The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Escape from the dolls’ house
Beatrix Potter, born 150 years ago this week, was trapped by shyness in her childhood nursery well into adulthood. Painting rabbits set her free, discovers Matthew Dennison
In 1891, aged 25, Beatrix Potter noted in her diary a theory that interested her: “That genius – like murder – will out”. She was thinking of herself, and she turned out to be right. Today, every 15 seconds, someone somewhere in the world will buy a Beatrix Potter book. And there’s little doubt which tale it’s likely to be. Late in life, writing to a young admirer, Potter described herself as “the Peter Rabbit lady”, and posterity hasn’t disagreed. You can now read The Tale of Peter Rabbit in Esperanto, if the fancy takes you, or in any of 44 other languages.
But when the 25-year-old Potter pondered the nature of genius in her diary, she was, as far as she and her family were concerned, a disappointment. Unmarried, cripplingly shy, plagued by poor health, she passed empty days in the nursery of her childhood home in South Kensington, at the beck and call of her irritable parents. She would remain there until her unexpected marriage at the age of 45.
In place of friends, she had a “noisy cheerful” pet rabbit called Benjamin H Bouncer. On good days, she noted, he was “amiably sentimental to the point of silliness”; on bad days, he ate the insides of her paintbox. Beatrix even dreamt about him: “Bunny came to my bedside in a white cotton nightcap and tickled me with his whiskers.” Inspired by Pepys, she wrote her diary in a complicated code of her own invention, sometimes framing her entries as letters to an imaginary friend called Esther. In these diaries, she vented frustration at her comfortable, pointless existence. As young as 10, she recorded an intention to “do something”.
Genius would – eventually – out, but its passage was not easy. Through force of will, she escaped the narrowness of Victorian daughterhood, the polite world of needlework and simpering over teacups that had always bored her. Potter’s life became instead a series of selffashionings: amateur scientist; author and illustrator; farmer, landowner and conservationist. As much as any of her stories, Beatrix Potter was her own creation.
But her ambition was quite at odds with that of her conventional, snobbish parents. Potter was born – 150 years ago this week – in a large, newly built house not far from the Victoria and Albert Museum. Both her parents had inherited cotton-milling fortunes from their self-made fathers, but Rupert and Helen Potter – socially ambitious – were keen not to betray even a trace of the entrepreneurialism that had made their fathers so rich.
Their pursuits were studiously genteel. Rupert, a barrister, enjoyed photography and collected illustrations. Helen liked canaries, the seaside and the conversation of attractive men; despite this, she prided herself on her resemblance to the middle-aged Queen Victoria. Humour was not a virtue in their household. Potter and her younger brother Bertram were kept away from other children, who would infect them with germs and, more worringly, bad influence.
To help the family transcend its manufacturing past, Rupert and Helen Potter wanted Beatrix to marry a gentleman. But she wanted to be an artist. From infancy, Potter had shown talent for drawing, which her father had encouraged. Her governesses had been supplemented with separate instruction in art – lessons in oil and watercolour painting. A dressing room became her studio. Rupert took her to galleries and exhibitions; he introduced her to his friend, John Everett Millais. In the homes of her grandparents, she saw paintings by the great and good of the Victorian art scene, including Landseer and Leighton. One grandmother owned a landscape by Turner.
When Potter’s teenage enthusiasm for painting began to outstrip what was normal for a gentlewoman, shading into eccentricity, her parents were concerned. They had no intention of humouring her blue-stocking interests for long, and anything resembling a job was out of the question. The battlelines were drawn; the war between Potter and her parents would last for 30 years.
While still living in the nursery in Bolton Gardens, painting led to her first adult obsession: mycology. In the late 1880s, over long family holidays in Perthshire and the Lake District, she began to paint native fungi. A decade later, she had made almost 400 detailed watercolour sketches. In the schoolroom at home, she germinated almost 50 different species of fungus; borrowing her brother’s microscope, she devised a theory about germination through spores – a significant scientific breakthrough, she believed.
Her efforts were championed by a sympathetic uncle, Sir Henry Roscoe, a distinguished chemist. For reasons that are unclear, Roscoe seized on his niece’s theory, and did all he could to upset the scientific establishment with it. After a number of uncomfortable interviews with the martinet director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, William Thistleton-Dyer, and his deputy, George Massee, the latter, with some reluctance, presented Potter’s research paper to the Linnean Society (as a woman, Potter could not speak or attend). But the Society dismissed the paper and Potter dropped the project; no copy of it has survived.
Biographers have inferred that she was the victim of institutional misogyny – 19th-century botany was a man’s world. But it may be that Potter came to doubt her own findings, or that, after 10 years of collecting fungi, she simply lost interest. Her diary only notes her suspicions that her uncle’s motives were ulterior.
Science’s loss was literature’s gain: after fungi, in the catalogue of Potter’s obsessions, came writing. The catalyst was Potter’s last governess, Annie Carter.
In the nursery at Bolton Gardens, Carter had taught the 17-year-old Potter German and Latin. Staying for two years, she offered Potter a model for female independence, in contrast to the daughterly concurrence demanded by Rupert and Helen. When Carter married a civil engineer called
Her sole companion was Benjamin H Bouncer, a ‘noisy cheerful’ rabbit