Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  The next ten days were spent in acrimonious debate over what should be done — the crisis was so serious that the Potters’ departure to Llanbedr was postponed. Although Beatrix may have wished that Norman had proceeded more cautiously, once the deed was done she understood that her future happiness was at stake. She dug deeply into her Crompton spirit, her newly won self-confidence and her devotion to Norman, and found the courage, despite considerable guilt, to oppose her parents. At some point, Beatrix and Norman exchanged rings as tokens of their betrothal. But Beatrix acceded to her parents’ demand that there would be no official announcement. While she would wear Norman’s ring in public, the engagement would remain a secret from all except the immediate family. After this compromise was agreed to, Beatrix’s decision to marry Norman Warne was probably never mentioned again. As far as her parents were concerned, there was no betrothal. For Beatrix and Norman, the agony of uncertainty had begun.17

  Meanwhile Norman had returned from his sales trip to Manchester quite ill. Beatrix had sent a messenger with the dummy book and proofs of The Pie to the Bedford Street office while Norman was away, but Harold, unable to find the parcel, became alarmed, thinking the proofs were lost. Beatrix fled from the poisonous silence at home to the comfort of her elderly former governess’s house in West Hampstead, in north London. Writing from Miss Hammond’s address on Sunday, 30 July, she informed Harold she would come to the office the next day, even though Norman would not be there. ‘I shall bring Miss Florrie Hammond with me,’ she explained. ‘You will not think me very cross if I say I would rather not talk much yet about that business though I am very glad you have been told.’ Although not all of Norman’s family may have been pleased at the proposed union with the older and rather idiosyncratic Miss Potter, some of Norman’s nieces had already been instructed to call her ‘Aunt Bee’.18

  Beatrix’s letter to Harold Warne reveals a greater concern. ‘I do trust that your brother is not going to be very ill,’ she wrote. ‘I got scared before he went to Manchester, wondering if he had been drinking bad water. I shall be able to ask you after his health, as Miss Florrie is not quite “all there” & stone deaf!’ Terribly anxious about Norman, as well as how the uproar would ultimately resolve itself, she confessed, ‘It is a very awkward way of happening; I think he is going a little fast now that he has started.’ Although she wished events were not rushing on so uncontrollably, she graciously ended her letter with more confidence than she felt: ‘I trust it may come right in the end. Thanking you all for your kindness.’19

  Beatrix’s letter of the 30th from Miss Hammond’s is the last she posted from the London area. Her exact whereabouts the next few days are difficult to determine, but she visited the town of Amersham in Buckinghamshire, where she painted two extant watercolours on Thursday, 3 August. This suggests that the Potters did not leave for Wales until Friday the 4th at the earliest. In the interim the painful struggle of wills going on inside 2 Bolton Gardens, hidden from the world, was hopelessly deadlocked.

  It was not entirely unusual for an adult woman of nearly 40 to oppose her parents’ wishes regarding such an important issue as marriage, but it was a near-revolutionary act for a daughter as dutiful and respectful as Beatrix. There is no evidence that Bertram was involved, but his views must have been solicited as he joined the family in Wales for at least some part of the ensuing holiday. Since Bertram, however, had not yet found the courage to confront his parents about his own marriage nearly three years earlier, Beatrix’s brave decision to marry Norman put him in an uncomfortable position. If Beatrix knew then about her brother’s status, and she probably did, she said nothing. But she was unshakeable in her decision to accept Norman’s proposal. Before she left for Wales, Beatrix had given Norman an engagement present: a drawing in grey wash and pen and ink of Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage going to fetch her from the ball. The drawing was one of several done a decade earlier when she had been illustrating fairy tales and fables. In Beatrix’s version, the pumpkin carriage is drawn by three pairs of rabbits, with mice as coachmen and other small animals carrying lanterns and sedan chairs. The town is swathed in moonlight and the street scene is a medieval-looking town with more tiny mice peering out of the windows at the fine coach rushing through the street. It is a drawing of an escape, with the hope of a happy ending, and a perfect engagement present to Beatrix’s ‘Prince Charming’.20

  Over at 8 Bedford Square, Norman had been ordered bed rest on 29 July, five days after he had proposed to Beatrix. What preliminary diagnosis his physician made at the time is unknown, nor how alarmed his family was initially, although the doctor apparently indicated his illness was serious. Norman had promised Beatrix he would send for her if their separation become too difficult. They had last seen each other on Saturday, 22 July. Whether they saw each other before Beatrix left for Wales is unknown, but Beatrix never saw Norman alive again.21

  In order to keep herself occupied in Wales and to share her activities and thoughts with her intended, Beatrix began a ‘holiday diary’, making the first entry on 12 August. That day, she recorded her delight in the summer sea and a swimming beach where she had visions ‘of bare legs, & a little green crab… I am sure the crabs & shrimps join hands & caper about when the tide is coming in and the children have gone home.’ She added some shells to her shell collection, found good places for sketching, took interest in Bertram’s purchase of some Japanese double-tailed goldfish, and took Tiggy into the kitchen garden where the ageing hedgehog caught some spiders and a small snail. She rebuilt her rabbit hutch. The pages of Potter’s diary are filled with the sort of natural history that had always intrigued her: habits of the goldfish, varieties of butterflies, catching and sketching grasshoppers and watching sea birds. She was fascinated by the large beds of sea lavender and the blue-grey sea holly, noting their changing colours in the afternoon light. As always, she noticed and remarked upon the sheep and the handsome, sleek black Galloway cattle with long horns. She especially enjoyed the view over a barley field that she painted on the evening of 17 August, noting that ‘it is a beautiful colour, nodding & waving in the wind’.22

  On 20 August she drew a picturesque drain pipe ‘with a trimming of leaves & moss projecting from the garden wall’ and made the acquaintance of a wood toad, ‘nearly as large as a tea-pot’, whose bulk was damming the water in the pipe and to whom she fed some woodlice. She later likened him to their late host Sam Pope, who was a very large man, thinking the toad looked ‘dreadfully like him…’ She recorded her observations of nature that day: the garden insects, butterflies, and some aggressive grey and brown ants who ‘stood on their hind legs with their nippers open’.23

  That day, 20 August, was also Louisa Jane Warne’s eightieth birthday. Back in Bedford Square, Norman’s mother wrote to her granddaughter Jennie: ‘I wish dear Norman was getting better, but it is very slow work. He is so weak and cannot take anything but milk, he keeps very cheerful for all that but he can scarcely stand. Harold is coming… to-day to see the Doctor, but we fear it will be very slow recovery.’24

  But Norman Warne died in his bedroom at 8 Bedford Square on the afternoon of Friday, 25 August, with his mother, sister Millie, and two brothers at his bedside. He was barely a month past his thirty-seventh birthday. His simple will had been drawn up hastily that morning, dividing his small estate between his brothers, Millie, and his nephew Fred Stephens. The cause of death was lymphatic leukaemia: a difficult condition to diagnose in those days. His decline had been extraordinarily rapid. Edith Warne Stephens recorded her brother’s death that day in her family journal, Immortelles: ‘Dearest Norman joined his Daddy.’ It was exactly a month since he had asked Beatrix Potter to be his wife.25

  Beatrix’s holiday chronicle stops abruptly on Tuesday morning, 22 August, when she went up on the hill to pick blackberries, and was not taken up again until 29 August, the day of Norman’s funeral and burial. Where precisely she was when she wrote of her activities during the days just before Norman’s death
is unclear, although it is likely she wrote after the services. Norman was buried in the Warne family tomb at the fashionable Highgate Cemetery in London. The crypt rested among those of other literary notables: George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Herbert Spenser and Karl Marx. Beatrix attended the service along with the Warne family and friends.26

  Her diary entry for Tuesday, 29 August, 1905 reads: ‘This was all I had written but I remember it all so well & what I meant to write.’ She recounts how she had gone into the woods on the morning of 24 August to write letters, but reveals that she had just received a letter, perhaps from Harold or Fruing Warne, that made her think that Norman was very ill. After lunch she took her rabbits, Josey and Mopsy, down into the cellar where she ‘got rather depressed & most mercifully I wrote to my dear old man — the letter he got the last morning. I soon wrote myself quite merry again, & it is a silly letter all about my rabbits, & the walking stick that I was going to get for him to thrash his wife with — but he didn’t read it, so it was good enough. I am so thankful I wrote it.’27

  She got her sketching things and went down to the village to post her letter, enjoying the fields, sketching several on her way. After tea that same afternoon she went out again to draw the barley field in the waning light. ‘I sat on a big stone with my back against the wall. Down below, sloping steep, was the little field of red-gold barley, — golden & green — for the rain had brought up the clover, & there was a lighter patch beside each stook where they had been shifted.’ She remembered how the valley had looked with the black poplars, ‘how their trunk & branches stood up, first across the farm, the marshes, the sea & the sky, holding the landscape together’. She watched a train travelling south and wished ‘vaguely I was in it’, for her bags were packed. But that train was the last one of the day. So she sat there, watching the sunset. The night was ‘so still; not a breath of wind, and so peaceful & beautiful in a grey light… The sea was in a soft haze, pearly grey & indistinct except at one point under the sun… I remember thinking about Turner’s pictures & thinking how profane it seemed to be to try to draw anything so beautiful with my dirty little paint box. I remember thinking the evening was as still as death — and as beautiful — as I was looking at it there came out through the mist over the sea just for a few seconds — a gleam of golden sunshine…? Her diary ends: ‘In the evening there shall be Light.’28

  It was not until the morning of 25 August that Beatrix received the telegram the Warne family had sent, telling her that Norman was dying and asking her to come to London. In her postdated diary entry she reflects, ‘I am quite [heavily underlined] glad now I was not in time, I should only have cried & upset him… They did not send the wire to Llanbedr till the next morning… It was merciful to me anyhow, for I do not think there was another night train after that one I was looking at [on the 24th].’ Forced to cut short their holiday by many weeks because of Norman’s death, the Potters probably left Wales on the 27th, arriving back in London in time for Beatrix to view Norman’s body before burial.29

  ‘I thought my story had come right with patience & waiting like Anne Eliott’s [sic] did,’ Beatrix wrote to Millie Warne months later from Bath, the setting of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion. ‘It was always my favourite and I read the end part of it again last July, on the 26th the day after I got Norman’s letter.’ She had held fast to that ephemeral hope of happiness. But Anne Elliot’s fulfilment was fictional, and Beatrix Potter’s loss was terrible and real. Bereft of her own story’s happy ending, with dreadful silence at home, and no one except Norman’s immediate family with whom she could share her grief or be comforted, Beatrix fled London for Wales.30

  Once again her movements are hard to follow. After a week, maybe longer, Beatrix emerged at Gwaynynog, where she joined her unhappy uncle Fred Burton, also in mourning. Beatrix loved this house with its carved oak panelling, its fine antique furniture and its romantic, untidy garden where she had so often sketched. Harold Warne sent the re-proofed plates for Tiggy-Winkle on 5 September. Beatrix pronounced them better than the first set which had so displeased Norman. Pushing through her grief, Beatrix wrote: ‘It will be a trying thing to come for the first time to the office, but there is no help for it. I have begun sketching again; I am badly behindhand with my stock of summer work but I shall be able to make it up if there is a fine autumn.’ She planned to work on the book of verses and ‘the frog “Mr Jeremy Fisher”. I know some people don’t like frogs! but I think I had convinced Norman that I could make it a really pretty book with a good many flowers & water plants for backgrounds.’31

  Soon the atmosphere at Gwaynynog proved too depressing, and Beatrix escaped to the seaside by herself. ‘I am moving from this terrible address on Saturday to lodgings,’ she wrote Harold, promising to send a new address. Her plans were quite specific: she would be away from London for two months, but would come back to the Warne office after a month ‘to see dear Millie again’ and to discuss the progress on the new books. ‘I feel as if my work and your kindness will be my greatest comfort.’32

  The following day Beatrix wrote a loving and lively picture letter to Norman’s niece, Winifred Warne, calling herself the ‘Peter Rabbit Lady’, telling about her rabbits, Josey and Mopsy, and Mrs Tiggy, all of whom had travelled with her to Gwaynynog. ‘I have got my hedgehog here with me too; she enjoys going by train, she is always very hungry when she is on a journey. I carry her in a little basket and the bunnies in a small wooden box, I don’t take any tickets for them.’ Drawing pictures of Mrs Tiggy dressed as she was in the book, she tells Winifred how Tiggy disdains to eat shrimps, preferring worms and beetles instead, but suggesting that the little girl could invite Mrs Tiggy to tea as ‘she will drink milk like anything out of a doll’s tea-cup!’ She then sketches the real hedgehog drinking out of a teacup, and signs the letter, ‘with a great many kisses from your loving friend’.33

  True to her word, Beatrix was back in London by the 25th. She went to Norman’s grave at Highgate with Millie to see that the family headstone had been properly replaced, and arranged for some new plants, seeking Mary, Fruing’s wife’s, advice about the suitability of Japanese anemones. Beatrix was invited to stay at 8 Bedford Square while she was in town, and she gratefully accepted. The opportunity to be at the Warnes’ house with Millie and her mother pleased and comforted her. She did some watercolour paintings of the interior rooms of the house, including Norman’s bedroom, which she undoubtedly intended as a gift for Mrs Warne. Before she left Bedford Square she wrote to Mary, thanking her warmly for a photograph of the children that she had sent. ‘I should have liked it… even if they had been strangers, but I have heard Norman talk so often about the children that they seem like little friends.’ Explaining that she was leaving again for Wales on the 27th and would not return until the end of October, Beatrix wrote: ‘I cannot tell you how grateful I have felt for the kindness of all of you, it has been a real comfort & pleasure to stay in this house.’ As a token of her gratitude, Beatrix sent Millie a special Christmas present in December: a copy of the watercolour sketch of the barley field at Llandbedr she had done the evening before Norman died. ‘I try to think of the golden sheaves, and harvest,’ she told Millie, ‘he did not live long but he fulfilled a useful happy life. I must try to make a fresh beginning next year.’34

  After leaving London, Beatrix returned to Gwaynynog briefly, and from there travelled north to Sawrey. Harriet Burton’s estate had been probated in early June and Beatrix had received a small legacy from her aunt. Having learned earlier that spring that Hill Top Farm was for sale, Beatrix had begun serious negotiations with Frederic Fowkes to purchase the farm acres from his larger property, planning to use her new inheritance and the royalties from her books, a sum that now amounted to approximately £1,075. It was a purchase Norman must surely have known about and approved; a dream they shared of owning a small farm in the English Lakes. Norman was dead, but this part of her ‘story’ Beatrix refused to relinquish. As long as she lived, Hill Top would be
a memorial to that hoped-for storybook ending, and the place where she would reinvent herself yet again.35

  10

  Stories

  As Beatrix Potter copied out her deeds and walked the boundaries of her fields in early October 1905 at Near Sawrey in Lancashire, she was aware of the irony in her ownership of Hill Top Farm. It had come about because she had dared a few small rebellions as an otherwise dutiful daughter of a family who had rejected their roots in the north and turned their backs on the origins of their wealth.

  Now, at the age of 39, Beatrix was mysteriously on the brink of liberation. She was the author of six popular books for young children and, by any measure, successful. She had used her profits, along with the legacy from her Leech aunt, Harriet Burton, a woman who was proud of her association with merchant life, to make an investment in Lancashire land, thereby returning to the countryside her ancestors had embraced. Most ironic of all, Hill Top Farm would have been shared with a husband in trade, a man whom her parents had scorned, and whose sudden death made her more determined than ever to control at least this aspect of her life and to make a success at farming — even if it had to be from a distance.1

  The happy challenge provided by Hill Top Farm — the necessity of overcoming her grief and getting on with her life — inspired a remarkable outburst of creativity. She produced thirteen stories over the next eight years, including some of her best work. In the course of this creative effort, Beatrix Potter was transformed into a countrywoman.2