Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  She loved old houses even then: exploring the back stairs and the hidden passage ways at Camfield that connected the old house to the new, just as she loved the musty smell and the dust motes floating in the slant of light that penetrated the cellar windows of Grandmother Leech’s house, Gorse Hall, in Stalybridge. ‘I wonder why houses smell so different,’ she wrote after a visit there. ‘On thinking of a place the first recollection is the smell and amount of light.’ Inquisitive and fearless, she scoffed at superstition and exaggerated claims of terror surrounding both houses, spread by older cousins, and had no hesitation about investigating such terrain by herself.3

  Camfield was ‘the place I love best in the world’, she wrote in her journal. It was beautiful to her in all seasons. She seems always to have remembered landscape details in colour. Typical was her reminiscence of Camfield in 1891: ‘The autumn frost spreads a ruddy glow over the land… Miles upon miles of golden oak wood, with here and there a yellow streak of stubble, and a clump of russet walnut trees behind the red gable, and thin blue smoke of a farm… In summer the distant landscapes are intensely blue.’4

  Quite possibly she was a babe in arms when she was introduced to a starkly different landscape: one that was equally lush in its own right, but distinguished by wide, flat rivers, and grassy green straths which yielded unexpectedly to dark, mysterious larch forests with damp, mossy floors. Forested hills often hid streams which splashed over ancient rocky outcroppings before flowing out into the valley. The Scottish countryside around Perthshire combined landscapes where reality and fantasy were often indistinguishable. Once again it was Grandfather Potter who made this countryside accessible to her.

  An avid fisherman, Edmund Potter took a shooting estate in the remote Highlands near Alness in Easter Ross. Henry Roscoe, newly married to Edmund’s youngest daughter, Lucy, remembered that in addition to sport, they amused themselves with photography in which both Lucy and Rupert were much interested and at which both excelled. Rupert continued the tradition of Scottish holidays, in 1870, when Beatrix was nearly four, staying at Tulliemet House, an estate in the eastern forests of the Tay. The following summer they moved south, to Dalguise House on the western shore of the river, not far from the ancient cathedral seat of Dunkeld, where the fishing was exceptional.5

  Dalguise House, a rather stark estate with beautifully landscaped gardens, was begun in 1714 and enlarged in the early nineteenth century, making it more suitable for holiday entertaining. The Laird of Dalguise, John Steuart, although an absentee owner, kept the estate well stocked with game and its many outbuildings in good condition with capable managers. The summer of 1871 was the beginning of a decade of summers Beatrix spent at Dalguise — a place which immediately became home to her heart. The Scottish landscape provided a feast for her eye, nourishment for her imagination and freedom for her spirit. It was this landscape against which she would compare all others, and upon which she would base her aesthetic value of nature.6

  Beatrix loved Dalguise from her very first visit. When she was about six she wrote a letter to her father, who was already in Perthshire fishing, asking him: ‘If you see anything pretty will you please send me a picture of it and then I will send you a letter back, and send word how the dogs are and if it is fine and nice at Dalguise.’ Rupert indulged his little daughter with details of Dalguise: ‘My dear B.,… I will write you a letter before I go to bed to tell you something about Dalguise. I said to McIntosh [the gamekeeper] “what sort of a little dog is Sandy” & he said I should see & he whistled & out came a brown dog with such long hair & such queer sharp ears that I did not know him at all [here Rupert drew a pen and ink sketch of a little terrier] — he is something like this & very full of fun — but he has not got such a fine tail as Tiny(?) had & he cannot beg & is rather greedy, so we must teach him manners.’ Rupert then went on to report on the status of Beatrix’s ‘pretence garden’, which had been trampled by the cows over the winter, and the animals he had seen. ‘I saw a little bunny on the lawn no bigger than your bear… but he will be a big bunny soon I am afraid & will be mischievous.’7

  Looking back on a decade of holiday summers in Scotland, it seemed to Beatrix that her happiest moments were those spent at Dalguise. There she got extra attention from her father, the opportunity to have as many pets as she wanted, to collect butterflies, identify birds, make friends with farm animals, explore the countryside, and draw and paint whatever she saw, whenever she wanted. ‘I remember every stone, every tree, the scent of the heather, the music sweetest mortal ears can hear, the murmuring of the wind through the fir trees,’ she recalled later. ‘Even when the thunder growled in the distance, and the wind swept up the valley in fitful gusts, oh, it was always beautiful, home sweet home…’8

  During these long summer holidays the Potters entertained family and friends, especially those who liked to fish and who would endure Rupert’s endless photography sessions. John Bright, the elder statesman among the Quakers, and William Gaskell were Beatrix’s particular favourites and came regularly. Bright loved to fish and Gaskell enjoyed the scenic countryside. Some of Rupert’s many photographs show Gaskell, seated in a lawn chair with his arm affectionately around the pretty young child. Little Beatrix must have reminded the kindly minister of his own daughters. She responded to his genuineness with affection. For Christmas 1874 she knitted him a scarf. In his note thanking her, Gaskell wrote: ‘Big as I am I know I could not have done it one-tenth as well. Every time I put it round my neck — which during this weather will be every day — I shall be sure to think of you.’9

  Sir John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, who by the 1870s was one of the most successful society painters in England, with his wife, the former Effie Ruskin, was another regular at Dalguise. Millais frequently asked Potter to assist him in his portrait and landscape painting by photographing his subject or scene, thus creating an aide-memoire for the painter to work from when his model was unavailable. Although Millais frequently teased the shy Beatrix and made her blush, she listened to his conversation and observed his painting with increasing critical appreciation. There were visits from other distinguished friends and, in between, various Potter and Leech relatives who came to enjoy the countryside. All were recorded by Rupert’s camera either on the lawn beside the stately stone column surmounted by a unicorn or on the steps in front of the house.10

  Beatrix also got to know a variety of local Perthshire people over the years. Charlie McIntosh, the tall, lanky, enormously shy postmannaturalist, walked the rural route from Dunkeld to Tulliemet, Kitty MacDonald, the tiny woman from Inver who took in their laundry, and Mr Wood, the local entomologist, who knew that Beatrix and Bertram liked to draw. One hot summer afternoon Wood stopped by with a present ‘out of his hat’, of ‘buff-tip caterpillars collected on the road… but they had got loose amongst his venerable grey locks’. There were trips to tradesmen and merchants, all of whom Beatrix observed carefully. Some, like the well-known photographer A. F. Mackenzie and his wife, became family friends. The stationmaster John Kinnaird, who greeted them at the railhead at Birnam, was particularly colourful. Unlike the winter months in London, where every activity was carefully regimented and supervised, Beatrix had plenty of opportunity at Dalguise to socialize with her family’s guests, or to go off by herself.11

  Beatrix’s first nurse was a Scot — for they were thought simply the best nurses to be had, and no wealthy Victorian family could be without one. Nurse Ann Mackenzie from Inverness was a Calvinist, presumably dour and intolerant of permissiveness, which was, of course, the point. Recalling Nurse Mackenzie, Beatrix later wrote rather uncharitably: ‘I remember when I was a child lying in a crib in the nursery bedroom [at Camfield] under the tyranny of a cross old nurse — I used to be awakened at four in the morning by the song of the birds in this elm [opposite the kitchen window]. I can feel the diamond-pattern of that old yellow crib printed against my cheek, as I lay with my head where my heels should be, staring backwards over my eye brows at
the plaster heads on the chimney piece, and a large water-colour alpine scene which I regarded with respectful awe.’ But it was this same ‘cross old nurse’ who put Beatrix to bed with stories of fairies and the Scottish good folk, and sang the rousing hymns of the famous eighteenth-century Nonconformist composer Isaac Watts, the cadences of which lingered long in her hearing, and were later imitated in efforts at hymnody. As Beatrix later acknowledged, Nurse Mackenzie bequeathed ‘a firm belief in witches, fairies and the creed of the terrible John Calvin (the creed rubbed off, but the fairies remained)’.12

  Mackenzie immersed her charge in the rich folklore of the Scottish Highlands. During the summer holidays at Dalguise they walked about the countryside discovering the hidden and the magical about them. Beatrix began to explore alone, comfortably certain that the countryside was filled with fairies, and lost in her own imagination. Her later governesses had only to build upon the already rich repository of fantasy and folklore, nature study, and love of drawing that Nurse Mackenzie uncovered.13

  The books that Nurse Mackenzie read to Beatrix in Scotland contained large amounts of folklore, rhyme and adventure. The good nurse was probably unaware of the still volatile debate as to whether fairy stories were good for young children, or else she had made up her mind that they were harmless, since she provided Beatrix with a sample of everything, but fantasy was heavily favoured. Along with stories from the Old Testament, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beatrix recalled as favourites Aesop’s Fables, the older fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and newer ones by Hans Christian Andersen, and particularly the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott. She also enjoyed Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, a fantasy written in reaction to those who insisted that stories for children must teach a moral value. Surrounded as she was by these fables and rhymes, it is not surprising that they would be the subject of some of her earliest illustrations or that later in life certain landscapes frequently reminded her of scenes from her favourite childhood books.14

  Beatrix loved to draw and paint. Her talent was obvious from a young age and her parents encouraged her. Beatrix had observed that her parents carried sketchbooks when they went out in the countryside and she imitated them by making her own out of rough paper that she fastened together with string. Her earliest sketchbook, inscribed ‘Dalguise 1875’, contains a careful study of a dozen or so caterpillars drawn in watercolour. Each page is divided into two columns: one gives a physical description, the other observations on their habits. She made extensive records of birds’ eggs and butterflies. The fine wood specimen cabinet that occupied a corner of the schoolroom at Bolton Gardens was filled with the children’s collections of moths, butterflies and insects, all properly mounted and identified as to genus and family.15

  Beatrix was interested in recording what she saw around her. Her sketchbook includes a farmer with a cow, a house at the foot of a mountain, a bridge over the river, all unembellished and realistically rendered. Beatrix also delighted in drawing the fanciful. A sketchbook that dates from 1874 and 1875, when she was eight or nine, includes drawings of rabbits on ice-skates wearing jackets, hats and scarves. As a child growing up in London, Beatrix would have had many opportunities to observe people ice-skating and perhaps to try it herself. But they could also have been inspired by watching members of the Dalguise Curling Club.16

  In addition to sketching from nature, both Beatrix and Bertram enjoyed drawing and copying from various drawing books popular during the period. Rupert’s influence is clear in his children’s love of copying animals and sketching from book illustrations. When both children were young, he sketched animals to amuse and to instruct them. He owned a number of Vere Foster drawing books from which he sketched and which Beatrix later enjoyed on her own. For her part, Beatrix approved her father’s sketching, though much later she criticized his lack of understanding of what was required to paint a picture. On the back of one drawing that he had made for her as a child and which she kept until her death, she wrote proudly: ‘note the direct work & “touch”.’17

  Much of Potter’s juvenile work was copied. Some came from outline drawings in the manuals on birds, flowers and mammals. But she also made sketches of buildings, trees, baskets and a water butt. Her particularly vivid flower drawings of 1876 were probably copied from Foster manuals on ‘Foxgloves’, ‘Narcissus’ and ‘Daffodil’, or from the popular Art of Flower Painting by James Andrews. These and several of her other copying efforts were also deemed worthy of preservation by her parents.18

  As the children grew, Rupert encouraged them to study birds. At both Camfield and Dalguise they could listen to their songs, explore the woods, and find their nesting places. For her tenth birthday, in July 1876, Rupert gave Beatrix Jemima Blackburn’s Birds Drawn from Nature (1868), a gift that delighted her and one that sharpened her eye for nature as well as art. ‘I remember so clearly — as clearly as the brightness of rich Scotch sunshine on the threadbare carpet,’ she wrote in 1891 after meeting the famous Mrs Blackburn in person,

  the morning I was ten years old — and my father gave me Mrs Blackburn’s book of birds, drawn from nature, for my birthday present. I remember the dancing expectation and knocking at their bedroom door, it was a Sunday morning, before breakfast. I kept it in the drawing room cupboard, only to be taken out after I had washed my grimy little hands under that wonderful curved brass tap, which, being lifted, let loose the full force of ice-cold amber-water from the hills. The book was bound in scarlet with a gilt edge. I danced about the house with pride, never palled.19

  That same year she made a fine copy from Blackburn’s 1871 narrative poem The Pipits.20

  Beatrix’s early summer holidays at Dalguise coincided with her delight in picture books and her earliest efforts to read. Her childhood encompassed both the Arts and Crafts and the Aesthetic movements in art and design. At mid-century there had been an explosion of interest in children’s books both as a literary genre and as a venue for stylish artists. Children’s book illustration was considered high art and children’s books became part of Victorian fashion, like architecture and home decor. Well-to-do parents took delight in buying artistic books for their offspring. The Potters, as consumers with their own artistic enthusiasms, were no exception. Toy books, brightly coloured booklets with stiff covers that contained a nursery rhyme or fairy tale, were enormously popular when Beatrix was young. Often they were illustrated by first-rate artists, which made them especially desirable. The pioneers of the picture book, the so-called ‘triumvirate’ of Edmund Evans, the virtuoso colour printer who so skilfully reproduced their images from woodblocks, were Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott. Beatrix absorbed the techniques of all three artists, and all influenced her eye, but she was particularly fond of Caldecott’s work. It was an opinion she shared with her father, who later collected Caldecott.21

  What is known about Beatrix Potter’s childhood reading comes primarily from letters she wrote later in life. She recalled enjoying Mrs Molesworth’s stories about real children, illustrated by Crane, and remembered particularly one called ‘Carrots’, about a red-headed boy. It is likely she knew Molesworth’s ‘The Cuckoo Clock’, and ‘Reel Fairies’, about a child who invented fairy characters from cotton reels in her mother’s sewing box. Crane, Greenaway and Caldecott all adopted costumes of the early nineteenth century for their characters, a convention which Beatrix seems to have absorbed. All three artists, as well as Evans’ skilful engraving, influenced her tastes.22

  Beatrix had access to the popular work of the English illustrators Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle, Hablot K. Browne, famous as ‘Phiz’, the illustrator of Dickens’s novels, and Gustave Doré, whose drawings frequently appeared in Punch and the Illustrated London News. In light of her father’s friendship with John Everett Millais it is tempting to speculate that Beatrix may also have enjoyed his illustrations in Little Songs for Me to Sing, published the year before h
er birth, which featured a little girl who looked remarkably like the young Beatrix. Later on, she also enjoyed St. Nicholas, an American children’s magazine that published fine fiction, lavishly illustrated by the best American artists.23

  Before she was eight years old two books had made a particular impression. She was four-and-a-half when she was given Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense with his fanciful illustrations and memorable rhymes, including the much-loved ‘Owl and the Pussy-Cat’. She was six or seven when her mother decided she was old enough for Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Professor John Wilson, a barrister friend of Rupert’s, provided her first copy, conferring first with Helen Potter as to ‘whether I was old enough — or whether the book was too old? which was the same thing… I became immediately so absorbed with Tenniel’s illustrations that I don’t remember what they said about “Lewis Carroll”.’ Later she made her own illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as for several of Lear’s rhymes. There are Carrollian inflections in Potter’s private prose writing and, more notably, in her storybook characters. Whether by conscious imitation or by chance, Potter, like Lear and Carroll before her, also amused herself by writing letters to young children.24