Mice

The mice are presented chiefly through their place in Jennyanydots’s after-hours household routine: a troublesome, noisy group she tries to discipline by gathering them for lessons. Their portrayal blends comic disorder with an oddly formal program of instruction, making them both participants in her domestic scheme and a measure of its eccentricity.

Nighttime Lessons

When the household has gone to bed, Jennyanydots creeps down to the basement, where she is deeply concerned about the mice’s behavior and manners. She lines them up on the matting and teaches them music, crocheting, and tatting. The scene turns the basement into a classroom and recasts the mice, not as a threat to be chased away, but as pupils subject to a cat’s orderly routine.

The verse’s neat pairings—bad behavior with bad manners, then matting with tatting—give this instruction a brisk, playful form. That polished list of lessons sits in comic contrast with the mice’s unruly reputation: they are not described as naturally quiet or well behaved, but as a group Jennyanydots sets out to manage.

Noise and Jennyanydots’s Diagnosis

The mice’s failure to keep quiet remains a problem even after the household’s daytime bustle has ended. Jennyanydots is sure that their noise is due to an irregular diet and proceeds on the belief that nothing is done without trying. The account gives her diagnosis and approach, but does not establish whether the mice become quieter or whether her proposed remedy succeeds.

Her response makes the mice central to the poem’s portrait of Jennyanydots’s work: the household’s apparent rest does not end her activity, but opens onto a second shift of supervision and teaching. The comic tension lies in the scale and formality of her intervention—lining up mice and providing lessons—set against the simple recurring difficulty that they will not keep quiet.

Mouse and Rat as Comic Alternatives

Elsewhere, The Rum Tum Tugger’s changing preferences make a mouse one option in a deliberately unstable choice: set him on a mouse and he wants a rat, while a rat sends him back toward a mouse. The line uses the two animals as interchangeable alternatives in a joke about his contrariness. It offers no further account of the mice as a group, but briefly gives the mouse a different role in the book: not Jennyanydots’s pupil, but the object of a capricious cat’s chase.