Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  Rupert was a good student at Manchester, excelling in the Greek and Roman classics and in ancient history, in which he took prizes in 1849. Rupert and Crompton both inherited their father’s interest in the fine arts, attending lectures at the Royal Manchester Institute, and enjoying exhibitions in London. As adults, both collected art, though on a vastly different scale. From his college days on, Rupert was fascinated by the new art of photography, a subject which had also intrigued his father, but he did not have the opportunity to take it up in any serious way until the mid-1860s.23

  Rupert took a London University degree in 1851, the first member of his family to do so. Although Crompton had matriculated at Manchester, he did not finish. After three years he entered the family business at Dinting Vale and, in the same year as Rupert finished his degree, Crompton was made a partner at Edmund Potter & Company. Rupert’s two younger brothers, Walter and William, also followed their elder siblings to the college. Walter took a degree in 1853 from London University and perhaps shared quarters with Rupert at University Hall for a time, but both he and William returned to Manchester to work. Rupert rejected a career in business and instead chose to study law, a choice that met with his father’s approval.

  There is an unexplained gap of two years between the end of Rupert’s studies at Manchester in 1851 and his appearance at Lincoln’s Inn in 1854. Evidence suggests that Rupert gave serious consideration to studying for the ministry. But lay students of Rupert’s generation were increasingly choosing careers in the professions, and the law had become an attractive alternative for many wealthy parents. For whatever reason, Rupert was temperamentally wise to strike out differently. While he was scientifically curious and artistically able, he was not disposed to decisive action or energetic leadership. He was deliberative, fond of abstractions, uneasy with both intellectual ambiguity and economic uncertainty, and inherently conservative. He loved books, politics and argument. The law suited him.24

  Rupert’s law student days in London were spent at Lincoln’s Inn. He was admitted on 17 January 1854 and became a pupil of Hugh McCalmont Cairns, a leading member of the Chancery bar, Member of Parliament, Solicitor-General and in 1868 Lord Chancellor. Since Rupert had already set his sights on the Chancery Division of the High Court, Cairns was probably his only pupil master. His association with Cairns was one from which he derived professional benefit.25

  Rupert’s apprenticeship in law at Lincoln’s Inn was not all devoted to serious study. A surviving sketchbook from 1853 includes humorous caricatures of his fellow students and life at the Inns of Court. There are also precise pen-and-ink sketches of animals, including a bear in an overcoat smoking a pipe, a dog at a spinning wheel and, most curiously, a flight of ducks over a marsh including one wearing a bonnet, an image which later struck the imagination of his daughter and was the precursor of another more elaborately bonneted duck she would one day make famous. The sketchbook and other evidence of Rupert’s artistry indicate that he enjoyed drawing and that he was skilled at it. He particularly enjoyed copying engravings and book illustrations, and he had an affinity for caricature.26

  Rupert Potter was called to the bar on 17 November 1857. He occupied chambers at 8 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, from 1858, moving in 1862 to 3 New Square, where he is continuously listed as occupant until 1892 when he would have been 60 and when he presumably retired. The annual Law Lists describe him as a barrister specializing as an equity draughtsman and conveyancer. This type of specialized legal work had to do with the transfer of property and the establishment of trusts, and as such his business was before the Chancery Division of the High Court. Rupert also practised before the Lancaster Chancery Court in Manchester and Liverpool, courts which specialized in conveyancing matters. As a barrister with north-country connections, he would naturally have business with this court. Potter gained considerable expertise in this area of the law, as demonstrated in a book on the subject he published in 1862 analysing legislation then pending in Parliament.

  Equity law and conveyancing normally did not involve the barrister in litigation. Furthermore his career would certainly have been impacted by the reorganization of the judicial system about 1876 when the Court of Chancery was abolished as an independent entity. These particularities of the law help explain the nature of Potter’s legal career as well as the rather casual schedule he kept as a barrister in his later years.27

  Rupert’s practice has been the subject of speculation, and, with no case record, it has been accepted that he did not actively practise law, leading a life of cultured idleness and living on inherited wealth. But this view must be amended. First, at least one case in which Rupert appeared as counsel reached the Law Reports, and presumably there were others in which he was a participant and which were not published. On the basis of this record, as well as the nature of the case, and the rarity of cases which identify counsel by name, one must conclude that by the time of Beatrix’s birth in 1866 Rupert had achieved some professional reputation.28

  Secondly, Rupert did not come into any of his inheritance until after his father’s estate was settled in 1884. His share was large, but not overly so given the size of his father’s estate, and it was not enough to support him in a life of total leisure. In fact, Rupert’s final inheritance from his father came in pieces: a more substantial portion upon the death of his mother in 1891, and the remainder when his elder sister Clara died in 1905. Finally, Rupert, like his father before him, made a variety of equity investments, about which his daughter reports him frequently anxious. These, combined with his other sources of earned and unearned income, made him extremely wealthy by the early 1890s.29

  As a young barrister Rupert pursued an active social life in London, using his father’s connections. Shortly after he came up to London he was elected to membership in the Reform Club. It was a natural choice for the son of a prominent Liberal and advantageous for cultivating clients and finding agreeable society. In 1860 Rupert was nominated to the Athenaeum, the most intellectually elite of all London clubs. Sir Charles Eastlake, President of the Royal Academy, Director of the National Gallery, President of the Photography Society of London, and a trend-setter in the art world, was one of his proposers.

  Rupert’s desire to move into such prestigious intellectual and artistic circles reflects his family’s considerable social connections, his own professional standing, and perhaps a certain naivety about social mobility. But it indicates that Rupert was ambitious for himself despite any detriments derived from his north-country birth or his background in trade. There was, however, a fourteen-year waiting list at the Athenaeum between Rupert’s entry into the candidates’ book and the time a vacancy appeared to which he could be elected. By April 1874, when his name came to the head of the waiting list, his original proposers had died. Their successors, however, were equally distinguished and more reflective of Rupert’s own associations. Rupert was elected to the Athenaeum by 243 votes to 5, his supporters’ sheet having about thirty-eight signatures, considered an average number. By this time Rupert’s politics were decidedly more conservative. The Athenaeum rather than the Reform became his club of choice, a preference also driven by his interest in photography and his participation in the London art scene.30

  When it came to marriage, Rupert showed an equal mix of ambition and pragmatism. Although he was anxious for entry into London society, he turned to his north-country roots for a bride, seven years younger, whose background and wealth matched his own. Rupert and Helen Leech were married on 8 August 1863 by Rupert’s former Manchester College classmate, the Revd Charles Beard, at Gee Cross Chapel. The 24-year-old bride came with a handsome legacy from her father, and looked forward to the prospect of a genteel life in London society. Since her mother still maintained a family home in London, Helen was not without connections of her own.

  Of all the members of Beatrix’s family, Helen Leech Potter’s history and personality is the most obscured and the most controversial. Nothing is known about her childhood and educat
ion. Only Beatrix’s reporting of Leech family conversations in her journal hint at Helen’s relationships with her siblings, her parents or her in-laws. According to family gossip, Elizabeth Leech Potter surpassed her younger sister in both beauty and disposition, and was the family’s favourite. Raised in considerable luxury, Helen was educated in the arts of household management and prepared for a life in society.31

  Helen joined her mother in activities that supported the Unitarian community in Stalybridge during the cotton famine, but her participation in philanthropic work reveals nothing about her commitment either to Nonconformity or to improving the lot of the poor since it was expected of young, single women of her background. Beatrix writes of the family attending church but most often she associates religious observance with her father and his family. As a married woman, Helen’s only known charitable involvement in London was the curious transcription of many volumes of unspecified literature into Braille for an association for the blind.32

  Helen Leech brought to her marriage in 1863 a particularly colourful, elaborately designed bedcover. It was probably a wedding gift from family and friends to which Helen, with her artful needle, may well have contributed a portion. The large bedcover features the initials of the bride and groom and their wedding date centred around a wreath of flowers and leaves. A diamond-shaped centre section featuring appliqué patches of mostly diamond blocks lends a three-dimensional effect. The coverlet’s survival testifies to the value Helen placed on it, and to her daughter’s later appreciation of its workmanship.33

  Helen also enjoyed painting and drawing. Several extant landscapes show a pleasing perspective, more than Sunday afternoon skill in brushwork, and a good sense of colour, if a bit too much motion. Her obvious enjoyment of drawing, painting and needlework do not set her apart from most upper-middle-class Victorian women, but they indicate that Helen shared her husband’s art enthusiasms and that she too had artistic talent that added to the sum ultimately inherited by both her children.34

  Photographs of Helen as a young mother show her grimly unsmiling and properly undemonstrative, as indeed do most photographs of the period, which required one to remain completely immobile for interminable minutes. She embraced the style and decorum demanded by her wealth and social aspirations, to which was added a measure of stiff reserve, or perhaps the reflection of an unhappy disposition. Her dark hair was severely parted in the middle, pulled back tightly, and elaborately wrapped on the back of her head in the fashion made popular by Queen Victoria, whom she resembled both in stocky stature and prominent feature.

  There is no record of Helen’s social activities, other than her daughter’s comments on the daily ritual of making social calls. Just how successful she was in her own society is a matter of speculation. Like her husband, Helen was burdened by a distinctive Lancashire accent and by her membership in the Nonconformist community, both detriments to moving up into the genteel society that she, at least, seems to have aspired to join. The Potters entertained in London during the season and, following the ritual of the social calendar, invited friends to join them on holiday, first in Scotland and later in the Lake District.

  The Potters’ social ambitions in London required that they minimize their family’s north-country origins, while at the same time they made use of its social connections. This attitude was not unusual for the second generation of merchant wealth, but Helen’s rejection of her family background seems less forgivable because it was accompanied by an often stinging disapproval of those she marked as inferior. Whether Helen was a snob by nature or whether it was an attitude she adopted as a Victorian norm, she felt herself and her family superior to those who worked in trade and to those professionals who were not in the same social class as her husband. Her pretentiousness was perhaps no greater than that of similarly situated Victorian women, but her attitudes contrasted poorly with those of her generous mother and mother-in-law. In any case her social hauteur was not an endearing quality.

  From her daughter’s maturing point of view, Helen was a difficult, controlling woman who demanded time and attentive service from everyone around her. Her insecurities and biases limited the experiences that were allowed to both her children, subsequently narrowing their social horizons. That said, Helen doubtlessly suffered from the oppressive confines of family, the endless boredom that afflicted many Victorian women who were circumscribed by the range of approved activities, and the paternalism of upper-middle-class society. At least in part, Helen Potter’s pretentiousness was a reflection of her personal powerlessness, to which might be added her lack of education and intellectual interests.35

  Helen’s page in a family ‘favourites’ album drawn in 1873, ten years after her marriage, provides another glimpse. In it she drew small coloured pictures of the things she liked and disliked at the time. She described dancing, music and the company of a sociable gentleman as favourites. The seashore was her choice for a holiday. But more revealing is a drawing that suggests that she had unusually severe dental problems. To be sure, smiling was not the fashion, and being constantly photographed by her husband was an arduous affair at best. But could it be that Helen’s sour, unsmiling, demeanour in nearly every extant photograph was in part an effort to hide prominent, even protruding teeth?36

  We know little of Helen’s network of female friends and relationships and thus are deprived of information about another important aspect that sustained the lives of Victorian women. Helen Potter has been portrayed as a disagreeable, self-centred woman who did more to impoverish her daughter’s life than enhance it. There is certainly truth in this interpretation. But it is also possible that Helen Potter has been understood primarily through the eyes of a precocious adolescent, an unusual daughter with eclectic interests that Helen did not understand, share or condone. Her marriage to Rupert seems to have been more enduring than truly companionable. It is possible, too, that Helen was bored as well as neglected by a husband whose interests kept him out of the house, in the club or behind the camera, and who certainly preferred the company of his artistic companions to social rounds with his wife.

  Rupert and Helen first settled into married life in London in Upper Harley Street, then a fashionable area of Marylebone. When Helen became pregnant with Beatrix in 1865 they sought larger, more fashionable quarters, eventually selecting a house in the rural area of Kensington off the Brompton Road. Bolton Gardens was a newly built enclave of large, granite-faced four-storey homes on both sides of the road, each with a small garden in the front and a larger one in the rear. Each house had its own mews with stables for horses, and housing for carriage and livery behind.

  Bolton Gardens was an appropriate neighbourhood for aspiring upper-middle-class professionals from mercantile backgrounds who were doing well and viewed themselves as a rising elite. It also appears to have been an enclave of distinguished Dissenters, among whom the Potters would have felt socially comfortable. Helen Potter brought a below-stairs staff of two sisters, Elizabeth and Sarah Harper from Stalybridge, as cook and housekeeper. A Londoner, George Cox, was hired as butler. Albert Reynolds, his wife and school-age sons, and a boarder, David Beckett, who was the groom, completed the Potters’ initial household.37

  A daughter, Helen Beatrix, was born at 2 Bolton Gardens on Saturday, 28 July 1866, in the twenty-eighth year of Queen Victoria’s reign. News of her arrival was announced in The Times with customary formality. Nearly six years later, on 14 March 1872, a brother, Walter Bertram, joined her in the nursery on the third floor. This ‘unloved birthplace’, as she later called it, would be Beatrix’s home for the next forty-seven years.38

  2

  Exposures

  There was nothing to obstruct the view from the third-floor nursery window over the rooftops of South Kensington all the way to the tower of the new Natural History Museum. Nor was there anything to restrict the physical or intellectual freedom of the little girl who occupied the nursery at 2 Bolton Gardens. Contrary to myth, the dormer windows had no iron bars in front o
f the sash, nor were there bars on the upper story of any of the Bolton Gardens houses facing the Old Brompton Road. Their existence, however, has been accepted as both fact and as a metaphor characterizing Potter’s psychological formation in most accounts of her childhood. The reality of life lived out on that third-floor nursery in the 1870s and 1880s was far more complex and much more vital than previously supposed.1

  Between early childhood and coming of age, the nursery evolved from nanny’s domain to schoolroom, art studio and botanical laboratory. Along the way it became home to a virtual museum collection of live pets and dead specimens, anthropological samples and microscopic studies of plants and insects. Potter’s childhood and girlhood was certainly solitary if measured by friendships and social interaction with her peers, but in terms of exposure to the world of art, literature, science, fantasy, travel and natural history, it was a rich and enviable one.

  From her earliest days Beatrix was nurtured in two extraordinary landscapes. Camfield Place, her Potter grandparents’ home, was cultivated and managed. Dalguise, the holiday house in Perthshire, Scotland, was untamed and chimerical. Both environments stimulated her interest in natural history, and gave permanent impression to her artist’s eye.

  Beatrix was born the year that her Grandfather Potter bought Camfield. Her earliest perceptions of the natural world and of nature’s beauty came first from the sights and sounds of the expansively planted grounds with its groves of pink flowering chestnuts and the colours of the surrounding rural countryside. Memories of birdsong and flowers, the routines of country life, farm animals, the pleasures of fresh milk, warm eggs and cosy fires were indelibly recorded. Holding hands with Grandmamma seated on the sofa beside her before dinner, Beatrix was supremely content. Life at Camfield as she recalled it was a ‘perfect whole, where all things are a part, the notes of the stable clock and the all pervading smell of new-mown hay, the distant sounds of the farmyard, the feeling of plenty, well-assured, indolent wealth, honourably earned and wisely spent, charity without ostentation, opulence without pride…’2