“The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way,” the book’s intro continues. “He was only about two inches high; and he had a mouse’s sharp nose, a mouse’s tail, a mouse’s whiskers, and the pleasant, shy manner of a mouse.”
The novel noted that when Stuart was “many days old,” he both looked like a mouse and acted like one as well, albeit “wearing a gray hat and carrying a small cane.”
Stuart grew up rapidly, with the book explaining, “When he was a week old he could climb lamps by shinnying up the cord. Mrs. Little saw right away that the infant clothes she had provided were unsuitable, and she set to work and made him a fine little blue worsted suit with patch pockets in which he could keep his handkerchief, his money, and his keys.”
Interestingly, readers of Stuart Little have been surprised about his birth story since the book’s release. Famed writer and librarian Anne Carroll Moore had a very intense reaction when White’s editor sent her the original manuscript, as described in Melissa Sweet’s Some Writer!, a 2016 biography of White.
“’I was never so disappointed in a book in my life,’” she said, with the biography stating, “She wrote an urgent fourteen-page letter to the Whites explaining why Stuart Little, with its ‘monstrous birth,’ should not be published.”
