Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  Beatrix’s social commentary reflects not only changes and fissures between relatives, but a deepening social conservatism which mirrored the very real social and economic unrest of the times. Economic misery followed the serious agricultural depression of 1873. Prices and incomes dropped, rents could not be paid and domestic violence increased. The difficult political question of Irish Home Rule dominated all the elections. The Liberal majority returned in the general election in the autumn of 1885 was unstable and short-lived. When a large demonstration of unemployed labourers spilled onto the streets of London in February 1886, there was widespread property damage. Soldiers were called out and many well-to-do people fled the city. Helen Potter listened nervously for sounds of the mob outside Bolton Gardens in the evening, while Rupert talked about ‘going to the Colonies, Edinburgh, [or] quiet provincial towns’: threats he had uttered routinely over the last decade. However, he had good reason to fret about the future, particularly as his large portfolio of foreign investments was highly volatile, he had little income from real estate, and, like others of his class, his domestic returns depended upon commercial stability.57

  By the mid-1880s Rupert had rejected whatever vestiges of his father’s enlightened views he had once assumed. His increasing political insularity was juxtaposed to the spectacular political rise of his brother-in-law, Henry Roscoe, and the topic of bitter comment. In the wake of his son’s death, Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, FRS had decided to stand as a Liberal candidate from Manchester in the general election of 1885. Although his political ambitions were much ridiculed in Beatrix’s household, Roscoe did the unthinkable, winning the only Liberal seat in Parliament from Manchester. Beatrix commented sourly on the outcome: ‘Uncle Harry’s position is most extraordinary… I fancy he has got rather more of a position than he bargained for.’ But clearly Henry Roscoe, ‘statesman of science’ and liberal advocate, had become a worthy successor to Edmund Potter.58

  With his election to Parliament, in addition to his knighthood the previous year, his distinguished work in chemistry at Owens College, Manchester and his well-known expertise in water treatment and industrial pollution, Uncle Harry was by far the most distinguished member of the Potter clan. And he was poised for further distinction. Rupert’s disdain also included his youngest sister Lucy Roscoe, who had not only made an impressive marriage, but also had achievements of her own. Lucy had won a gold and two silver medals from the Photographic Society of London as a younger woman, and about 1888 had one of her photographs selected as the best photograph by an English amateur photographer for inclusion in an American publication. Rupert, dallying on the edges of the intelligentsia, must have been inordinately envious of both his brother-in-law’s status and his sister’s recognition in his own field of artistic endeavour.59

  On New Year’s Eve 1885 Beatrix reviewed the past year with disappointment, and not much optimism for anything better in the next.

  How awful it seems at the end of a year to think it has actually passed into space never to return! Gone except its memories! Much bitterness and a few peaceful summer days. Oh life, wearisome, disappointing, and yet in many shades so sweet, I wonder why one is so unwilling to let go this old year? not because it has been joyful, but because I fear its successors — I am terribly afraid of the future. Some fears will inevitably be fulfilled, and the rest is dark — Peace to the old year, may the seed sown therein bear no bitter fruit.60

  For the better part of the next year and a half, Beatrix endured progressively acute bouts of chronic fatigue often accompanied by low-grade fever. Although it was never diagnosed with certainty, she was most likely suffering from rheumatic fever. There were nearly eight months in 1886 when she did not write at all in her journal. ‘Part of the time I was too ill, and since then the laziness and unsettledness consequent on weakness have so demoralized me, that I have persevered in nothing for more than a week at a time except toothache.’ In the spring of 1887, on a family trip to Grange-over-Sands on Morecambe Bay, she experienced severe pains in her feet which got progressively worse and moved up her limbs. The family returned to London three weeks later where Beatrix was bedridden, with ‘little fever’ but a ‘great deal of rheumatics. Could not be turned in bed without screaming out.’ At the end of June 1887 she was ‘amazed to find [her]self in summer, having last seen the trees in winter’.61

  She insisted that she had not missed much, but there had been changes that she preferred not to dwell upon. In the autumn of 1886 Bertram had been sent off to Charterhouse, a fine school in Surrey, about thirty miles south-west of London. It was a school traditionally favoured by the sons of barristers and solicitors, army men, and the civil service, and was regarded as prerequisite to a place at Oxford or Cambridge. Like other public schools of the late nineteenth century, the subculture at Charterhouse favoured the emotionally stalwart and the physically robust. Quite likely Charterhouse was a very poor choice for a young man with artistic talents and introverted personality. The following April Bertram became ill and returned to London without taking his exams. ‘It also is useless to speak more,’ Beatrix reported cryptically, ‘for the thing is done and can never be undone.’ Bertram was sent back to Eastbourne for the autumn term. Although Rupert was reluctant to give up public school for his son, Beatrix, who had some sense of how desperate Bertram had been, was thankful the experiment was over.62

  While Beatrix was convalescing, she took pleasure in drawing her schoolroom pets. Bertram had left a pair of long-eared bats in her care, which she had enjoyed sketching but which became difficult to keep. She released one and chloroformed the other, rarer specimen, afterwards taking precise measurements of all the bones in its wings and legs, and stuffed it according to Bertram’s directions. He also sent her a chrysalis of a privet hawk moth as a gift, which she drew in several stages of development.63

  Beatrix used Bertram’s old microscope to draw the details of her specimens. She drew the trivial and the extraordinary: a ground beetle in pencil and watercolour, artistically presented on the page under different magnifications; a wonderfully hairy jumping spider, magnified to show the colouration of its body, but endowed with an inner energy, and several varieties of her favourite butterflies and lizards. Such drawings suggest that her observation of the natural world and the relationship between nature and art was becoming more sophisticated. The scientific accuracy of her microscopic work also reflected a new confidence and maturity. She painted a fine weasel at Camfield, capturing the sinuous body under a glossy, thick coat. Her observations of animals coincided with similar qualities in people she knew. ‘How amusing aunt Harriet is,’ she wrote once, ‘she is more like a weasel than ever, and her tongue — it exceeds all description.’64

  One of Beatrix’s best drawings is a woodmouse that she sent to a friend as a Christmas present in 1886. There were many sketches of a ‘Miss Mouse’ otherwise known as ‘Xarifa’, the dormouse, a creature that she loved to draw. In October 1886 ‘Xarifa’ died in Beatrix’s hand. ‘Poor little thing,’ Beatrix wrote sadly. ‘I thought at one time she would last as long as myself… I think she was in many respects the sweetest little animal I ever knew.’65

  The tone of Beatrix’s journal changes markedly after December 1886. Thereafter she reports fewer bouts of depression, and less fear of the future; undoubtedly the result of her improving health. By 1891 she was writing about the art world as someone confident in her own critical abilities. She regarded her family with some emotional distance and occasionally with a worldly ennui. There had been a new female literary influence evident in her life as well. Sometime in 1890 Beatrix read and was much impressed by the literary life of Fanny Burney, whose early diaries had just been republished. In May, Beatrix began writing quite polished letters to a fictional friend she addressed as ‘Esther’, adopting the name of Burney’s younger sister, to whom Burney also addressed herself in her diary. Beatrix calls Fanny Burney ‘her heroine’ and correctly absorbed their similarities of education, social upbringing and ability to
paint skilful verbal portraits.66

  There were also external forces propelling her in new directions. One was the pragmatic desire for some expendable income. She received a psychological and practical push from her brother and also from Uncle Harry. Less easy to document but no less certain was the influence of Hardwicke Rawnsley.

  Rawnsley, the Anglican priest, and Roscoe, the Liberal Unitarian scientist, approached the world very differently. But both were men of deeply held passions and inordinate curiosity, and both were students of nature. They challenged Beatrix to move forward toward emotional independence with a renewed sense of possibility. When the Potters rented Lingholm over the course of several years, Beatrix renewed her friendship with the Rawnsleys. During those summers Rawnsley had ample opportunity to encourage Beatrix’s art and her scientific illustration, and to share his enthusiasm for geology, archaeology and the special grandeur of the Newlands Valley just west of Derwentwater.67

  After his election to Parliament, Roscoe was a frequent guest at the Potters’ table in Bolton Gardens, as well as at Camfield. He and Lucy lived at 10 Bramham Gardens, within walking distance of the Potters’ house. Henry also had the opportunity to observe Beatrix’s artwork over a crucial period. Both he and Lucy admired the Christmas cards and place-cards Beatrix made for the family in 1889. Beatrix recalled that ‘the cards were put under the plates at breakfast and proved a five minutes wonder’. Roscoe was aware that Beatrix and Bertram both ‘had a desire for coin’ in order to purchase a printing machine that cost £16 and that they were short of that amount by £6. He suggested that her cards were of such quality that ‘any publisher would snap at’ and encouraged her to offer some for sale.

  Suggestion was one thing, execution quite another. Forced to take matters into her own hands, she prepared six designs for cards using ‘that charming rascal Benjamin Bouncer our tame Jack Hare’, as her model. Bouncer, known as Bounce, thus assisted in Beatrix’s first venture into commercial art. ‘I may mention’, she explained after the fact, ‘that my best designs occurred to me in chapel – I was rather impeded by the inquisitiveness of my aunt, and the idiosyncrasies of Benjamin who has an appetite for certain sorts of paint, but the cards were finished by Easter.’68

  She sent them to a list of five publishers that she and Bertram had compiled, beginning with the firm of Marcus Ward, but they were promptly returned. Bertram, home from a recent Continental adventure and busy preparing for entrance exams for Oxford, was ‘inclined’ to the firm of Hildesheimer & Faulkner, and so delivered his sister’s drawings to the publisher himself. The following day came an envelope with a cheque for £6 and the request to the ‘gentleman artist’ for more sketches.

  My first act was to give Bounce (what an investment that rabbit has been in spite of the hutches), a cupful of hemp seeds, the consequence being that when I wanted to draw him next morning he was partially intoxicated and wholly unmanageable. Then I retired to bed, and lay awake chuckling till 2 in the morning, and afterwards had an impression that Bunny came to my bedside in a white cotton night cap and tickled me with his whiskers.69

  Uncle Harry offered to take Beatrix, poised for commercial success, to the offices of Hildesheimer & Faulkner to show them her new designs. It was in fact Beatrix’s first business meeting and Uncle Harry seems to have tried his best to stay in the background and let her negotiate for herself. Beatrix’s account of the meeting shows a remarkable attention to detail and to the business of publishing. She gauged what Mr Faulkner liked and disliked, though not always agreeing with his taste. She took note that he wanted designs that referred to the seasons which he did not have in his current albums, and that he also had an ambition to publish a children’s book, showing her a sample of what he thought agreeable. ‘His one idea seemed to me to be fiddles and trousers. Now, if there is anything hideous, it is trousers, but I have conceded them in two guinea-pig drawings.’ Uncle Harry found nothing ‘vulgar’ in Mr Faulkner’s samples, although Beatrix divined correctly that it was humour he wanted rather than artistic realism.70

  Beatrix was 24 when her designs were published, first as Christmas and New Year cards, and then as illustrations to a set of verses by the prolific versifier Frederic E. Weatherly, a barrister from Bristol. They appeared in a seven-page, gilt-edged booklet bound together by a pink silk cord titled A Happy Pair. It sold for 4½d., and gave the illustrator’s name as ‘H.B.P.’71

  Flushed with success. Beatrix sent some further watercolour sketches to another London publisher on her initial list, Frederick Warne & Company. Warne returned them with a letter stating that while they were no longer publishing ‘Booklets’, they found her designs pleasing. Their letter left the door ajar as to a future interest: ‘if at any time you have any ideas & drawings in book form: we should be happy to give them our consideration.’ It was a beginning.72

  While one part of Beatrix’s world was expanding, another was contracting. In early September 1891, Jessy Potter died at Camfield in her ninetieth year. She was buried in the Potter vault at Hyde, next to her beloved Edmund. Such was the esteem in which Jessy Potter was held within the Unitarian community that a rare obituary appeared in the Unitarian paper, the Inquirer, which praised her services ‘in the cause of religion and liberty’.73

  Beatrix had unabashedly adored her grandmother, not only for her charm, beauty and openly affectionate nature, but for her energy, her resilience and especially her rebelliousness. Beatrix thought her ‘as near perfect as it is possible here’. With her passing, Beatrix moved into adulthood, determined to discover something meaningful to do with her life.74

  4

  Experiments

  ‘Now of all hopeless things to draw,’ Beatrix wrote one late October evening in 1892, ‘I should think the very worst is a fine fat fungus.’ She was referring to her meeting that afternoon with the shy but erudite Charlie McIntosh about her botanical drawings, but also to the irony of finding herself a would-be painter of ‘funguses’. The Potters had come to Birnam, a village near Dunkeld, in late July for another long Scottish holiday. Beatrix had been trying all summer to gain an interview with McIntosh, their former postman at Dalguise, who was a highly regarded naturalist, in the hope that he would suggest ways she might improve her work. Theirs was to be a most ‘singular acquaintance’: a unique scientific collaboration that had far-reaching consequences.1

  By the early 1890s Beatrix’s interests as an artist and naturalist had converged on fungi and, to a lesser degree, on fossils. Such enthusiasms were typical of the Victorian craze for natural history which, beginning earlier in the century, affected everyone from aristocrat to artisan. Women in particular were drawn to the study of insects, shells, ferns, fossils and fungi, and to their naming, classification, collection and frequently their illustration. Like many of her contemporaries, Beatrix was first drawn to natural history as a way to relieve the boredom that beset affluent Victorians, and for the measure of personal freedom it brought. Certainly her initial efforts were amateur, but she enjoyed drawing under the microscope and she had certain undefined artistic ambitions that accompanied her exploration of the natural world.2

  Collecting, mounting and looking at specimens under the microscope was considered worthwhile entertainment for families of the Potters’ class. Debates over identification and proper microscopic techniques were commonplace, enlivened by such guides as P. H. Gosse’s popular Evenings at the Microscope (1859) and other influential manuals. Beatrix had inherited Bertram’s microscope when he went off to boarding school, and while it did not have a particularly good lens, probably no higher than 200 X magnification, she enjoyed viewing and drawing a variety of living and non-living specimens at close range.3

  While she was recovering her health, she spent time at the nearby Natural History Museum studying the insect displays. Soon insects, spiders, butterflies and moths were subjected to her intense scrutiny and patient rendering. Her microscopic drawings were not only scientifically accurate, but arranged on the paper with a plea
sing sense of space. Even her paintings of unattractive creatures, or just pieces of them, had beauty and energy, even personality.4

  The Potters encouraged Beatrix’s precocious talents as a naturalist illustrator with books that would inspire and guide: in addition to Blackburn’s Birds Drawn from Nature, Grandmother Potter gave her a beautiful gilt-edged edition of John E. Sowerby’s British Wild Flowers (1882) with its own black-velvet-lined presentation box. It contained some ninety hand-coloured plates by one of the finest botanical illustrators of the day. Its influence on her flower painting was immediate.5

  But natural history was a public Victorian passion as well as a private one. In 1888 Beatrix had sufficient confidence in her observations of the hawfinches around Camfield to include them in a letter to The Times. Her information on the birds’ habitat added to that of ornithologist William Yarrell’s A History of British Birds (1871–85), volumes which were also in the Potter library. Although Beatrix’s letter was unfinished, the fact that she thought her observations worthy of publication indicates a high level of confidence.6