by Linda Lear
Although Rupert was well known among Unitarians in London, outside this small Nonconformist community his associations were limited to his clubs and to the art world. In spite of their considerable wealth, the Potters moved in a narrow range of society in London, and were not themselves successful outside that circle. Had they remained in Manchester, where they had an extensive family network in the mercantile and political community, there might have been suitable introductions. But Helen and Rupert had chosen to leave the north and reaped the consequences of social isolation in London.
Undoubtedly the Potters would have been pleased had both their children married well and there must have been considerable family pressure on Beatrix to keep up with her Leech and Potter cousins. Ethel Leech, daughter of Helen’s eldest brother, had married Sir William Hyde Parker. Through his London clubs, Rupert knew many fine families, especially intellectuals and professionals, who might offer eligible young men. But Helen had a different criteria of suitability. A husband for Beatrix had to offer the one thing that Potter wealth could not buy: family name and inherited land. The issue of religious tradition might have been bridged, as it was for increasing numbers of Nonconformists around the turn of the century, but Helen’s social ambitions narrowed the field considerably.14
Beatrix was certainly not against marriage; quite the contrary. But as she grew older she realized that her opportunities were limited. Too shy and too conservative to embrace the social and political freedoms promised to the ‘New Woman’, she remained both dutiful and devoted, but like other women of her class, that loyalty came at an emotional cost. As she increasingly moved in her own orbit, her encroaching spinsterhood was an additional incentive to achieve something on her own.15
In 1897 the Potters chose to come back to Lingholm, the estate overlooking Derwentwater near Keswick that they had first rented in 1885. They returned for the next two summers, and again in 1901 and 1904. The large, rather stark, fieldstone house sits high above the lake set off by a long drive, a great expanse of lawn, formal gardens and wide terraces. The rear of the house had elaborate borders designed by Colonel George Kemp, later Lord Rochdale, with terraces set at just the right level for a surprise view of the lake between the trees, spilling down gently to the woods that run along the lakeshore. The woods, then and now, have an extensive collection of prize rhododendrons planted by generations of Rochdales, and remain home to colonies of red squirrels. The rocky shoreline of Derwentwater is dotted here and there by reedy marshes, all providing ideal material for sketching.
When Beatrix arrived at Lingholm, she was for the first time in some years without a specific project or mentor to direct her energies. Finding herself at a sort of intellectual crossroads, she welcomed the energetic Revd Hardwicke Rawnsley, now Vicar of the nearby Crosthwaite parish church in Keswick, back into her life, finding his passion for preservation of natural beauty in the Lake District of compelling interest. Rawnsley, only fifteen years older than Beatrix, was still an altogether appealing figure with his blue eyes, full moustache and ginger beard. He had the shortish, stocky build of an athlete and there was about him a kind of physical and intellectual robustness. He looked deceivingly like one of those simple, old-fashioned parsons with his flat black hat and white tie, although in summertime the black hat was replaced with a dapper straw one. But Rawnsley was hardly a ‘country parson’. A man of flashing intellect, robust curiosity and restless energy, he had been made an ‘honorary Canon’ of Carlisle cathedral in 1893, an acknowledgment of his contributions to the diocese and to the wider community.16
Rawnsley’s successful opposition to the railway planned through Borrowdale brought him into collaboration with the eminent jurist Viscount Bryce, Sir Robert Hunter of the Commons Preservation Society, as well as his old friend Octavia Hill, who championed the preservation of open spaces for the working poor. The Lake District Defence Society which Rawnsley had founded in 1883 at Wray had grown into a robust organization, supported by the most influential landowners. Rawnsley had offered it as a working model for national preservation, and along with Hunter and Hill, they had successfully founded the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty in 1895.17
The National Trust was based on the radical legal premise that a non-profit entity could hold title to land or buildings as trustee in perpetuity for the use and enjoyment of the entire nation. The legislation establishing the Trust was a landmark in the British preservation movement. The Trust was officially a charity, entirely supported by individual membership and donations of property. Rawnsley became secretary of the new organization, a post for which he was ideally suited and which provided him the perfect pulpit from which to champion the unique mission of the Trust.
Rupert Potter joined enthusiastically as one of the first Life Members of the National Trust. He enjoyed discussing the legal intricacies of acquiring undeveloped land and properties and, since his legal experience had been in the area of trusts and estates, Rawnsley sought him out and valued his advice. Rawnsley was a frequent visitor to the Potters at Lingholm that summer, often accompanied by his wife Edith, who was involved in efforts to preserve local crafts and craftsmen. Beatrix listened to his impassioned arguments for preservation and his ideas for special appeals to save a vulnerable rural culture, not just romantic vistas and fine architecture.18
Rawnsley’s attitude towards preservation was often controversial. He did not trust the local fellsmen to make good choices about the future development of their native landscape, knowing that they would often find a commercial venture worthy of destroying an ‘empty vista’, out of ignorance, for short-term financial reward or merely to relieve the boredom of rural life. It was a point of view that Beatrix agreed with. She could not but be influenced by his attitudes about preservation and rural life, and by his belief in the crucial role of the National Trust. She shared his view that the Lakeland environment should be saved for the benefit of all, and not just the wealthy few. His political and social commitments, so different from her father’s, broadened her world-view as well as her attitudes about the environment. Under Rawnsley’s tutoring, Beatrix’s understanding of the culture of Lakeland expanded over the following summer holidays.19
Rawnsley’s interests in preserving the distinctive Herdwick sheep made a particular impression on Beatrix. She had always been interested in livestock, noting the different breeds of cattle and sheep she saw on her travels, especially in Scotland. But under Rawnsley’s influence she became aware of the precarious future of the Herdwick and of their unique suitability to fell farming. Two years later, in September 1899, Rawnsley and his son Noel were instrumental in establishing the Herdwick Sheep Association, dedicated to preserving this breed of coarse-wool, fell-bred sheep which had been a fixture of the high fell farms for centuries.20
The ever-restless Rawnsley was also a prolific writer of books about the natural history and culture of Lakeland and its literary associations. He was a journalist, a proselytizer and a talented versifier, who could compose a sonnet for any occasion. Around 1897 Rawnsley also published Moral Rhymes for the Young, a collection of didactic verse for children. With such mutual interests, it is little wonder that Beatrix found him a valued friend and a different sort of mentor.21
Beatrix’s art had always been place-specific, but these summers at Lingholm offered her an extraordinary choice of landscape. She painted views of Borrowdale near Derwentwater and the dramatic vistas across the lake. St Herbert’s Island was just opposite the Lingholm shore, with Walla Crag often a misty presence in the background. The great mass of fells known as Cat Bells looms over the lake, and the green Newlands Valley runs off to the west. In the early summer the rhododendrons around the estate burst into a rainbow of pastel shades, and in autumn the hillsides were ablaze with burnished colour, contrasting dramatically with the grey stone walls and the bare slopes of the upper fells. It was an artist’s paradise, with few houses or structures to interrupt the pastoral view.
On rainy
days Beatrix painted the everyday things around her: flowerpots, antique furniture, the interior halls and staircases. She once used the inclement weather as the backdrop for an unconventional view of Lingholm; with one side and the roof line of the grey stone house cast up dramatically against the opaque, rainy sky with the distant mountains shrouded in mist. She called it simply Rain. When she tired of the pastoral, Beatrix went into the market town of Keswick. Many of its houses and buildings are recognizable in the sketches she made of the market square. Although she found Keswick ‘an awfully dull, cold town’, it was a change of pace to make quick sketches of people shopping and conversing. Beatrix never drew the human figure well, but these sketches, done almost impressionistically, succeed where her more studied attempts often fail.22
As she sketched around the countryside and wrote picture letters to the Moore children, she had no particular idea in mind as to how her landscapes and little stories might be used, but her former governess Annie Moore did. By 1899 there were six little Moores, the two older boys, Noel and Eric, and four girls, of whom the youngest, Joan, was born in 1896. Over the years Beatrix had written a good many letters to the Moore children, but she had not visited them in some months. When she was finally able to go to Wandsworth, in early January 1900, Annie Moore suggested that some of her picture letters could be made into interesting books for little children. She thought they might sell. Beatrix was taken by the idea.23
The Moore children had kept all her letters, Marjorie tying hers up with a yellow ribbon. Beatrix asked if she might borrow them back to make copies and consider which one would be most suitable for a book. She selected the letter she had written to Noel from Eastwood in 1893 about Peter Rabbit, copying it out onto folded sheets of paper. The original letter was too short to make a proper book, so she added some text and some new black and white illustrations which expanded the story of the rabbit’s adventure in Mr McGregor’s garden and made it more suspenseful. These changes also slowed the narrative down, added intrigue, and gave a greater sense of the passage of time. Then she copied it out into a stiff-covered exercise book, and painted a coloured frontispiece showing Mrs Rabbit dosing Peter with camomile tea.24
Beatrix sent her book, now titled ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr McGregor’s Garden’, to at least six publishers, some suggested by Bertram, others by her friends Gertrude and Alice Woodward, and one or two recommended by Hardwicke Rawnsley. But in rapid succession her manuscript was returned by each of the six, including Frederick Warne & Co. in Covent Garden, who nearly a decade earlier had shown some interest in her artwork. Some publishers wanted a shorter book, others a longer one. But most wanted coloured illustrations which, by 1900, were proving both popular and affordable.
‘You will begin to be afraid I have run away with the letters altogether!’ Beatrix wrote to Marjorie Moore in March. ‘I will keep them a little longer because I want to make a list of them, but I don’t think they will be made into a book this time because the publisher wants poetry.’ Beatrix illustrated her frustration with little drawings showing ‘Miss Potter’ arguing with a gentleman holding a big book, and another showing her walking out of the shop with her book, leaving the publisher standing empty-handed at the door. ‘The publisher is a gentleman who prints books,’ she explained, ‘and he wants a bigger book than he has got enough money to pay for! and Miss Potter has arguments with him… I wonder if that book will ever be printed! I think Miss Potter will go off to another publisher soon! She would rather make 2 or 3 little books costing 1/- each, than one big book costing 6/- because she thinks little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings on one book, and would never buy it.’ Here Beatrix drew a sketch of Mrs Rabbit in front of a bookshop giving two little bunnies a coin from her purse. Discouraged but determined, Beatrix went off to the British Museum to study a book of old rhymes. ‘I shall draw pictures of some of them,’ she told Marjorie, ‘whether they are printed or not.’25
Beatrix had very specific ideas about how she wanted her ‘little rabbit book’ to look and how much it should cost. She was also accustomed to dealing with card and annual publishers like Ernest Nister, who almost certainly was one of the six to whom she first sent her manuscript and with whom she was now arguing. Once again Beatrix threatened to withdraw her manuscript, but this time the tactic did not work, and the manuscript was returned. In a postscript to a picture letter to Freda Moore in April from Tenby in South Wales, Beatrix wrote with obvious exasperation, ‘Miss Potter is sitting upon her book at present & considering! The publisher cannot tell what has become of it.’ The accompanying sketch shows a woman sitting rather awkwardly on a large book on a sandy beach staring resolutely out to sea.26
Although it had been seven years since Potter had conceived and illustrated her letter about Peter, her revisions of it in 1900 reveal how far she had progressed in the art of story-telling, how well she understood her audience, and how knowledgeable she was about the children’s book market. The late Victorian and early Edwardian publishing world was enormously competitive. In the 1890s important art presses such as William Morris’s Kelmscott Press and J. M. Dent’s Everyman Library, who published the work of Aubrey Beardsley, had given greater consideration to book format and to producing mass-market books for young children. Dent, for example, brought out a successful line of tiny fairy tales and nursery rhymes in his ‘Banbury Cross’ series, some illustrated by Beatrix’s friend Alice Woodward. In 1895 a twelve-book series known as the ‘golliwog’ books became a publishing phenomenon, beginning with The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg. These were large-format books featuring doggerel verses faced by colour illustrations in bright poster style, set off by large white areas. The ‘golliwogs’ were followed in 1897 by a series for little children known as the ‘Dumpy Books for Children’, a creation of Grant Richards, an enterprising young publisher well connected to the highbrow literary world. Both series proved enormously popular and profitable.27
In October 1899 Richards published The Story of Little Black Sambo, a small picture book for very young children which featured a few words of text opposite brightly coloured pictures in a fashionable colour cover. Sambo was the work of Helen Bannerman, a Scottish woman living then in India with her surgeon husband and small children. Bannerman’s story derived largely from the golliwog books and the tigers of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books. But Little Black Sambo became a runaway best-seller, going through four printings in as many months. Its success clearly inspired Beatrix to make up a dummy book (sheets folded together to show size, shape and form) of ‘Peter’ just five months later. As she evaluated the market, it seemed to her that an original and beautifully illustrated tale might sell as well as Bannerman’s derivative one. She adopted Bannerman’s small-size picture-book format rather than that of several other popular styles both because she preferred it for small children and because she believed it would sell. As Beatrix recalled later, ‘After a time there began to be a vogue for small books, and I thought “Peter” might do as well as some that were being published.’28
Beatrix knew that her work was original, but she could not have gauged just how generically different her tale of a mischievous rabbit in human clothing was. From a book editor’s point of view, her story was too long, her narrative lacked proper pacing, there were no coloured illustrations, and the black-and-white outline pictures were too different from the familiar ones influenced by Morris or Beardsley. When no offers to buy her book were forthcoming, Beatrix decided to publish it herself — exactly as she wanted it.29
Armed with recommendations from the Woodward sisters, she withdrew her savings from the bank, and paid a call on Strangeways & Sons, a printer in Tower Street, London. Sometime in early September 1901, she ordered a printing of 250 copies of what was now simply The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She had the zinc blocks for the black-and-white illustrations made by the Art Reproduction Company of Fetter Lane, and the engraved coloured frontispiece printed by Hentschel of Fleet Street. She ordered 500 copie
s just in case she might want to reprint it. The printing and engraving cost about £11. On 16 December 1901, the privately printed edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was ready for distribution to family and friends. But by then Beatrix found herself with an unexpected dilemma.30
Canon Rawnsley had originally recommended several publishers to whom Beatrix had sent her manuscript. During the family holiday at Lingholm in 1901 she discussed her efforts to attract a commercial publisher and her plan to publish it herself. Rawnsley offered to make one final effort on her behalf, tempted perhaps by her report that one publisher had wanted poetry. He turned Beatrix’s text into what can only be described as rather dreadful didactic verse, and submitted it, along with Beatrix’s illustrations and half her revised manuscript, to Frederick Warne & Co. Warne’s had already rejected Potter’s earlier version, but took note of Rawnsley’s proprietary interests in the manuscript as well as the fact that a private edition was underway for which there existed blocks and an engraved coloured frontispiece. It may well be that Rawnsley’s rhyming version was so bad that it made Beatrix’s straightforward narrative look even better. For whatever reason, Warne’s asked to see the rest of Potter’s manuscript, enquiring particularly why Potter had not done more illustrations in colour. Rawnsley turned the publisher’s query over to Beatrix. But her terse reply hinted at an unyielding disposition: ‘I did not colour the whole book for two reasons,’ she wrote, ‘the great expense of good colour printing — and also the rather uninteresting colour of a good many of the subjects which are most of them rabbit-brown and green.’31
