Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

Her letters to children, cards and fantasy illustrations, even more than her microscopic fungi paintings, suggest where Beatrix Potter’s creative energy would take her next. But even her delight in fungi was never exclusively scientific — they too could dwell in the realm of magic and fantasy — and one particular memory linked them and her to the village of Near Sawrey, a foreshadowing of the full circle her life would take. In November 1896, as she was about to leave Sawrey, she wrote:

  I think one of my pleasantest memories of Esthwaite is sitting on Oatmeal Crag on a Sunday afternoon, where there is a sort of table of rock with a dip, with the lane and fields and oak copse like in a trough below my feet, and all the little tiny fungus people singing and bobbing and dancing in the grass and under the leaves all down below, like the whistling that some people cannot hear of stray mice and bats, and I sitting up above and knowing something about them.

  I cannot tell what possesses me with the fancy that they laugh and clap their hands, especially the little ones that grow in troops and rings amongst dead leaves in the woods. I suppose it is the fairy rings, the myriads of fairy fungi that start into life in autumn woods.65

  6

  Fantasies

  Beatrix was late in rebellion, even for a Victorian daughter. A desire for money and the measure of emotional and financial independence it might bring her propelled her out of an extended adolescence and artistic apprenticeship, and shifted her focus from fungi to fantasy. She was sustained in this creative transition by her pragmatic approach to life, an abundance of curiosity, and a sense of humour that found amusement in the absurdity of everyday events. Much of her creative energy derived from a remarkable visual inventory of past experiences and an extraordinary memory for detail. By 1903 Beatrix Potter had emerged as a writer and artist who was not only expert in the art of story-telling and illustration, but who had confidence in her intuitive sense of how she might market her creations. Artist and entrepreneur emerged as one.

  Although most of her artistic focus in the 1890s had been on natural science in one form or another, Beatrix was alert for ways in which she could market her fanciful drawings of her pets for greetings cards or as small booklets. Her choice of subject depended very much on the animals that she had at hand and those that matched her text. While her animals were anthropomorphized by human costume and activity, she deliberately set them in a real place and in real, rather than imagined, nature. Typical were her illustrations of the rhyme, ‘Three little mice sat down to spin’, drawn about 1892 and intended as a booklet. Mice were always among her favourite subjects. But in these sepia illustrations, the setting and activity is extraordinarily accurate. It includes in miniature the paraphernalia of spinning; the looms, the bobbins, the distaffs and the interior of a low-roofed spinning room. The bentwood chairs the mice sit on had been in her favourite bedroom number 4 at Camfield Place. Beatrix produced six drawings, and a coloured title page, but she never finished the booklet. She painted variations of these spinning mice, as well as sewing mice, dancing mice, dining mice, mice at tea, mice playing cards, and a superb bespectacled gentleman mouse reading the Day’s News.1

  Her work was experimental and her output prodigious. Creatively, Beatrix was always moved to interpret a familiar story in her own way. In 1893, the same year as her picture letter to Noel Moore about her rabbit Peter, she began a series of eight illustrations of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, finishing the last one in 1896. The adventures of that trickster ‘Brer Rabbit’ had been family favourites and it was a natural text for her to choose.

  The impact of Harris’s talking animals on contemporary writers both in Britain and America was enormous, not only because of his cunning but likeable rabbit protagonist, but also because of the cadence and virtuosity of the colloquial dialect, the pacing of the stories and his subversive humour. Uncle Remus proved to be ‘the great bridging text between the beast fable and animal fantasy’. Like her contemporaries Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame and A. A. Milne, Beatrix was enthralled by these apparently naive animal fables set in the context of everyday human life. As she studied Harris’s art, she was fascinated by the way he turned the ordinary into the extraordinary. It reinforced her choice of familiar settings for her own illustrations.2

  Each of her drawings from Uncle Remus features a single vignetted scene, surrounded by a border of realistically drawn rabbits, with a bit of text off to the side or bottom. Beatrix was fascinated by the language of Uncle Remus. Such words as ‘rabbit tobacco’, ‘puddle-ducks’, and ‘Cottontail’ found their way into her vocabulary. So too did adapted cadences such as ‘lippity-lippity’, a subdued version of Harris’s ‘lippity-clippity, clippity-lippity’. Beatrix relished the unexpected twist in his tales; how the weak triumphed over the strong through cleverness, cunning and luck, only to be sometimes fooled themselves. The ironic pleased her and the trickster elements of the subversive mischief-maker ‘Brer Rabbit’ challenged her inventiveness. When she came to write and illustrate her own tales, Uncle Remus was her reference point in the creation of a world where animals and humans overlap.3

  Beatrix was also impressed by the art of Edward Lear, whom she had long admired, not only for his limericks, but as one of the great natural history painters of her day. His Book of Nonsense (1846) had been one of her childhood favourites. ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, which Lear had composed as a gift to the sick daughter of a friend in 1867, she especially admired. Beatrix first appropriated Lear’s cadences in 1883 when she illustrated the ‘the pig with a ring in his nose’, who lived on the idyllic island where the ‘Bong tree grows’. She would elaborate his rhyme in several versions.

  But it was in her picture letters to the Moore children, and to her various young cousins, that Beatrix practised her art of illustrated story-telling, using her own impressions and experiences as the subject of story and picture. She experimented in these letters with the intricacies of matching drawings to the text, and with the structural elements of story-telling: narrative, language, voice, pacing and humour. Her sense of the absurd is fully in evidence, and she appropriates Harris’s technique of embellishing the ordinary. These picture letters to children, upon which the very best of her later books are based, served as the medium for Potter’s artistic transition between natural science and fantasy, between the sociological insights of her journal and her stories for children. Since these picture letters are about real life and often about her real pets, they are also the bridge between Beatrix’s private and her public art; between her old life and the new one she was creating. Perhaps more clearly than any other medium, these picture letters provide the earliest evidence of her unique genius as artist and story-teller.

  Most of her picture letters describe her holiday activities: the weather, the pets she has with her, the animals she sees, farming practices, family gossip and local lore. Each letter was suited to the age and interests of the child, revealing her instinctive ability to match story to audience. She shows her enthusiasm for the natural world and shares her opinion on livestock, fishing, museums, seaports and harbours, and the foibles of her family. Often they address subjects of natural history or archaeology that she knew would challenge them. They highlight her observation of minute but salient details and her ability to explain complicated ideas in a way that would appeal to small children. Her picture letters to Noel and Eric Moore, in particular, become more sophisticated in subject matter as they grow older. In one of her last letters to Noel about the construction of ships and an imaginary battle between mice and frogs in 1900, when he was 13, Beatrix chided him: ‘It seems to me you must be getting too old for picture letters!’4

  Potter’s earliest known picture letter was written to Noel from Falmouth in the spring of 1892. After telling him about her trip, sketching the train and palm trees of Cornwall, the harbour and the ships, she writes: ‘we went across the water to a pretty little village where the fishermen live. I saw them catching crabs in a basket cage which they let down into the sea with some me
at in it & then the crabs go in to eat the meat & cannot get out [drawing].’ She continued, ‘this is a pussy I saw looking for fish. These are two little dogs that live in the hotel, & two tame seagulls & a great many cocks & hens in the garden,’ sketching each. Years later Beatrix would use harbour scenes and boats from these family holidays in the coastal towns of the West Country as backgrounds in her books.

  In August 1892 Beatrix wrote to Noel, then four, about bringing Benjamin on the train from London in his basket, of how she took him out in the garden at Heath Park on a leather strap, and about his surprise encounter with a wild rabbit amongst the cabbages. ‘It sat up on its hind legs and made a little grunting noise, but Mr Bunny was eating so fast he did not take any notice… then he was so much surprised that he ran away.’ A second picture letter, to Noel’s three-year-old brother Eric, describes her little mouse who was so tame it would sit on her hand and eat hemp seeds.5

  Two years later Beatrix wrote to Eric Moore again from Falmouth about a ship, the Pearl of Falmouth, on which she saw a white pig with a curly tail. Reminded of Lear’s rhyme of the owl and the pussy-cat, she told Eric:

  I daresay it enjoys the sail but when the sailors get hungry they eat it. If that pig had any sense it would slip down into the boat at the end of the ship & row away [drawing]. This is the captain & the boatswain & the ship’s cook pursuing the pig. The cook is waving a knife and fork [drawings]. He wants to make the pig into sausages… This is the pig living on Robinson Crusoe’s Island. He is still rather afraid of the cook… [drawing]. This is the same pig after he has lived ten years on the island, he has grown very very fat & the cook has never found him.

  Several years later Beatrix returned to Lear’s rhyme in a letter to Noel and another to her young cousin Molly Gaddum. In Molly’s letter she illustrated her own version of the marriage of the owl and the pussy-cat. ‘It is very odd to see an owl with hands, but how could he play on the guitar without them?’6

  In April 1895 the Potters visited Salisbury where they saw Stonehenge for the first time. Near Abbotsbury they toured the swannery where Beatrix was fascinated by the decoy system the monks had designed to lure wild ducks through a series of hurdles into ever narrowing covered hoops ending in a bag where up to seventy ducks could be trapped. She wrote Noel a letter featuring a double-page illustration of the duck trap and explaining the mechanics of the device and the habits of the wild life. It was perfect for a bright nine-year-old boy who loved animals and was clever enough to figure out from her illustration how the trap worked.7

  She told the children about all sorts of real animals that she saw doing strange things. From Holehird on Windermere, she wrote to Noel about a poor frightened donkey pulling an organ who was put on the ferry boat with an apron tied over his eyes. She wrote to Eric about the dogs she saw in Mr Ginnet’s circus, illustrating the letter with pictures of the dogs dancing and turning somersaults, the prancing horses and the clown who made the horse do tricks. ‘It was a very odd circus,’ she wrote with characteristic realism, ‘last time I had the pleasure of seeing the circus Mr Ginnet possessed a red bull which he rode, but I fancy he has made it into beef.’ Beatrix was especially fond of the circus and returned to it in a later fantasy.8

  Often she put herself into the letters. From Weymouth on the Dorset coast in 1895, Beatrix wrote to Noel about the ‘rocks, & fossils, very old shells in the stone’. Her letter included a little picture of the three Potters walking along the beach looking for fossils. In 1896 she wrote to Noel about her pleasure at being in Sawrey.

  It is such a pretty place, and we have a boat on Esthwaite Lake [drawing herself in a rowing boat with the tall rushes and water lilies]… I sometimes sit quite still in the boat & watch the water hens. They are black with red bills and make a noise just like kissing… One evening I went in the boat when it was nearly dark and saw a flock of lapwings asleep, standing on one leg in the water. What a funny way to go to bed [drawing of birds]! Perhaps they are afraid of foxes, the hens are [drawing a fox carrying off a bird].

  In a probable reference to the farmer, a Mr Preston, who farmed Hill Top at the time, she told Noel: ‘He is a funny old man, he feeds the calves every morning, he rattles the spoon on the tin pail, to tell them breakfast is ready but they won’t always come, then there is a noise like a German band [drawing the farmer calling the calves and the hens going up a wooden runway into the coop for the night].’9

  A year later, she wrote to Noel from Lingholm about a trap she and Bertram made for catching minnows: ‘my brother tied a bit of string to it, put some bread inside and watched [drawing of the trap with bread inside]. The minnows came all around snuffing and at last one old fish found the way in at the end, and all the others followed. I should think there were 50 or 60 inside.’ Beatrix never forgot how much little boys like to hear about nasty things such as the man who threw rotten pears and snails into his perry (fermented pear juice). In 1898, just before leaving Lingholm, she told Noel about the young hawk Bertram had been given and how they cared for it. ‘We put it in a cage at first, which was a pity, because it spoiled its tail, but we did not know how to fasten it… Then we put little straps on its legs [drawing], I cut them out of an old glove, they have to be tied in a peculiar way, so as not to hurt… I don’t know whether he will really be able to train it to catch birds for him out of doors; the difficulty is to teach them to come back when they are called [drawing]!’ Bertram’s hawk died and was replaced by a barbary falcon.10

  Some of her picture letters were simply amusing. When Noel had a case of the mumps she began her letter with a picture of a pathetic little rabbit sitting in a chair all bandaged up about the chin. She told him about her pony who was so stiff he had to have mustard plasters on its hind legs, drawing a picture, and explaining that she could not come to Wandsworth because she would have to run away from the mumps, drawing a group of little ‘mumps’ with large, swollen heads and little short legs running after a fleeing woman with a large umbrella. She told how Bertram had nearly been blown away when a stiff breeze came up suddenly and almost carried him and his large canvas up into the air. ‘I expect he will be blown away some day like a big kite [drawing of Bertram flying over the hills holding on to his picture]!’11

  Beatrix wrote equally amusing letters to the Gaddum children and to the younger Moore girls, but she especially enjoyed writing to the boys because they were interested in nature and in how things worked. They also appreciated a story with adventure or humour in it. Perhaps the boys reminded her of Bertram and the letters she had once written to him. She practised thinking as both a writer and illustrator as she created these letters, including in them the same sort of sharp-eyed detail about the world around her and what amused her as she had in the pages of her journal. The picture letters, like the journal, were a visual record of her experiences as well as biographical commentary. Both provided training for her future craft, and functioned as the archival sources for many of her books.

  The Potters travelled less frequently in the three years between 1897 and 1900 than they had before; perhaps an indication of Rupert Potter’s unpredictable health. But when they did go on holiday, Beatrix, now in her early thirties, was often responsible for the travel arrangements. Her mother’s expectations of her daughter’s participation in the management of domestic affairs at Bolton Gardens had also increased. Most of the time Beatrix managed her duties efficiently. She protected her time by remaining out of reach on the third floor, fully occupied with her own work. But it could not have been easy for her to withstand her mother’s efforts to control her time, or to keep from becoming emotionally hobbled by her over-protectiveness. According to Bertram, Helen Potter was ‘the sort of woman who would have you pushed in a perambulator until you got out and said you would rather walk’. Beatrix’s success in retaining any independence, especially in London, underlines the pleasure she took from her creative work. But no matter how diplomatically she juggled her time, her enlarging interests and activities inevitably
led to a clash of expectations within the family.12

  Earning money from the sale of her cards and from her commission at Morley College had been a boost to her self-esteem. Although the idea of illustrating booklets or doing something in commercial art had begun in earnest in the mid-1890s, earning money became more urgent after she realized that her botanical illustrations would not fulfil her desire for immediate income. Her desire for some financial independence was reinforced by a change in her relationship with her father, and by her reacquaintance with Hardwicke Rawnsley in the summer of 1897.

  Rupert had always been an exacting personality, but father and daughter had long enjoyed a common interest in art and photography. When Rupert’s health began to deteriorate in the late 1890s family life became more difficult. He suffered from kidney stones, insomnia and pulmonary difficulties. He was overweight and frequently in pain, for which he took increasing amounts of narcotics which did little to improve his disposition. Further agitated by the policies of the Liberal government regarding the expansion of the franchise, the Irish Home Rule question and rights of working men, Rupert was anxious and irritable. His opinions about art as well as politics ossified. Since Bertram was most often away in Scotland painting, Beatrix bore an ever-increasing share of both her father’s demands and his dyspepsia. There had been the suggestion that Rupert should go abroad, perhaps to the Low Countries, for his health. Distressed at the prospect of an extended European tour, Beatrix made a private visit to her father’s physician, Dr Aiken, explaining to him that she could not tolerate living in an isolated hotel in a foreign city with her discontented parents. She apparently impressed the physician sufficiently as the idea was dropped.13

  In fairness to Rupert, Beatrix had not the usual social ambitions of an unmarried woman. She showed little interest in society or in meeting eligible young men, being immensely shy, but also despising the process. This distaste undoubtedly increased as she got older. Rupert’s estimate of her prospects diminished as he saw that his efforts at matchmaking were unappreciated. Finding eligible introductions for his daughter was not an easy task in the 1890s, but in Beatrix’s case there were two particular hurdles: the restricted society to which the Potters belonged, and Helen Potter’s unrealistic requirements.