Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  The summer of 1896 — the summer Beatrix turned 30 — the Potters spent at the large country house of Lakefield (Eeswyke) on the shore of Esthwaite Water, just outside the village of Near Sawrey. Although it was still too dry to find many fungi around Sawrey, she felt the sensation of pending discovery when she spied the ‘dark hairy stalks and tiny balls of one of the Mycetozoa’ on a flat chip of wood. She was working intensely on the problem of germination and had come away with a new Beck’s microscope with 600 x magnification and a new camera. When the rains came, bringing up even more fungi, Beatrix was ready for them.22

  She wrote to Charlie McIntosh from Lakefield in late August asking him to send any large pezizas he could find. McIntosh evidently complied, as there are over thirty drawings of cup fungi extant from this summer holiday. Beatrix was successfully germinating spores by then and, with all the confidence of the expert that she now was, she noted in her journal dispassionately, ‘The larch peziza came into flower. I took it very calmly being so firmly persuaded it would come.’23

  Four days later she made a study of one cup fungus, the Pocolum species on the petioles of oak leaves, and another on driftwood near Esthwaite Water. She drew these under a microscope, clearly showing the cylindrical cases containing the spores. That night she reported, ‘Had further ideas about fungi. It stands to reason, all such as grow on fresh manure for a few weeks in summer must have some other form to take them over the winter months.’ She now surmised that fungi with fruiting bodies, like mushrooms and toadstools, must have some sort of underground form. Beatrix showed something of her intellectual métier, continuing: ‘(I have much pleasure in contradicting Mr G. Murray re Ascobolus, whether I grow it or not, I stick to it.)’ It was clear to her that this underground form must be the means by which fungi ‘get from log to log without cups to spore’. Beatrix hypothesized that ‘all the higher fungi have probably a mould’, and that if there were individual moulds, all of which could be sprouted with time and patience, there were ‘enormously more moulds than have been specified’.24

  Undoubtedly she shared her observations with McIntosh, as well as the fact that she was successfully growing this underground form, the mycelium. She was so engrossed in her research and in the safe transportation of her ‘precious fungi’ back to London at the beginning of October that she barely recalled the journey. Similarly she had to force herself out of her preoccupation with fungi to enjoy a brief visit to the Huttons at Stroud, noting only that the beautiful Caroline did not have a particularly fine singing voice: ‘The Gods do not give all their gifts to one.’25

  Before she left Sawrey, Beatrix wrote to Roscoe telling him about her theories of fungi reproduction, clearly anxious to show him her drawings. Aunt Lucy obligingly invited Beatrix to Woodcote for the weekend where she could have her uncle’s undivided attention. Afraid that her parents would object, Beatrix ‘escaped out of the house’ quite early and walked up and down the street in front of the Roscoes’ home in Bramham Gardens until the household was awake. On the train to Surrey, Beatrix explained her theories, trying to make Uncle Harry aware of their novelty and asking his advice as to how to approach the botanists at Kew to discover if anyone there had managed to germinate the spores of the gill fungi as she had. Although Roscoe was rather slow to understand exactly how novel her theories were, he realized her need to know if anyone at Kew had done it. He ‘invented a fishing letter’ to Massee asking for a reference to anyone else who might have been cultivating spores. ‘He was not sanguine,’ Beatrix reported, but she copied out the letter as instructed. Roscoe also wisely counselled his protégée to make sure she knew the literature on the subject, since ‘you have to discover a great deal that has been done before, before you find anything new’.26

  In two days she had a reply from Massee referring her to Oskar Brefeld’s daunting twelve-volume study, Botanische Untersuchungen über Schimmelpilze (1872–96). Beatrix knew about Brefeld’s work, but had not read it. The thought of doing so nearly ‘annihilated her’, but she was, after all, fluent in German, as was Roscoe, and by bedtime she had found humour in the prospect of finding out what the Germans had done.27

  The next morning she went off with her pony to Kew ‘in a state of damp resignation’. But it took only minutes to discover that ‘Massee knew very little about it’. Under her questioning, Massee admitted that he did not think Brefeld had grown the mushroom mould. Massee was, however, clearly sceptical about what Beatrix’s slides actually showed, and, knowing that she was an amateur working in less than ideal conditions, disputed her conclusions on that basis. Beatrix dismissed his concerns, certain that she could germinate the spores again, and confessed, ‘I contradicted him badly.’28

  Roscoe was delighted with Beatrix’s account of the meeting. But as far as Beatrix was concerned, he became much too hopeful. Roscoe now understood that some important scientific points were at stake and relished the thought of disparaging the haughty Thiselton-Dyer. ‘He is under the delusion no one has grown them except me and Dr Brefeld,’ Beatrix wrote, feigning humility because she too had the same notion. Roscoe now urged her to write up her findings as a paper for the botanists at Kew.29

  Beatrix realized that the kitchen of Bolton Gardens was not an ideal environment for germinating spores, nor as free of contaminates as a proper laboratory. In an effort to eliminate contamination as the basis for Massee’s scepticism, she called at the Society of Preventive Medicine on Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury to ask for help from Uncle Harry’s former associate, the chemist, Joseph Lunt. An assistant there showed her the best techniques for making sterile slides and probably suggested the nutrient formula which she subsequently used as a medium. After her best 1/6th inch lens had rolled off the table into the hearth, she went to R. & J. Beck, the store in Cornhill in the City which specialized in fine optics, and bought a new 1/8th inch lens to draw the germinating spores. Following Roscoe’s direction, she then spent the week writing out her findings and got them typed up. On 3 December she went again to Kew, firmly intending to deliver them to Thiselton-Dyer in person.30

  In her letter to the director, Beatrix explained that her uncle wished him to look at some of her fungi drawings, and hoped he might read her paper. The text of Beatrix’s letter is important in understanding what happened next. It is unclear whether she left the letter and paper before she had an anxiety attack and bolted, or if she brought them back to Kew several days later. Presumably Roscoe either wrote the letter himself or offered the language, but Beatrix concurred in its content.

  Sir H. Roscoe sent me to ask whether you would be kind enough to look at some of my fungus drawings which he is interested in. I do not quite like to give the paper to Mr Massee because I am afraid I have rather contradicted him. Uncle Harry is satisfied with my way of working but we wish very much that someone would take it up at Kew to try it, if they do not believe my drawings. Mr Massee took objection to my slides, but the things exist, and will be all done by the Germans. It is rather a long paper to ask you to be kind enough to read.31

  Regardless of what Beatrix’s drawings demonstrated, the issue was now taken between Sir Henry and Thiselton-Dyer and his staff at Kew. The unfortunately worded and politically inept letter slighted Massee, appealed over his head to the director, and challenged science at Kew. Roscoe, the chemist, is ‘satisfied’ with his niece’s botanical slides, and Potter, the amateur, has contradicted Massee, the professional. As if this were not offence enough, the letter impugns English botanists by suggesting that the far-sighted Germans, like the famed chemist R. W. Bunsen with whom Roscoe had worked in Heidelberg, will inevitably prove her theory correct. The professionals at Kew were put on notice by an amateur investigator. Sadly, the worth of her subsequent work had little to do with the ensuing scientific storm.32

  According to her own account, Beatrix got to the director’s office, where she waited uncomfortably for about fifteen minutes, intimidated by Mr Baker’s curious glances, and then, overcome with shyness, she ‘inconti
nently fled’. She realized that she had lost an important opportunity at Kew, admitting: ‘I am sorry I had not courage to face the Director, it was very warm and draggly.’ But her confidence had been undermined even before she set out for Kew that morning. ‘I wish I had not showed it to my parents,’ she confided. ‘He [her father] went through it with a pencil, making remarks upon the grammar. He has bought me that very expensive book [Brefeld] which I have not opened because I wanted to tell Mr Thiselton-Dyer I have not read it. Also I am sure it will put me out in invention.’ Undoubtedly Rupert was trying to improve his daughter’s project, both by buying her the Brefeld volumes and editing her paper, but his timing was poor. Her parents were aware of what she was about at Kew, and at least tacitly approved her research, without understanding its importance.33

  Beatrix’s failure of nerve is all the more unfortunate because several days earlier she records that she has ‘found the idea of the lichens’ and had ‘another IDEA(?) about hybrids’. Beatrix’s use of the term ‘lichens’ is important, for clearly she was now confident that there could be many kinds of moulds. Some produced a lichen which she believed was a hybrid: a dual organism composed of a fungus and an alga, and that there could be many forms of this hybrid. Beatrix also speculated that a symbiotic relationship necessarily existed between them.34

  Most nineteenth-century botanists dismissed lichens as Linnaeus had, as ‘poor peasants of the plant world’; lower plants that were thought to be either simple mosses or unusual fungi. Only the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener thought otherwise. In 1869 he proposed a ‘dual hypothesis’, suggesting from his study of the taxonomy of lichens that they were all hybrids, composed of a liaison between a fungus and an alga, except that he believed one was a parasite on the other. Most botanists treated Schwendener’s theory with contempt, thinking it impossible that a hybrid organism could function as an integrated whole. At the time Beatrix was experimenting, calling a botanist a ‘Schwendenerist’ was a term of abuse and derision.

  Hybridization was, in fact, the subject of fierce debate by the end of the century. Most English botanists scoffed at the idea of a ‘useful and invigorating parasitism’. Even M. C. Cooke, Massee’s mentor, had only derision for such a suggestion. Beatrix, who had read at least some of Schwendener, was not entirely convinced, doubting that one organism was parasitic. Although she did not know how stable hybrids might be, she suspected they existed as complete and independent organisms.35

  On 7 December Beatrix found new courage. She returned to Kew prepared to stay as long as necessary. She was again kept waiting. While the clerks worked around her, she read the newspaper. The director finally ‘bounced in, very dree he was, and in a great hurry’, clearly prepared to dismiss her at the soonest possible moment. He must have been taken somewhat aback by her energetic exposition of her findings. ‘I was not shy, not at all,’ she wrote. ‘I had it up and down with him. His line was on the outside edge of civil, but I took it philosophically.’ Thiselton-Dyer patronized her, indicating that the subject was ‘profound’, but her opinions inconsequential; ‘mares’ nests’, he pejoratively called them. Dismissing her drawings without even looking at them, he tried to pass her off to Henry Marshall Ward, the newly appointed Professor of Botany at Cambridge. Beatrix was furious. ‘I informed him that it would all be in the books in ten years, whether or no, and departed giggling.’36

  In high colour after this encounter, Beatrix marched over to the Herbarium ready to take on Massee, only to find to her astonishment that he ‘had come round altogether and was prepared to believe my new thing, including Lichens’. He was trying quite ‘ineffectually’ to grow Bulgaria inquinans. Taking pity on his efforts, Beatrix gave him a slide of Agaricus velutipes that she had successfully germinated many times. With extraordinary perceptiveness on the consequences of professional specialization which had led to this moment, Beatrix concluded, ‘I don’t think he has a completely clear head… but it is extraordinary how botanists have niggled at a few isolated species and not in the least seen the broad bearings of it. He would never have found out the bearings of the lichen.’ Massee, however, was clear-headed enough to caution Beatrix not to talk about her discovery until she had it worked out with more samples. Potter’s encounters at Kew, first with Thiselton-Dyer, then with Massee, constituted not only a personal triumph, but a valid challenge by an amateur generalist to the insularity of the professional specialist. It testified to her intellectual fortitude as well as her scientific achievement.37

  When Beatrix saw Uncle Harry at the end of the week he was waving a letter from Thiselton-Dyer which he described as ‘rude and stupid’, and which he refused to let her read, calling the director ‘a little rough-spoken’. Beatrix feigned innocence as to why the director would have been offended by her visit. But she was probably correct in surmising that his letter ‘contained advice that I should be sent to school before I began to teach other people’. In her view the director was ‘a short-tempered, clever man with a very good opinion of his Establishment, and jealous of outsiders’. But it is hard to believe that she was so naive as to assume that Thiselton-Dyer would be happy to have such information as she attempted to deliver or to imagine he was obligated to consider her findings without denigrating them. Yet she seems unaware of just how audacious she had been. She had stood up to Thiselton-Dyer and in essence told him that his views, and those of his staff, were not only incorrect, but would be publicly ridiculed in time. There would be consequences.38

  Sir Henry Roscoe was as stubborn and as quick to take offence as Thiselton-Dyer, though not as pompous or autocratic. He was annoyed that his protégée and her research had been given such a rude and cursory hearing by the likes of a mere agricultural botanist. Roscoe questioned his niece closely about her experiments and the import of her conclusions, asking her repeatedly if she was ‘quite sure’. Beatrix was impressed that he took the time and trouble to understand exactly what she had discovered and why it was significant, and did her best to answer his questions. She grasped some of the politics involved, but probably did not appreciate the political capital Roscoe would risk on her behalf when he promised ‘he would see it through’. ‘It [Thiselton-Dyer’s letter] was the very luckiest thing that could have happened,’ she wrote later, ‘for uncle Harry was just sufficiently annoyed at the slighting of anything under his patronage to make him take it up all the harder.’39

  Since the experts at Kew had seen fit to dismiss her conclusions, Roscoe’s plan was to offer them to a wider audience, no less than the Linnean Society of London. Confessing to an attack of ‘flightiness’, a façade of amusement Beatrix often employed to hide her anxiety, she realized the turn of events cast her and her research in a central role. It is likely that this was more than she had bargained for. Leaving Uncle Harry to his plotting, she went to her Hutton cousins in Putney Park to gather a new quantity of fungi. But she also diplomatically sent two slides of Bulgaria inquinans to Massee, hoping he would share them with the director, and silently prayed that her precious student ticket would not be revoked because of her insubordinate behaviour.40

  Christmas morning 1896 found Beatrix at Bramham Gardens refining her paper under Uncle Harry’s supervision. Beatrix was impressed that he was taking ‘an immense amount of trouble in trying to understand the botanical part, and showing me how to mend my Paper’. She was certain that most fungi were capable of forming a mould, like yeast, which she believed to be a hybrid. She had now read her way through the twelve volumes of Brefeld, who confirmed her theory of germination, but she could not ‘discover in his unwieldy volumes’ whether he had actually germinated spores himself, or if he was just speculating that it could be done.

  Roscoe loaned her Louis Pasteur’s volumes explaining the appearance of the mould penicillium and Aspergillus glaucus, another common mould. Pasteur’s experiments were easier to follow, but he did not realize that there were hundreds of moulds, or that some of the fungi would have combined with an alga and hence be distinguished by
the presence of chlorophyll. She found Pasteur’s work fascinating. ‘Brefeld’, she observed, ‘has a mass of facts… and theories which may or may not be correct, but which don’t piece on to the experiments however.’ And just such a concise, integrated explanation was precisely what Uncle Harry was trying to help Beatrix produce. ‘I see what he is trying to teach me in mending mine,’ Beatrix wrote after comparing Pasteur to Brefeld. ‘Pasteur is all in one piece. Brefeld is as discursive and unstable as — as Dacromyces deliquescens.’41

  Beatrix underestimated just how hard Roscoe would make her work. They spent all Christmas Day together and the day after. Uncle Harry made notes showing her what needed more verification and how the argument should be presented. For someone who had no training in scientific methodology or documentation, the necessary scholarship was daunting. But Beatrix was willing, even enthusiastic about the challenge. ‘I cannot sufficiently thank uncle Harry…’ she wrote. ‘I shall keep those pencil marks when I am an old woman.’42

  For the next month Beatrix worked at her microscope, checking references and refining her argument. Her experiments were not without moments of levity, however. Curious about the fungal properties of dry rot (Serpula lacrymans), which McIntosh was also studying, Beatrix had some specimens delivered to Bolton Gardens in a brown paper bag. Realizing her parents would disapprove of such potentially destructive material in the house, she buried it surreptitiously under a stone in the garden until she had time to study it. ‘How I should catch it,’ she wrote, ‘my parents are not devoted to the cause of science.’ Indeed few home owners then or now would have welcomed such invasive material. But her interest in the progression of dry rot, the spread of larch canker and the relationship between the appearance of a mould and the proximity of certain species of trees in a forest was also an important observation for forest science and one in advance of most other botanists of her day.43