Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  25. BP to CMI, 10 December 1892. The Dunkeld correspondence, consisting of three letters from Rupert Potter, eleven from Beatrix, and two from McIntosh, is in the National Library of Scotland and was published by Mary Noble, ‘Beatrix Potter, Naturalist & Mycologist and Charles McIntosh, the “Perthshire Naturalist” ’, Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 44/3(1987), 607–27 (hereafter cited as Notes, RBG). Copies of the correspondence are in the Royal Botanic Garden Library, Edinburgh. Beatrix produced at least two drawings of every specimen, sending one to McIntosh and keeping the other herself. The drawings she sent to McIntosh eventually came to the Perth Museum and Art Gallery. None of them are signed, and they remained unidentified until Noble authenticated them. See M. A. Taylor and R. H. Rodger (eds.), A Fascinating Acquaintance: Charles McIntosh and Beatrix Potter (2003). Copies of correspondence are at the Perth Museum and Art Gallery, and at LDM@TA.

  26. The objectionable fungus is the common stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus.

  27. Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museum: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (2000), 3–43. The museum and not the laboratory was the central institution of Victorian science. BP to CMI (undated, 1893); partial letter in Notes, RBG. VN, 80–84.

  28. BP Journal (1893), 310. In sharp contrast to the detailed account of her activities Beatrix had kept the previous summer, her journal for most of 1893 is blank. The records of ownership, lease and sublease of Eastwood to the Potters for 1893 are in the Blair Castle Archives, Perthshire. Atholl McGregor rented Eastwood from the Duke from 1882 to 1899. His sublet to Potter for the summer is confirmed by O. C. Lewis, Rector of Dunkeld Cathedral, to Leslie Linder, 1 March 1970; V & A. The name McGregor was a common one in the area. David Duncan to the author, 14 April 2003.

  29. The fungus Strobilomyces strobilaceus, which has returned to its original name, is still rare in Scotland. One drawing of the fresh specimen is in LDM@TA and one is at the Perth Museum. The dried one which she painted first, discovered only in 1988, was given to the Perth Museum by Mrs Joan Duke, widow of the executor of Beatrix Heelis’s estate. The dried specimen is dated ‘Aug 11 Eastwood, Drummond Wood Crieff 1889’. This particular fungus dries exceedingly well, enabling Potter to paint it quite adequately after its return to McIntosh; Dr Roy Watling to the author, 18 January 2004; Robin Rodger, Curator, Perth Museum and Art Gallery. A postcard from John Stevenson is in McIntosh’s papers verifying the identification in 1893. Stevenson noted the 1893 find in a holograph in his book. Mary Noble, ‘Beatrix Potter, Mycologist’, BPSN, 2 (March 1981). VN, 72–3. Elizabeth Battrick, Beatrix Potter: The Unknown Years (1999), 13.

  30. HWBP, 110. TNR, 22–3.

  31. It is also interesting that by 1893 the Moore family consisted of four children: two boys and two girls. Beatrix claimed as an old woman that she had no one in particular in mind when she created Mr McGregor and never knew anyone by that name, but she had obviously forgotten. She may also have been reluctant to identify McIntosh as her model since the naturalist was anything but a crass villain. McIntosh credits John McGregor, late forester to the Duke of Atholl, in his article on the larch disease, ‘Notes by a Naturalist Round Dunkeld’, Transactions of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science, 2/6 (1887–8), so it was a name Potter would have heard around Eastwood. Peter Parker, ‘Gardening with Beatrix Potter’, BPS Studies, 10 (2003), 98–9, argues that McGregor was definitely working class and not an Edwardian gentleman; I concur. Beatrix made her own artistic adjustments to fit the story. BP to Noel Moore, 4 September 1893, FWA.

  32. BP to Eric Moore, 5 September 1893, CCP. Judy Taylor to the author, 8 August 2003. Correspondence with Ivy Trent, Cotsen Children’s Library, formerly in Los Angeles.

  33. BP to CMI, 19 November 1893, Notes, RBG, 619, n. 14. BP to CMI (n.d., c. November 1893), VN, 80–82. Roy Watling to the author, 16 February 2004.

  34. CMI to BP, 10 January 1894, Notes, RBG. This letter was found in a copy of Henry Coates’s biography of McIntosh, A Perthshire Naturalist, which Beatrix gave the Armitt Trust along with other volumes in her library. Very likely she had kept the letter since 1894 because of his excellent instructions. This is one of only two extant letters from McIntosh to Potter.

  35. VN, 94. See Mary Noble and Roy Watling, ‘Cup Fungus or Basidiomycete, and Potterism’, Bulletin of the British Mycological Society 20 (1986), 45–7, and W. P. K. Findlay, Wayside and Woodland Fungi (1967), where fifty-nine of Potter’s fungi drawings are published.

  36. There may have been more than seventy-three paintings, but these are the extant number.

  37. BP to CMI, 1894, Notes, RGB, n. 21. Leslie Linder, ‘Summary of Fungi drawings by year’, Linder Archive, V & A: 50 drawings in 1894. 23 drawings in 1895. BP Journal (10 October 1894), 363–4.

  38. Ibid. (14 March 1893), 314–16.

  39. Crompton Hutton was related to Richard Holt Hutton, an important Unitarian editor and reviewer, who graduated ahead of Rupert at Manchester College and was a James Martineau acolyte.

  40. BP Journal (12 June 1894), 319, and n. 2, regarding a 1956 letter from Caroline Hutton Clark.

  41. Ibid. (1894), 322. See Peter Hollindale, ‘Beatrix Potter and Natural History’, BPS Studies 9 (2001), 65. Hollindale argues that Potter was above all an ‘empirical observer of immediate natural phenomena’.

  42. BP Journal (1894), 320, 324.

  43. Ibid. (12 June 1894 and ff.), 320–26.

  44. Mary Hutton became a well-regarded geologist, specializing in fossil sponges; Brian G. Gardiner, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Fossils and Her Interest in Geology’, Linnean, 16/1 (January 2000), 31–47.

  45. Letter to Eric Moore, 28 March 1894; letter to Noel Moore, 29 March 1894, CCP.

  46. Archivist, Charterhouse, Surrey, correspondence with the author, September–October 2003. Archives of the Athenaeum, ‘Walter Bertram Potter, Supporters Sheet’, entry 13 May 1890; Sir James Caird, MP, and Sir John E. Millais were his proposers. Bertram Potter to BP, 6 September 1889, postmarked Paris, V & A. The only unexplained discrepancy is that the records from Magdalen College list Bertram as coming up from Charterhouse; while those at Charterhouse clearly show he withdrew in 1887. Robin Darwall-Smith, Archivist, Magdalen College, Oxford to the author, 25 July 2003; Alumni Oxonienses: The Historical Register of the University of Oxford (1900), 812.

  47. BP Journal (29 July 1894), 330.

  48. BP to Eric Moore, 13 September 1894, CCP.

  49. BP Journal (6, 23 August 1894), 333, 337, 338. Inside Beatrix’s copy of Geikie’s Outlines of Geology (1888), inscribed ‘July 1894’, were three sheets of her pen-and-ink drawings of fossilized fish with notations on each as to their identification through reference to Hugh Miller’s popular book The Old Red Sandstone (1841). There was also a photograph of an archaeological dig at Glacier Garden, Lucerne, taken and signed ‘WB Potter’, but not dated, by Bertram that same summer. See Barber, Heyday, 225–38.

  50. See the Beatrix Potter Collection, LDM@TA. BP Journal (14 September, 1894), 346; (26 July 1894), 329; (3, 6, 10 October 1894), 358–62.

  51. Ibid. (18 August 1894), 337–8; (10, 20 September 1894), 344, 350; (1 October 1894), 356.

  52. Ibid. (20, 25 September 1894), 350, 354.

  53. CMI to BP, n.d., Notes, RBG, 614. BP Journal (5 October 1894), 356–7, 360.

  54. Ibid. (27 September 1894), 356. Beatrix thought the bites might be from spiders but probably they were ticks, which are still common in the Borders. BP to Eric Moore, 15 September 1894, CCP.

  55. BP Journal (13 September 1894), 346; (11 September 1894), 344–5; (10 October 1894), 364.

  56. Ibid. (2, 10 October 1894), 357, 363.

  57. Ibid. (10 October 1894), 364–5; (11 November 1895), 408; (16 January 1896), 417.

  58. Eileen Jay and Jenny Hall, A Tale of London Past: Beatrix Potter’s Archaeological Paintings from the Armitt Collection (1990). The archaeological drawings are part of the Potter collection at LDM@TA and were given by Beatrix in April 1935 together with two sketch maps and her not
es on their provenance. Sadly, the original artefacts have disappeared.

  59. Eileen Jay, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Archaeology’, VN, 49–54. VN, 153. Ruskin noted the similarities between the Pre-Raphaelite approach to natural detail and natural history studies: Lynn L. Merrill, ‘Natural History’, in Sally Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (1988), 530–32. BP gave her copy of Henry W. Acland and John Ruskin, The Oxford Museum (1859), a work which argues that all art and decoration follow from forms in nature, to the LDM@TA in 1935. Dr S. T. Chapman, ‘The Other Beatrix Potter’, Westmorland Gazette (10 October 1986). ABP, 6.

  60. BP Journal (26, 27 April 1895), 383; (27, 30 April 1896), 421–2. Jay, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Archaeology’, 16–17.

  61. BP Journal (23 November 1895), 410; (9, 13 July 1895), 389, 390; (25 April 1896), 421. Lynn M. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989), 65–74.

  62. BP Journal (27, 30 April 1896), 421–2. BP/AW, 91–4. Hollindale, ‘Beatrix Potter and Natural History’, 61.

  63. Caroline Anne Martineau (1843–1902) was the author of Aunt Rachel’s Letters about Water and Air (1871) and Easy Lessons on Heat (1880). Constance and Caroline were the daughters of Richard Martineau, a well-to-do brewer and philanthropist and a cousin to Rupert’s mentor James and his sister, the writer and reformer, Harriet; Pedigree of the Martineau Family, Archives of Manchester College, Oxford University. BP Journal (19 November 1884), 118.

  64. Emma Cons (1838–1912) had also worked as a stained-glass restorer for John Ruskin. Both Cons and Martineau knew H. D. Rawnsley from their work with Hill. Octavia Hill, together with Rawnsley and Robert Hunter, was a founder of the National Trust in 1895. Morley Memorial College was renamed simply Morley College. Judi Leighton, ‘Emma Cons’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Nancy Boyd, Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World (1982), 60–82.

  65. BP Journal (7 January 1896), 415; (23 March 1896), 420; (23 November 1896), 410.

  66. A third drawing seems to have been a ‘trial run’ by the publisher, of miscellaneous items: a moth, an old pottery pitcher, a caterpillar, an enlarged section of an insect leg and foot, an eland’s head, two rabbits and several fungi sketches. All are signed ‘H. B. Potter ad. nat. del. Copyright’; V & A.

  67. BP Journal (3 November 1895), 408.

  68. Flower (1831–99) was Director of the museum from 1884 to 1898. BP Journal (17 May 1896), 422–3, 425. Gardiner, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Fossils’, 38.

  69. Henry Woodward (1832–1921) was an eminent naturalist and a vertebrate and invertebrate palaeontologist who created the catalogue for the British Museum’s fossils. Gardiner, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Fossils’, 45, suggests that Beatrix might have assisted Gertrude in illustrating some of Woodward’s articles for the Palaeontological Society, but I have found no evidence. BP Journal (13 July 1895), 391. An indication that the Potters and Woodwards knew one another also comes from Richard Hough, ‘The Tailors of Gloucester’, Signal, 42 (September 1983), 150–55. The Woodwards, however, were not Unitarians.

  70. Gertrude Woodward (1861–1939), Alice Woodward (1862–1951). There is no specific reference to Alice Woodward in Potter’s journal, but it is impossible to imagine that both Alice and Gertrude did not encourage her ambition to write and illustrate a ‘booklet’ for children. ‘Alice Bolingbroke Woodward Illustrated Work. Chronological Listing’, Natural History Library, Natural History Museum, London.

  71. Robert E. Mack to BP, 25 May 1894; BP to Ernest Nister (Robert E. Mack), 2 June 1894; Robert E. Mack to BP, 4 June 1894, HWBP, 176–7. BP/AW, 126–7. ASC, 66. The full title is Comical Customers at the New Stores of Comical Rhymes and Stories (1884).

  72. BP Journal (14 December 1895), 411.

  73. BP to CMI, c. Summer 1895; CMI to BP, c. 1895; BP to CMI, 20 August 1896; in Notes RBG.

  5 Discoveries

  1. The Pleasure Garden had been open to the public ever since Kew’s rescue from decades of neglect in the 1840s. But the admission of the ‘pleasure seekers’ to other parts of the garden, except in a limited way, was hotly debated for decades. Ray Desmond, Kew: The Royal Botanic Gardens (1995), 223–38; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (2000), 243–8.

  2. Desmond, Kew, pp. xiii–xvi, 268; William Thiselton-Dyer, ‘A Historical Account of Kew to 1841’, Kew Bulletin, 60 (1891), 279–327; Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. Studies in Social Discontinuity (1979), 58–67, 75; Drayton, Nature’s Government, 244–7; Peter Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain, 1850–1920 (1987).

  3. Desmond, Kew, 268, 249–50; 252–67; Drayton, Nature’s Government, 238–45; Paul Lawrence Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (2000), 96.

  4. W. B. Turrill, The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1959), 25. This volume, written by a member of the Kew staff, dismisses Thiselton-Dyer’s administrative accomplishments and castigates his rigid personality and his unpopularity with his staff. Drayton, Nature’s Government, 221–48, is crucial to understanding just how powerful a scientist Thiselton-Dyer became. Desmond, Kew, 282–3. Thiselton-Dyer’s decision to hire women at Kew was considered advanced.

  5. David Elliston Allen, The Botanists: A History of the Botanical Society of the British Isles through a Hundred and Fifty Years (1986), 4–24. The Botanical Society of the British Isles was founded in 1836 in response to the estrangement of many botanists from the Linnean. The latter encompassed botany and zoology while the Botanical Society was exclusively botanical.

  6. Even those papers which were selected for publication could be delayed for months or years, given the high cost of publication and the Society’s budget. A. T. Gage and W. T. Stearn, A Bicentenary History of the Linnean Society of London (1988), 88–93, 149–58. The Linnean Society had one of the most rigid protocols of any learned societies. It was not until 1829 that members were offered coffee and cake at meetings. David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (1976), 151–6. See especially David Elliston Allen (ed.), Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900 (2001); Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion, 69–92. By comparison, the Royal Zoological Society admitted women from its incorporation in 1829, and the Royal Entomological Society did so in 1833. The woman responsible for opening admission of women to the Linnean was herself blackballed because of her efforts. But by this time the Linnean had been eclipsed by the other societies in its leadership of the new botany; Gage and Stearn, 89.

  7. D. E. Allen, ‘The Early Professional in British Natural History’, in Alwyne Wheeler and James H. Price (eds.), From Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentaries on the History of Biology and Geology (1985), 1–12; Leslie M. Crossley, ‘The Professionalization of Science in Victorian Britain’, Ph.D. diss. (University of New South Wales, 1980); Gerald L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (1978), 4–9. Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History (1980), 286–96; Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (1989), 3–49. Allen, The Botanists, 161–74. Farber, Finding Order in Nature 33–4, 96–9. Barbara Gates, Kindred Nature (2001), 83–4. Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996), 160. Dorinda Outram, ‘New Spaces in Natural History’, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord and E. C. Spray (eds.), Cultures of Natural History (1996), 249–65.

  8. The best work on women in botany is Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760–1860 (1996), 208–224.

  9. Anyone wishing to come to Kew in the morning hours before 1898 had to be a bona-fide botanist armed with testimonials from ‘two respectable households’; Desmond, Kew, 232–8.

  10. Annie Lorraine Smith became an authority on lichens and was among the first women admitted to membership in the Linnean Society in 1905. BP Journal (7 January 1896), 415; (11 February 1896), 417–18.

  11. Wi
lliam Roscoe was a Renaissance scholar, the author of The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1795) and The Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth (1805). He was also Member of Parliament for Liverpool, and went bankrupt after a run on his bank in 1820; William Roscoe, Life of William Roscoe, 2 vols. (1833). Margaret Roscoe, Henry’s aunt, was also a highly regarded botanical artist who published an important volume, Floral Illustrations of the Seasons (1829–31). Sale catalogue for Gorse Hall, Stalybridge, contents of Gorse Hall, 1895, V & A.

  12. In 1895 Henry’s eldest daughter, Margaret Roscoe, married Charles Mallet, the nephew of Sir Louis Mallet, the Potters’ next-door neighbour in Bolton Gardens; marriage certificate 11 July 1895, Essex Church, The Mall, Kensington. BP Journal (11 July 1895), 389; (3 October 1895), 406; (2 February 1896), 417; (27 February 1896), 419.

  13. Ibid. (21–3 March 1896), 419–20. The painting Witches’ Butter and the microscopic drawings done at Woodcote are in the Beatrix Potter Collection, LDM@TA. VN, 140. The Roscoes began renting Woodcote in 1892. After he lost his re-election bid in 1895, they spent more time in the country. Dora Roscoe, Lucy Roscoe: A Memoir (1911).

  14. BP Journal (19 May 1896), 423–4. It is unclear whether she went to Kew on the 19th or the 20th.

  15. Ibid. Biographic information from Desmond, Kew, 425–36.

  16. BP Journal (19 May 1896), 423–4.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Ibid. 424.

  19. Ibid. Thiselton-Dyer (1843–1928) was ten years younger than Roscoe, but Beatrix must have thought him older because of his authoritarian manner.

  20. Ibid. (13 June 1896), 425.

  21. BP to CMI, 20 August 1896, Notes, RBG. Robert Peck, ‘Beatrix Potter, Scientific Illustrator’, Antiques (1996) 868–77. BP/AW, 90. BP Journal (13 June 1896), 425.

  22. Ibid. (23 July 1896), 426. Lakefield had been built in 1742 as a retreat for a Lancashire mill owner.

  23. Ibid. (26 August 1896), 430. These drawings of the pezizas and nearly as many boletes are part of the Beatrix Potter Collection at LDM@TA.