Beatrix Potter

British writer

• Born: July 28, 1866
• Birthplace: South Kensington, Middlesex (now London), England
• Died: December 22, 1943
• Place of death: near Sawrey, Lancashire, (now in Cumbria) England

Potter, an English writer and illustrator of such children’s books as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was also an early member of England’s National Trust for the preservation of properties of historic value or natural beauty. She donated four thousand acres of Lake District farmland to preserve the area’s rural quality of life.

Early Life

Helen Beatrix Potter was born to middle-class parents in a fashionable rural suburb of London at the very height of Victorian England’s prosperity and dominance on the world stage. Her father, Rupert Potter, was a barrister who had studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, and her mother was the daughter of a prosperous Lancashire cotton merchant. Their four-story Kensington house, bought especially to prepare for raising a family, had a staff of six servants, with a young Scottish nanny added after Beatrix’s birth. A brother, Bertram, followed not quite six years later.

As a child, Potter was shy, delicate, and often ill. She seldom ventured out into London, except for walks in Kensington Gardens with her nurse and her first dog, Sandy. She learned to read, she recalled, by painfully spelling her way through the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817), then Ivanhoe (1819), then The Talisman (1825), and then back to Rob Roy, which she could suddenly read. Rupert had been an amateur artist as a student and took up collecting, especially the drawings of Randolph Caldecott, the children’s illustrator for whom the Caldecott Medal was named, given annually since 1938 to the best-illustrated children’s book. Rupert was friends with the painter John Everett Millais and Prime Minister William Gladstone, whom he photographed.

The formative experience of Potter’s childhood was the family’s annual three-month vacation in Scotland, a ritual that began when Potter was five and lasted for the next eleven years. Each summer, Rupert would lease Dalguise House, a large country estate, where the adults would shoot grouse and fish for salmon while Potter would explore the meadows and woods collecting specimens, drawing and painting, and imagining Scottish lords and ladies walking alongside her. She and Bertram brought back pets from their expeditions frogs, lizards, snakes, newts, bats, rats, hedgehogs, and rabbits which they often smuggled into their upstairs rooms in the London house. Potter meticulously sketched and painted these animals. She did not like to draw people, nor did she draw them well. Her parents, fearful of germs and bad influences, kept the children isolated from other playmates. Potter’s substitutes for human warmth were her pets and her imagination. She began a journal when she was fifteen, written in a secret code to ensure privacy, which was her chief confidant until she was over thirty.

Life’s Work

It was through her continued attention to the writing and drawing that were the companions of her long and lonely childhood that Potter eventually produced the children’s books for which she is most famous. Her first attempts at serious work were as a scientific illustrator. She had become fascinated by fungi during the family’s Scottish vacations, befriending a shy postal carrier who taught her much about local mycological lore. Back in London, she spent long afternoons at the nearby Natural History Museum studying and drawing specimens, producing over one hundred watercolors that she hoped to have published as a book. However, they were rejected by the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.

Potter was pointed in a new direction by the happy accident of her family’s change of summer vacation locales. Beginning in 1882, when the Dalguise House was no longer available to rent, the family began summering in the Lake District, first renting a Victorian mansion called Wray Castle on the shores of Lake Windermere. The local vicar, Canon Rawnsley, was an amateur naturalist and conservationist deeply concerned about the despoilation of the lakes by tourism and its accompanying development. (In 1895 he succeeded in cofounding the National Trust, largely to protect the Lake District.) In 1890, on seeing Potter’s drawings, he suggested offhandedly that she might illustrate birthday cards or nursery rhymes with one of the new foreign firms in London such as Hildesheimer & Faulkner. With Bertram’s help, she sent off six designs for Christmas cards, using their pet rabbit Benjamin Bouncer as a model. She received a check for six pounds and, for the next two years, poured herself into illustration work for the firm. The work, however, was not aesthetically satisfying.

About that time she began writing “picture letters” to the small children of one of her former governesses, now Mrs. Moore. In 1893, one of these letters to the oldest child, Noel, then five, began, “I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits, whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.” This was the beginning of what was to become her most famous book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902). The Moore children kept all of the picture letters that Potter sent each summer. She was now nearly thirty but was still a devoted daughter living with her stern and proper Victorian parents. Bertram had escaped by buying a farm in the Scottish Border country and secretly marrying, though he dutifully turned up for the annual summer holiday.

By this time, Potter had found a particular village in the Lake District that seemed to her the most beautiful of all called Near Sawrey. She often visited a farm there called Hill Top and told the farmer’s children the same stories she was telling the Moore children. Perhaps because of the appreciative responses she was getting from so many children, the idea of a book occurred. She wrote Noel Moore, now twelve, to ask if he had saved the Peter Rabbit picture letters, which he had. Potter expanded the story, sent it off to six publishers, received six rejections, and decided to self-publish the book in 1900 with money her father had given her. It was a great success not only with friends and kind aunts but also with a wider audience, including Arthur Conan Doyle, who bought it for his children. At this point, the publisher Frederick Warne agreed to bring out an edition if she would supply color rather than black-and-white illustrations.

There followed a long and profitable relationship with Warne, who published, among other books, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903), The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904), The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905), The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906), The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907), The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908), and The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913). The youngest son of the Warne family, Norman, who had been made responsible for the “rabbits” account, proposed marriage to Potter, by letter, on July 25, 1905. She was on the annual summer holiday with her parents. They insisted that it would be beneath her to marry “into trade,” but Potter accepted the proposal, though for the sake of her parents did not disclose this outside the two families. Norman fell ill, however, and exactly one month later, on August 25, he died of leukemia.

Potter was grief-stricken that her last letter to him had been chattily unaware of how seriously ill he was. Despite his death, however, his proposal did help free her from her parents. With the royalties from her books, she decided to buy a farm in the Lake District. By chance, Hill Top itself was for sale. She purchased it and allowed the farm family she had known there to remain as caretakers. She spent only one month per year there, however, for her parents were increasingly ill, and she felt responsible for managing their London house. Then came the great crisis that finally changed her narrow and enclosed life. The local solicitor who had helped her buy Hill Top and other properties proposed marriage in 1913. Her parents would not allow it, though Potter was in her late forties. She fell deathly ill of pneumonia until help came from her brother Bertram, who finally revealed to their parents that he had married a shopkeeper’s daughter eleven years before. Her parents acquiesced, and Potter became Mrs. William Heelis. From that moment on, she ceased to use any other name.

Though she produced a few more books for Warne and continued to license merchandise using the images of her creations, Potter entered full-heartedly into the life of a married countrywoman. She became especially interested in restoring the native breed of sheep to the Lake District and became a breeder and shower of Herdwick sheep. She often regarded the children’s stories from the most creative period of her life, her thirties and forties, with distaste, considering them reminders of a life lived in the imagination as compensation for not living in the world. She refused all interviews and publicity and donated her farms to the National Trust on her death.

Significance

Beatrix Potter’s stories have become classics of children’s literature. This is partly because of the charm of the illustrations, in which animals are dressed in clothes but otherwise unsentimentalized indeed, she had to fight battles against censorship when she had her animals undress themselves. Her stories do not shy away from difficult words whose sound Potter liked. They are often tales of escape or domestic happiness, the most meaningful of themes for Potter and many children and adults.

Potter’s legacy also includes a marketing strategy, which is not surprising for the daughter and wife of lawyers: She created the first Peter Rabbit doll in 1903 and licensed Wedgewood to produce nurseryware. Her characters have inspired a ballet, animated films, a British postage stamp, an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, a Beatrix Potter Society, and tourist brochures marketing the Lake District as Peter Rabbit Country. Her most lasting legacy, however, may turn out to be her donations of property and royalties to the National Trust, which has subsidized the continuance of sheep farming in the Lake District, which otherwise would have given way long ago to commercial development and the disappearance of the way of life she loved.

Bibliography

Hallinan, Camilla, ed. The Ultimate Peter Rabbit: A Visual Guide to the World of Beatrix Potter. New York: DK, 2002. Richly illustrated book describing how Potter created The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other stories.

Jay, Eileen, Mary Noble, and Anne Hobbs. A Victorian Naturalist. London: Frederick Warne, 1992. While quite young, Potter made frequent trips to the Natural History Museum near her London home, making serious watercolor studies of animals and, oddly, fungi, reproduced in this book.

Kutzer, M. Daphne. Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code. New York: Routledge, 2003. An examination of the entire body of Potter’s work and its relation to her life.

Lane, Margaret. The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter. London: Frederick Warne, 1978. A study of Potter’s most creative years, during her late thirties and early forties, by her first biographer. Illustrated.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Tale of Beatrix Potter. London: Frederick Warne, 1946. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. The first biography, written with the cooperation of Potter’s husband, William Heelis.

Lear, Linda. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Lear, an environmental historian, focuses on the places that provided the settings for Potter’s stories. She describes how Potter early on developed an interest in nature, drawing flowers and animals.

Linder, Leslie. The History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter. 1971. Rev. ed. London: Frederick Warne, 1987. A study of Potter’s writings using the previously unavailable journal material.

Potter, Beatrix. Beatrix Potter’s Letters. Edited by Judy Taylor. London: Frederick Warne, 1987. A selection of some four hundred letters.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881-1897. Edited and transcribed by Leslie Linder. 1966. Rev. ed. Frederick Warne, 1989. A transcript of Potter’s encrypted journal, finally decoded by Linder.

Taylor, Judy. Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman. 1986. Rev. ed. London: Frederick Warne, 1996. A lavishly illustrated biography containing a useful bibliography and many photographs.