Beatrix Potter
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Notes
Abbreviations
Manuscript Collections
BPG Beatrix Potter Gallery, The Hawkshead and Beatrix Potter Property, NT
BPS Beatrix Potter Society, London (Archives on loan to V&A)
CCP Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton University
CRO/B Cumbria Records Office, Barrow-in-Furness
CRO/C Cumbria Records Office, Carlisle
CRO/K Cumbria Records Office, Kendal
FLP Free Library of Philadelphia
FWA Frederick Warne Archives, London
LDM@TA Lakes Discovery Museum @ The Armitt, Ambleside. The name has recently been changed to The Armitt Collection
NT The National Trust
PC Private Collection
V&A Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Published Works
ABP Beatrix Potter, The Art of Beatrix Potter, selected and arranged by Leslie Linder and W. A. Herring (1955; second edition, 1972; except where noted, all citations are from second edition)
ASC Judy Taylor, Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman (1986; revised edition, 2002)
BPA Beatrix Potter, Beatrix Potter’s Americans: Selected Letters, edited by Jane Crowell Morse (1982)
BP/AW Judy Taylor, Joyce Irene Whalley, Anne Stevenson Hobbs and Elizabeth Battrick, Beatrix Potter, 1866–1943: The Artist and Her World (1987)
BP Journal Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881–1897, transcribed from her code writings by Leslie Linder (1966; revised edition, 1989)
BP’s Art Beatrix Potter, Beatrix Potter’s Art: Paintings and Drawings, edited by Anne Stevenson Hobbs (1989)
BPSN Beatrix Potter Society Newsletter
BPS Studies Beatrix Potter Society Studies
BP/V&A Anne Stevenson Hobbs and Joyce Irene Whalley, Beatrix Potter: The V&A Collection (1985)
DIDJ Beatrix Potter, Dear Ivy, Dear June: Letters from Beatrix Potter, edited by Margaret Crawford Maloney (1977)
ELCL Beatrix Potter, The Choyce Letters: Beatrix Potter to Louie Choyce, 1916–1943, edited by Judy Taylor (1994)
HD Beatrix Potter, A Holiday Diary: With a Short History of the Warne Family, edited and written by Judy Taylor (1996)
HWBP A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, edited by Leslie Linder (1981, revised edition 1987)
Letters Beatrix Potter, Beatrix Potter’s Letters, selected by Judy Taylor (1989)
LTC Beatrix Potter, Letters to Children from Beatrix Potter, edited by Judy Taylor (1992)
ML Beatrix Potter, Beatrix Potter’s Farming Friendship: Lake District Letters to Joseph Moscrop, 1926–1943, edited by Judy Taylor (1998)
MY Margaret Lane, The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter (1978)
Notes, RBG Mary Noble, ‘Beatrix Potter, Naturalist & Mycologist and Charles McIntosh, the “Perthshire Naturalist” ’, Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 44/3 (1987), 607–27
TBP Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter (1946)
TMH Jo
hn Heelis, The Tale of Mrs William Heelis — Beatrix Potter (1999)
TNR Judy Taylor, That Naughty Rabbit: Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit (2002)
VN Eileen Jay, Mary Noble and Anne Stevenson Hobbs, A Victorian Naturalist: Beatrix Potter’s Drawings from the Armitt Collection (1992)
Beatrix Potter and Her Correspondents
ACM Anne Carroll Moore
ALW Amelia ‘Millie’ Warne
AMK Alexander McKay
BLT Bruce L. Thompson
BMM Bertha Mahony Miller
BP Beatrix Potter
BPH Beatrix Potter Heelis
CC Caroline (Hutton) Clark
CJW Carl J. Weber
CMI Charles McIntosh
DB Delmar Banner
DH Daisy Hammond
DMM Donald M. Matheson
ELC Eleanor ‘Louie’ Choyce
EN Esther Nicholson
FC Fanny Cooper
FW Fruing Warne
GN Grace Nicholson
GPC Mary-Abigail (Gail) Parsons Coolidge
GW George Walker
HDR Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley
HPC Henry P. Coolidge
HW Harold Warne
JDV Josefina de Vasconcellos
JM Joseph Moscrop
MFHP Marian Frazer Harris Perry
NDW Norman Dalziel Warne
NNH Nancy Nicholson Hudson
SHH Samuel H. Hamer
Prologue: Ownership
1. BPH to ALW, 8 November 1918, FWA. Westmorland Gazette, 8 November 1918.
2. BP to HW, 10 October 1905, Letters. BP to HW, 2 October 1905, FWA/V & A.
3. BP Journal (19 August 1882), 20–21. H. S. Cowper, Hawkshead (1899). Bruce L. Thompson, The Lake District and the National Trust (1946), 154–7. Although BP distinguishes her postal address as Near Sawrey, she refers to the village simply as Sawrey.
4. BP Journal (29 September 1885), 275.
5. Ibid. (21 September 1895), 403. See for example the painting Harvest Scene, Esthwaite Water, c. 1895, V & A, and From the Garden at Ees Wyke, looking toward Esthwaite Water, June 1911, FWA. BP Journal (15 July–17 November 1896), 427–35.
6. Ibid. (28 July 1896), 427.
7. F. T. Wright to The Caretaker [Mrs Ludbrook], Hill Top, 27 March 1951, NT.
8. MY, 94; HWBP, 168. BP to NDW, 11 December 1904, Letters, 111.
9. BP Journal (17 November 1896), 433. Thompson, The Lake District and the National Trust, 1–7. Wordsworth’s description of the scenery of the lakes, (1835) includes the phrase ‘district of the Lakes’ and the term ‘Lakeland’.
1 Roots
1. Beatrix Potter (Heelis), biographical profile provided to the Horn Book editors in November 1942 for a Horn Book publication, Illustrators of Children’s Books 1744–1945, ed. Bertha Mahony and others (1947). Part of this profile is published in BPA, 213.
2. ‘Roots of the Peter Rabbit Tales’, The Horn Book (May 1929); BPA, 207–9. Unitarianism is a denomination within the English Dissenting or free-church tradition which rejects the doctrine of the Trinity. Never large in numbers, and particularly prevalent in the Midlands and North of England, Unitarians were disproportionately represented among the new entrepreneurial segments of society and in scientific, literary and academic circles, and were particularly identified with political liberalism.
3. BPA, 207–8.
4. Ibid.
5. J. Mordaunt Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches (1999), 1–32.
6. Quoted in J. G. Hurst, Edmund Potter and Dinting Vale (1948), 6. J. Scott, J. H. Smith and D. Winterbottom, Glossop Dale, Manor and Borough (1973), 57–73. Edmund Potter, ‘Calico Printing as an Art Manufacturer’ (1852, in Manchester Central Library Archives), 49; ‘Edmund Potter & Co. Ltd.’, Derbyshire Record Office. In her journal for December 1894 (BP Journal, 368), Beatrix incorrectly reports that the pattern was ‘a poker and tongs crossed, black on a blue ground’.
7. Under an Act of 1753, in force until 1836, all Dissenters were required to be married in the Church of England. Hurst, Edmund Potter, 2–7. Glynis Reeve (Greenman), A North Country Lass (privately published [Glossop], 2001); Eileen Jay, Beatrix Potter’s Manchester Roots (1994): The children of Edmund and Jessy in birth order were: Edmund Crompton, Clara, Rupert, Walter, William, Mary and Lucy.
8. Hurst, Edmund Potter, 12. Rowena Godfrey, ‘A Genial Man: Edmund Potter and his Calico Printing Work’, BPS Studies, 11 (2005), 21–34.
9. Scott, Smith and Winterbottom, Glossop Dale, 59. Reeve, A North Country Lass, 4.
10. Reeve, A North Country Lass, 4. Hurst, Edmund Potter, 28–30: Edmund Potter, Picture of a Manufacturing District (1856) remains a valuable statistical portrait of a Victorian mill town. Raymond V. Holt, The Unitarian Contribution to Social Progress in England (1952), 196–209. E. Potter, ‘The Strike: A Letter to the Working Classes’, and ‘Letter to Rev. Charles Richson in reply to opinions on “Trade Schools as necessary to promote national education” ’, in Pamphlets published by Edmund Potter (Manchester, 1831–55); Manchester Local Studies Library, Manchester.
11. He was a reporter for the jury on the exhibits of printing and dyeing, and entered exhibits displaying the progress of machine-printed fabrics. Obituary, Inquirer (3 November 1883). Edmund Potter, ‘Schools of Art’, in Pamphlets. Potter helped organize the Art Treasures Exhibition at Manchester in 1857; Robert H. Kargon, Science in Victorian Manchester (1977), 16–19. Edmund Potter, ‘Remarks on Education’, at the opening of the Unitarian Chapel in Glossop, 12 June 1875, Inquirer, 19 June 1875.
12. Manchester College, founded in 1786 for the sons of Dissenters, had removed to York early in the nineteenth century, but returned to Manchester for a second period during which it was officially Manchester New College. It had several more reiterations, becoming Manchester College Oxford in 1889. Its most recent incarnation is as Harris-Manchester College. Edmund served on the Board of Regents and sent all four sons to Manchester New College. For simplicity I refer to the college that Rupert attended as Manchester College. During his time, Manchester’s degrees were awarded by University College London. Hurst, Edmund Potter, 72–9. E. Potter, Pamphlets.
13. ‘Memories of Camfield Place’, c. 1891, BP Journal, 444.
14. Ibid. 447. Until rather recently Camfield Place was the home of Barbara Cartland, the romance writer. Still owned by the Cartland family today, it has been only slightly altered from when Beatrix used to lie happily in Bedroom number 4 with its well-loved green bed hangings. Probated will of Edmund Potter, 17 January 1884, Principal Probate Registry. This amount is distinct from real property, which is excluded from probate valuations. (The equivalent amount in US currency is $2,143,700 in 2003.) Probated values are taken from the calendars in the Probate Department of the Principal Registry, Family Division. Modern equivalents, rounded off, are derived from John J. McCusker, ‘Comparing the Purchasing Power of Money in Great Britain from 1264 to Any Other Year…’, www.Oanda.com/convert/fxhistory. Crompton Potter died just six months before his father in 1883. Walter died in 1871, and William, who never married, died of typhoid in 1873. All three Potter daughters survived: Clara, never married, continued to live at Queen’s Gate, Mary married Edwin Wrigley, a successful paper manufacturer from Bury, and Lucy became the wife of the noted chemist Sir Henry Roscoe.
15. Background on the Leech family is from family obituaries in Inquirer and Christian Life, from Samuel Hill, Bygone Stalybridge (1907), 223–8, and A History of the Mansions of Manufacturers, n.d., Manchester Central Library Archives. Interview with Christine Clough of The Friends of Gorse Hall, May 2000. Enid Bassom, ‘Profile: Gorse Hall’, BPSN, 76 (April 2000), 5–6. Reeve, A North Country Lass, 5–7.
16. Obituary of John Leech, Christian Reformer, 17 (1861), 320. Obituary of Mrs Leech, Christian Life (12 January 1884), 21–2. The overlap between the two families in their Unitarian associations is quite striking both intellectually and socially; Royal Manchester Institute, lists of subscribers, Manchester Central Library Archives; History
of the Royal Manchester Institute, 1881. Manchester Central Library Archives. BP Journal (5 May 1884), 83.
17. Beatrix always refers to the Burton home as ‘Gwaynynog’ but it is now spelled ‘Gwaenynog’. The equivalent amount in 2003 would be $954,000. M. Harvey to the author, 21 April 2003. Probated will of Harriet Burton, 10 June 1905, Principal Probate Registry. John and Jane Leech, the two elder Leech children, are buried at Gee Cross near the Potter crypt. The senior Leeches are buried at Dukinfield. The younger John Leech had a daughter, Ethel, who married Sir William Hyde Parker, from a family with naval connections, and subsequently lived at Melford Hall.
18. ‘Northern Notes’, Inquirer (30 July 1966), 5; ‘Stalybridge’, Inquirer (26 February 1870), 138. Jack Bredbury, The Foundation of the Stalybridge Unitarian Church and Sunday School and the Connection of Their Origins with the Leech Family (2001), 1–4.
19. BP Journal (28 March 1884), 79. ‘Northern Notes’, Inquirer (30 July 1966), 5.
20. ‘Mrs Leech’, Christian Life (12 January 1884), 21. Revd J. Grant Bird, Stalybridge Reporter (11 January 1884). Bird’s comments on Leech’s benevolence are extraordinary, as he was a clergyman of the Church of England. ‘London Diary’, Inquirer (6 August 1966), 3, (13 August 1966), 3. BP Journal (6 January 1884, 30 March 1884), 62, 80.
21. Rupert Potter to Edmund Potter, 1846, V & A.
22. V. D. Davis, A History of Manchester College (1932), 105–9, 119–20. ‘Mr Rupert Potter’, Inquirer (16 May 1914). Beatrix recalls her father’s respect for Martineau’s character and conscience in 1884; BP Journal (19 November 1884), 118.
23. Rupert later collected some thirty pen-and-ink drawings by the illustrator Randolph Caldecott, while Crompton amassed an important collection of modern British painters and valuable Chinese enamels and porcelains. BP Journal (19 March 1884), 76 and note. Edmund promoted photography at the Manchester Exhibition and very likely owned a camera. The youngest Potter child, Lucy, took up photography early, taking a competent portrait of her father in 1859.