by Linda Lear
Linda Lear
* * *
BEATRIX POTTER
A Life in Nature
Contents
List of Illustrations
Map
Prologue: Ownership
1 Roots
2 Exposures
3 Transitions
4 Experiments
5 Discoveries
6 Fantasies
7 Ideas
8 Realities
9 Losses
10 Stories
11 Diversions
12 Satisfactions
13 Partnerships
14 Salvages
15 Opportunities
16 Legacies
17 Americans
18 Ventures
19 Passages
20 Challenges
21 Reflections
Epilogue: Stewardship
Illustrations
Select Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Linda Lear has always been intrigued by how the lives of artists and writers have been influenced by the natural world. She discovered quite by accident that before Beatrix Potter began her legendary series of ‘little books’ for children she had been an avid student of natural history and might have had a career in science had such opportunities been available to women. As Lear explored Potter’s evolution from amateur scientist to acclaimed author-illustrator and careful steward of the land, she herself became an admirer of Lakeland’s farms, fells and sheep. A professor of environmental history, and the author of the prize-winning biography, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, Lear is an enthusiastic horticulturist and collector of botanical art. She and her husband live in Bethesda, Maryland.
PENGUIN BOOKS
BEATRIX POTTER
‘Rounded, sympathetic and fascinating… Potter’s legacy is rich and varied, and Lear has done her proud’ Herald
‘Potter’s marvellous voice, captured in letters and journals, comes through loud and clear in this new biography… Lear gives us much to consider about this unfamiliar and remarkable woman’ Lavinia Greenlaw, Daily Telegraph
‘Shows Potter in a new light’ Evening Standard
‘Lear’s dazzling study of a pioneering life influenced by nature forces us to re-examine every assumption made about Potter. Her own writing shines with wistful appreciation… we are left to marvel at the life and work of a true “woman of substance” ’ Vanessa Curtis, Scotland on Sunday
‘Curl up with Lear’s excellent new biography’ Daily Mail
‘Read Beatrix Potter and you sense a woman poised between late-Victorian constraint and the promises, intellectual and amorous, of liberation’ Anthony Lane, New Yorker
‘Diligent and humorous, Linda Lear is a good match for her subject’ Economist
‘The Beatrix Potter depicted in Linda Lear’s authoritative biography was undoubtedly heroic’ John Carey, Sunday Times
‘Linda Lear’s new biography brings Potter to centre stage… every page is informed by loving research which takes us inside the life of this impressively determined, courageous woman… In Linda Lear, this generous and creative woman has found a tenacious and sympathetic biographer’ Frances Spalding, Daily Mail
‘Lear has done a terrific job in collating information about a richly fascinating life’ Sally Vickers, The Times
For John
Beatrix Potter to Marjory Moore, age 10, about the difficulties of publishing a book (the Tale of Peter Rabbit) and a visit to the British Museum Reading Room. Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
List of Illustrations
Frederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.
1. Beatrix aged about five (courtesy of the Beatrix Potter Society)
2. The Potter family at Dalguise House, about 1881 (Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)
3. Beatrix at Dalguise House, with her spaniel ‘Spot’ (courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum)
4. Dalguise House in Perthshire (courtesy of a private collector)
5. Edmund Potter (courtesy of Manchester Archives & Local Studies)
6. Jessy Crompton (courtesy of a private collector)
7. Beatrix at Dalguise House with the Revd William Gaskell (courtesy of a private collector)
8. Beatrix, Bertram and Rupert Potter at Heath Park, Birnam, Perthshire, 1892 (courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum)
9. Beatrix with Xarifa, her pet dormouse, 1885 (Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)
10. Woodmouse, 1886
11. Peter Rabbit, 1898
12. Study of Judy the lizard, 1884
13. Beatrix, Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, and his son, Noel (courtesy of a private collector)
14. Sprays of Regal Pelargonium, 1886 (Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library)
15. Cedar at Birds’ Place, Camfield Place
16. Leaves and flowers of the Orchid Cactus, 1886 (courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York)
17. Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe (courtesy of a private collector)
18. ‘A Dream of Toasted Cheese’, 1899 (courtesy of a private collector)
19. ‘The Toads’ Tea Party’ 1902?
20. Grisette, 1893 (courtesy of Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Scotland)
21. Charles McIntosh (courtesy of Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Scotland)
22. Peter Rabbit and Mr McGregor
23. Old Man of the Woods, 3 September [1893] (courtesy of Perth Museum & Art Gallery, Scotland)
24. Noel Moore (courtesy of a private collector)
25. George Massee (courtesy of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
26. William T. Thiselton-Dyer (courtesy of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
27. Larch canker, 1896 (courtesy of the Armitt Collection)
28. Sheet Web spider, 1896
29. Eight fossils from the Applethwaite beds, Troutbeck, 1895
30. A street of shops leading down to the sea, Lyme Regis, Dorset, 1904
31. ‘Three little mice sat down to spin’, c. 1892
32. Staircase at Bedwell Lodge, 1891
33. Welsh dresser, Gwaynynog, 1903
34. ‘The Rabbits’ Potting Shed’, 1891
35. Norman Warne, 1898 (courtesy of a private collector)
36. ‘A November day’, c. 1905
37. ‘Old Mr. Prickly Pin’, c. 1902
38. ‘Guinea pigs go gardening’, 1893
39. ‘The chimney stack stood up above the roof like a little stone tower’, from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908)
40. Mouse threading a needle, from The Tailor of Gloucester (1903)
41. Painted Lady and Small Tortoiseshell butterflies, 1887
42. ‘Miss Butterfly’, the Red Admiral butterfly from The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse (1910)
43. ‘Jemima Puddle-duck was not much in the habit of flying’, from The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908)
44. Beatrix with Kep, 1913 (courtesy of the National Trust)
45. ‘An entrance gate in a wall, with a background of fields and trees’, Laund House, Bolton Abbey, 1902
46. Hill Top Farm, 1940 (courtesy of a private collector)
47. Sawrey village under snow, 1909
48. Beatrix and William the day before their wedding on 15 October 1913 (courtesy of the Warne Archive)
49. Pigwig and Pigling Bland escape
50. Background for the frontispiece for The Tale of Pigling Bland (1909)
51. Castle Cottage (FWA, phot
o by Rupert Potter)
52. Garden steps at Fawe Park, Derwentwater, 1903 (courtesy of the Rare Book Department, The Free Library of Philadelphia)
53. Onions at Fawe Park, Derwentwater, 1903
54. Beatrix Potter and Tom Storey with their prize-winning ewe, c. 1930 (courtesy of the National Trust)
55. Study of a sheep’s head
56. Mrs Heelis at the Keswick sheep show, 1935 (courtesy of a private collector)
57. Troutbeck Tongue (courtesy of a private collector)
58. View across Esthwaite Water to hills and mountains, 1909
59. Bertha Mahony (Miller), 1929 (courtesy of The Horn Book, Inc.)
60. Marian Frazer Harris Perry (courtesy of Nonya Stevens Wright)
61. The Eller-Tree Camp from The Fairy Caravan (1929)
62. Xarifa’s tale from The Fairy Caravan (1929)
63. Beatrix and a group of Girl Guides (courtesy of Girlguiding UK)
64. Caricature of Beatrix and a pig leaning on a fence, c. 1924
65. ICAA Christmas card, 1932
66. The board for Peter Rabbit’s Race Game (1919)
67. Beatrix with her Pekinese, Tzusee and Chuleh, 1943 (courtesy of the Warne Archive)
68. Beatrix and her shepherd (courtesy of a private collector)
69. Beatrix as an old woman at Hill Top (courtesy of a private collector)
PROLOGUE
Ownership
Near Sawrey, Lancashire
It was a cold, wet November day in 1918. The frosty air had settled just above the lake. Soon it would be dark. Through the gloom the figure of a woman could just be made out. She was on her hands and knees scrabbling about in the stubble of the harvested cornfield, searching for something. Close up she was a handsome woman with noticeably high colour in her cheeks, deep-set brilliant blue eyes and unruly brown hair pulled back haphazardly from her face. Her somewhat rounded frame was mostly hidden by several layers of outerwear. She wore a long, coarse wool jacket, wool stockings, and serviceable clogs as defence against the chill.
The woman was Mrs William Heelis, the former Beatrix Potter, the acclaimed creator of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and the author and illustrator of over twenty other little books for children. At 52 she was a happily married woman of five years and a successful landowner and country farmer of more than a decade. But just now she was desperately searching for the ring that Norman Warne, once her editor and publisher, had given her a month before he died and which she had worn every day for the past thirteen years as a treasured remembrance. It had slipped off her cold fingers while she was helping the hired men lift the heavy sheaves of bundled corn. She had already untied many on the threshing floor in hopes of finding it there, but now she was back in the field searching one more time before the light completely faded.
Suddenly she saw it, a simple gold ring among the wet stuff they had thrown down for the hens. ‘I am glad I was spared that last crowning distress of a most disastrous harvest,’ she wrote to Norman’s sister a few days later. ‘I should have had just one consolation, it was a pretty, quiet sheltered field to lie in, if it had not been found. My hand felt very strange & uncomfortable without it.’ The near-loss of Norman’s ring reminded Beatrix once again of how sad she had been when she had purchased Hill Top Farm in the autumn of 1905, and how much her life had changed.1
Near Sawrey was still a hamlet when Helen Beatrix Potter, a 39-year-old spinster from London, became the unlikely owner of Hill Top. The seventeenth-century farm sits back from the road on the eastern edge of the quiet, peaceful village – a place that looks like artists’ country. A few other farms, some scattered whitewashed cottages and the grandly named Tower Bank Arms stood, then as now, fronting fields that slope down to the shore of Esthwaite Water, one of the prettiest of the smaller lakes. Framing this soft hilly country are the Tilberthwaite Fells, and beyond them loom the Langdale Pikes.
Near Sawrey and its sister village, Far Sawrey, are distinguished by their proximity to the ancient market town of Hawkshead. Both sit upon the narrow strip of farmland between Esthwaite Water and the western shore of Windermere, in the township of Claife, now part of Cumbria but until rather recently the northern tip of Lancashire. There was no nationally protected Lake District Park, only a barely identifiable geographic region in the corner of north-west England, made famous in the early nineteenth century by a group of Romantic poets. Their literary celebration of the virtues of rural solitude ironically increased the number of tourists and ‘off-comers’ who discovered the mesmerizing beauty of the English Lakes. By mid-century the Romantic idyll was over. But in tiny hamlets like Near Sawrey, life went on much as it always had.
‘My purchase seems to be regarded as a huge joke,’ Beatrix wrote to Norman’s brother, Harold Warne, her editor at Frederick Warne & Co. It was early October 1905, just after she had arrived at the farm. ‘I have been going over my hill with a tape measure.’ But there was little she could do to mitigate the scepticism of her Sawrey neighbours. It was commonly known that Miss Potter had paid nearly twice as much for her thirty-four-acre farm as the previous owner — a fact Beatrix herself would not discover until it was too late to renegotiate the price. Buying Hill Top Farm had been her first independent business decision, paid for mostly with her own money. Her subsequent embarrassment at the inflated price was a painful lesson. In the future she would do her homework more carefully, and have a local solicitor to advise her. But nothing could diminish her joy at owning her own property.2
It is impossible to know when Beatrix Potter first came upon Near Sawrey. It may have been as early as the summer of 1882 when, at the age of 16, she walked over to the market town of Hawkshead from Wray Castle on the shore of Windermere. She recorded then, ‘Had a series of adventures. Inquired the way three times, lost continually, alarmed by collies at every farm, stuck in stiles, chased once by cows.’ She had noted the architectural details of Hawkshead’s buildings: the handsome Norman church with its fine oak carving, and the little Quaker Meeting House at nearby Colthouse whose door opened with a huge iron key. Several days later, Beatrix joined her parents and their guest, the orator John Bright, for a drive around Esthwaite Water. On their way around the lake they certainly passed through the tiny hamlet.3
Over the next decade, the wealthy Potter family frequently came to the Lake District on holiday. They spent a number of summers at Lingholm and Fawe Park, two large estates on the western shore of Derwentwater near Keswick, and some at Holehird, a mansion with expansive grounds perched high above Windermere. No matter where the family stayed, Beatrix explored the surrounding countryside. During a holiday in the Scottish lowlands in 1892, an area she had known and loved since childhood, she was reminded of the little English village of Near Sawrey. ‘I prefer a pastoral landscape backed by mountains,’ she wrote, even after a drive along the scenic Braan. ‘I have often been laughed at for thinking Esthwaite Water the most beautiful of the Lakes. It really strikes me that some scenery is almost theatrical, or ultra-romantic.’ Owing partly to their daughter’s enthusiasm for Near Sawrey, the Potters decided to lease Lakefield just outside the village in 1896.4
That long summer holiday allowed Beatrix to become well acquainted with the village, its cottages, shopkeepers and children, the countryside around Esthwaite Water, and especially with the neighbouring Hill Top Farm. There was something beautiful, something that pleased her senses everywhere she went. From the garden terrace of Lakefield the fields seem to fold down upon themselves to the edge of the lake. The light was never once the same on the hills opposite. It was a view that always captivated her and one which she would paint in every season.5
Beatrix celebrated her thirtieth birthday in Sawrey that summer, noting the passage with some pleasure. ‘I feel much younger at thirty than I did at twenty; firmer and stronger both in mind and body,’ she wrote, obviously relishing her time there and feeling inwardly renewed. ‘A perfect, hot summer day, cloudless’ until ‘evening when it rolled up like thunder round How
Fell’. Walking home after tea with some young cousins, she remarked upon the ‘very pleasant evening-light, and village people up and down the road and in the flowery little gardens’. Perhaps this was also the summer she determined to buy property there one day, but whenever it was, her deep contentment in Near Sawrey created an indelible memory.6
In 1900 the Potters again came to Lakefield. By then the country house had resumed its Old English name, Ees Wyke, meaning ‘house east of the water’, although it was more commonly known as Eeswyke, after the inlet close by. One village observer remembered that in 1900 the family came ‘with their servants, their carriage and pair, and Miss Potter with her pony and Phaeton’. Their coachman David Beckett and his family took lodgings at Hill Top Farm with Henry Preston and Beatrix frequently walked over to the farm to visit and to sketch.7
When the Potters returned two years later, Beatrix had more pressing things on her mind. All spring she had been working with Norman Warne, the youngest son of her publisher, Frederick Warne & Co., who was overseeing the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, her first commercially printed children’s book. Beatrix had arrived in Sawrey just in time to approve the colour blocks of her illustrations. Letters flew between Beatrix at Eeswyke and Norman Warne in London attending to the details of printing. The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published in early October 1902 while the Potters were still in Sawrey, the entire first printing sold out before publication.8
In the autumn of 1905 Beatrix was back at Sawrey. Much had changed in three years. She was the author of five more books for children: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester in 1903, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and The Tale of Two Bad Mice in 1904, and soon, The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, all with Norman Warne as her editor. For a slender moment that spring, after she accepted his engagement ring, Beatrix thought her own story might ‘come right’. Then Norman died. But she had earned money on her own, her books were a commercial success, and now she was to be a woman of property: the owner of Hill Top Farm.
