of Miss Moppet sisters, and appears as a character in both books featuring him: "The Tale of Tom Kitten" and "The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding" (1908). Potter was an admirer of American author Joel Chandler Harris and created a series of plates in the 1890s for his Uncle Remus stories, possibly in an attempt to find career direction. So deep was her admiration, Lear speculates the scene of Miss Moppet wrapping her head in the duster comes from a similar scene in an Uncle Remus tale in which Br'er Fox "feigns illness in a rocking chair, wrapped up with
Uncle Remus recorded have direct equivalents in the African oral tradition. Harris himself said, in the introduction to "Uncle Remus", that he hoped his book would be considered: ... a sympathetic supplement to Mrs. Stowe's [author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"] wonderful defense of slavery as it existed in the South. Mrs. Stowe, let me hasten to say, attacked the possibilities of slavery with all the eloquence of genius; but the same genius painted the portrait of the Southern slave-owner, and defended him. Mark Twain read the Uncle Remus stories to his children, who were awed to meet Harris himself. In his "Autobiography"