Beatrix Potter
JULY 1950
Behind the beloved tales for children was a young woman in Victorian Britain trying to find independence.
Who would have believed that this woman would write incomparably the favourite books “that bring grown-ups and children together in a shared delight?”
In the 1850s Beatrix Potter was born into a well-todo London family and promptly put in the care of a nurse. For most of the time she was left severely to herself – a shy little girl who had no one to play with.
Like a prisoner Beatrix grew up in a grim town house and day after day, year after year, she looked out through the third-floor windows with solitary eyes. All day she was alone with dolls and books. Amid the immense bleakness of her solitude she had to find her own secret path to fun and excitement.
The slow discovery of it began one summer when the family went to the country. A glorious change for Beatrix, for now she could go out-of-doors. She could draw pictures of the frog watching her from a stone in a stream, or a wood mouse washing his whiskers under a leaf. Crouched in a trance of stillness among the ferns, she shared little lives though long summer afternoons.
I can imagine the starchy dismay of Mamma and Papa Potter if they had ever found out what Beatrix kept hidden upstairs in the country house: a secret hoard of beetles, frogs, caterpillars, minnows and sloughed snake-skins.
She kept on drawing, too, and already her pictures, though firmly realistic, held a note of fantasy. Mufflers appear round the necks of rabbits skating on ice and carrying umbrellas; they walk out in bonnets and mantles.
When summer was over, some of
the treasures of the field were carried by stealth into the London house, which a cousin described as “a dark Victorian mausoleum complete with aspidistras”. On the third floor Beatrix reared a family of snails in a plant pot. Soon there was a pair of mice concealed in a box and fed on milk and biscuit crumbs after supper; and bats, which hung upside down in a parrot cage, came zigzagging across the room at dusk and settled on her fingers. Also there was a hedgehog called Tiggy who drank out of a doll’s tea-cup.
In mid-teens Beatrix was allowed downstairs a little more often, but she was too shy to meet the world. At parties given by cousins she refused to dance or to be introduced to anyone. After an hour the Potters’ coachman would take her home. She never went anywhere alone except to the Natural History Museum, a few minutes’ walk from the house; there she spent long mornings drawing stuffed animals.
For a little while Beatrix hoped to paint science pictures for museums. But one day the Keeper of Botany looked at her small, precious sketches – often no more than the fabric of a mouse’s nest or the eye of a squirrel – and told her she had a hopeless lack of “diagrammatic extension of details”.
So Beatrix laid her portfolios neatly away. After that she lived for years a Victorian life of prim do-nothingness. She reached her middle 30s, still without a man friend, and not a whit closer to her ageing parents. Then, one day, the butler brought her a letter which said that Noel, the little son of a former governess, was ill. For the next three months her letters to the sick boy were full of the doings of a rabbit, Peter, and in the margins she drew and painted tiny and exquisite pictures.
September 4th, 1893 My dear Noel, Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter. They lived with their mother in a sand-bank, under the root of a big fir tree. “Now, my dears,” said old Mrs Rabbit one morning, “you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr McGregor’s garden…”
FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS HER LETTERS TO THE SICK BOY WERE FULL OF THE DOINGS OF A RABBIT, PETER
The letter turns over, page after yellowed page. Here is Peter Rabbit among the lettuces, here Mr McGregor pursuing with his rake; and the words, read and chanted over and over again in the nurseries of two generations, still fall on the grown-up ear like an incantation of the innocent past.
It seems odd that Beatrix, this dowdily dressed spinster, could know exactly what interested children. Never did she descend indulgently to a childish level. She wrote on terms of perfect equality and as if to please herself. She was remembering something; she was stepping back, with Noel’s help, into a world of happy realities which was still the best she knew, green and secret oases in the desert of being grown up.
In the letters sent to the fevered boy, and later to other children, she was starting some of the best of her tales – creating such creatures as Squirrel Nutkin, Jemima Puddle-duck and the fabulous tailor of Gloucester, all characters as real as relatives. These first pen- and- ink drawings show such delightful scenes as the sandy recesses of a rabbit hole, furnished with chairs and tables, places where solemn little creatures explain that dried lavender is really rabbit tobacco.
With such ecstasy were these notions received by children that Beatrix decided to put them into a little book. Her manuscript, The Tale of Peter Rab
bit, was courteously rejected by seven London publishers.
But through the years, Beatrix had developed perseverance. Her parents,
HER PARENTS ALLOWED HER TO WITHDRAW HER SAVINGS AND PUBLISH HER FIRST BOOK HERSELF
though aghast, allowed her to withdraw her savings and publish her first book herself, spending £11 on it. The form was what she thought a children’s book should be – small, with only one or two simple sentences on each page and a picture every time one turned over. By February 1900 the first edition of 500 copies was ready, and Beatrix began to sell them to friends.
Children fell immediately in love with them; short ly the sales became so brisk that Beatrix wrote to Warne, the publishing house which had first rejected her book, and asked them to reconsider. They did, and asked her to do new illustrations in colour.
They were the first of her hundreds of water-colour illustrations – bird and animal characters, dressed in bonnets and shawls, coats and trousers, against a country landscape of hills and woods.
Thus began a publishing adventure with few parallels in the world of children.
But there was trouble ahead. No sooner did the neglected lady on the third floor begin to be successful than Papa Potter decided to take full charge, although Beatrix was now 36 years old. When a persistent young publisher insisted on dealing with his author without interference, she wrote, in humiliation: “I regret that I cannot call at the office again before leaving town. I have had such painful unpleasantness at home about the work that I should like a rest from scolding while I am away. I should be obliged if you will kindly say no more about a new book at present.”
Norman Warne, son of the publisher, seethed against the tyranny to which she submitted so meekly. Clearly the Potters were made uneasy by the tiny measure of independence which success had already given Beatrix. Moreover, they were suspicious of her brightened spirits, and not without reason. For Beatrix had made friends with Norman, and there was a sparkle in her strong blue eyes.
Papa and Mamma were alarmed. Publishing was a trade, and certainly Beatrix could never be allowed to marry a tradesman. But Beatrix accepted invitations to the Warne house, where the warm family life was a revelation. Her acute shyness overcome, she felt at home there. With his magic lantern, Norman beguiled the winter evenings; and he showed Beatrix the workshop in the basement where building dolls’ houses and rabbit cages was his hobby.
Soon Beatrix realised that in him she had at last found a being not unlike herself. Only her intense reserve concealed from her watchful parents the depth of her feeling. But after four years, in 1905, the Potters had to know.
Norman had proposed marriage and Beatrix accepted him.
The Potters took a stand of uncompromising hostility, and the next few months were deeply painful. Then Norman fell ill. When finally he was persuaded to consult a doctor, he was in an advanced stage of pernicious anaemia. A few days before Christmas he died.
The grief of Beatrix had to be borne in silence; at home it could not even be mentioned. Soon it became clear that a great change had come over her. Beatrix, asking no one’s advice or permission, bought herself a farm in the Lake District. There was a small, slate-roofed farmhouse; herbs and flowers bloomed beside the path, and an untidy pink rosebush straggled across the face of the house.
At Hill Top Farm Beatrix was more at peace than ever before, and book after little book for the young came flashing from her pen and brush – spell-weaving tales possessed of the poetry and texture of lyrics.
And then in the midst of her triumphs she gave up writing forever. She had met a country lawyer, William Heelis. At 47, still at odds with Papa and Mamma, Beatrix Potter married.
For the first time in her life she was sure of having a sympathetic companion always beside her.
Yet, as if she could hardly bear to be reminded of her early life, she deliberately buried her former self. The few stories she essayed were far below [the standard of] her earlier tales. Reporters seeking interviews were sent away with stupefying rudeness.
For 38 years she lived in happy wedlock, farming her land and tending her animals, unti l her death in 1943.
Why are the Beatrix Potter books still incomparably the favourites of the nursery? In all her stories, however fabulous, she wrote of little creatures in human terms. Ginger, the cat, serving behind the grocery counter, is a figure of pure fantasy, yet his cat nature is delicately underlined:
“The shop was also patronised by mice – only the mice were rather afraid of Ginger. Ginger usually requested Pickles to serve them, because he said it made his mouth water.”
Not long ago a leading newspaper declared: “Beatrix Potter’s greatness lies in the fact that she was able, again and again, to create that rare thing – a book that brings grown-ups and children together in a shared delight.”