Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  24. BP Journal (31 August 1897), 431.

  25. She was also carefully documenting her theories by photographs as well as drawing. The close association between photography and botanical art was part of the drive among Victorian naturalists to convey nature as accurately as possible. On 9 October 1896 she made several photographs of a polypore on an elm log at Putney Park, the nearby home of the other branch of her Hutton cousins. Photographs, V & A. BP Journal (17 November 1896), 435.

  26. Ibid. (n.d. 1896), 436.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid. (18 November 1896), 436. While Potter uses the term ‘slip’, I have substituted ‘slide’ for clarity. She appears to have done her microscopic work in the kitchen at Bolton Gardens and made her slides there as well. Tap water was probably the most common medium used for germination, but the formula found among her drawings is for a nutrient solution consisting of a base of sugar water with trace metals, nitrous ammonia and acid tartrate. She could have let the slides dry and rehydrated them when she wanted. John Clegg speculates that she used the ‘hanging drop’ technique, in which a small quantity of nutrient solution is dropped onto a microscope slide, with or without a concave well; John Clegg, Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Scientist (1989), 12. Formula courtesy of Beatrix Potter Collection, LDM@TA.

  29. BP Journal (18 November 1896), 436.

  30. Ibid. (20, 30 November 1896), 437. Lunt was the co-author of Roscoe’s text Elementary Lessons in Chemistry (1866). By the 1890s typewriters were widely available in London. Petri dishes had been invented and would have been in use in Lunt’s laboratory. There is at least one drawing of moss germination done in a Petri dish in 1898 in the Beatrix Potter Collection at the LDM@TA.

  31. BP to W. Thiselton-Dyer, 3 December 1896, director’s correspondence, vol. 99/7, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; reprinted in Letters, 38.

  32. Roscoe did his post-graduate work with Bunsen in 1853 and always boasted the superiority of German science.

  33. BP Journal (3 December 1896), 437. Most scholars assume her parents either inhibited or actively thwarted her scientific efforts; see, for example, M. Daphne Kutzer, Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code (2003), 8.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Tom Wakeford, Liaisons of Life (2001), 24–5. Although Wakeford has confused some facts surrounding the evolution of Beatrix’s scientific paper, his readable book is invaluable for understanding the basic science of symbiosis, the physiology of lichens and the real importance of Potter’s work.

  36. BP Journal (7 December 1896), 438. Ward (1854–1906), who had studied at Owens College, Manchester, during Roscoe’s tenure, was at Cambridge from 1895 to 1906 and specialized in plant pathology.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid. (11 December 1896), 438–9.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid. (25 December 1896), 440; (26 December 1896), 440. Contemporary mycologists have applauded Beatrix for this charming and quite accurate metaphor, since this particular jelly fungus ‘weeps’ and literally becomes liquid; a truly unstable plant. See Mary Noble, ‘Beatrix Potter and Her Funguses’, BPS Studies, 1 (1985), 44.

  42. BP Journal (25 December 1896), 440. This latter statement has reinforced the view that Beatrix would have kept this paper along with her other fungi drawings and that its singular absence is the result of loss or destruction after her death.

  43. Ibid. (29 December 1896), 440. I do not read this statement as an indictment of her parents’ attitude towards science, but as a humorous remark. BP to CMI, 22 January 1897. McIntosh’s paper on the larch disease was read before the Perthshire Society of Natural Science on 10 February 1898 and published as ‘Notes by a Naturalist Round Dunkeld’, Transactions of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science, 2/6 (1897–8), 1–3; Notes, RBG and n. 50. McIntosh’s letter to Beatrix about the larch disease was written between 12 and 22 January 1897. Beatrix’s microscopic drawing of the larch canker, Lachnellula willkommii, is in the Beatrix Potter Collection, LDM@TA.

  44. BP Journal (30 December 1896), 441.

  45. Ibid. (26 December 1896), 440.

  46. BP Journal (9, 31 January 1897), 442. Ward’s response to her theories is unknown. Evidence for her visit to Cambridge appeared recently in a letter to Noel Moore. Beatrix writes that she ‘went to Cambridge last Friday, it was so wet in the country’. BP to Noel Moore, 13 February 1897, PC.

  47. BP to CMI, 12 January 1897, Notes, RBG.

  48. BP to CMI, 22 January 1897, Notes, RBG; see especially nn. 49–51. McIntosh, ‘Notes by a Naturalist’. In this brief paper on the larch disease McIntosh makes the important connection between the outbreak of the disease, the appearance of insect-feeding birds, and abatement of the aphis plague. He presented it on 10 February 1898.

  49. BP Journal (9, 24, 28, 31 January 1897), 442–3.

  50. Extant drawings of the germination of spores drawn every six hours at 600 x are in the Beatrix Potter Collection at the LDM@TA. BP/AW, 90.

  51. BP to CMI, 22 February 1897, Notes, RBG.

  52. W. P. K. Findlay, Wayside and Woodland Fungi (1967). Sheet number 30 shows green alga cells and fungus/lichen including Aspergillus, Cladosporum, Penicillium and Mucor, LDM@TA. BP to CMI, 22 February 1897, Notes, RBG. Roy Watling, ‘Helen Beatrix Potter’, The Linnean: Newspaper and Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 16/1 (January 2000), 26–8. Watling points out in a later article that her paper was based on the sprouting of the spores of the agarics. Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 155–6. Leslie Linder to C. W. Stephens, 31 January 1964. Minutes of Council Meeting, Linnean Society, 21 March 1897.

  53. Roy Watling, ‘But if… Helen B. Potter’s Year of Anxiety!’, in Armitt Papers, LDM@TA (1997), 39. Minutes of the Linnean Society General Membership Meeting, 1 April 1897. Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 149.

  54. Minutes of the Council Meeting of the Linnean Society, 8 April 1897; Proceedings of the Linnean Society, November 1896–June 1897, 11.

  55. BP to CMI, 21 September 1897 (unfinished), Notes, RBG. W. P. K. Findlay to Mary Noble, 17 July 1978, BPS. Findlay also casts doubt on whether some of the germinating spores were really basidiospores, and argues further that the professionals would have dismissed Beatrix’s discoveries simply because they had not observed them for themselves. See also his memo to Noble, ‘Beatrix Potter’s paper’.

  56. Leslie Linder to John Clegg, 6 July 1964, V & A; Linder to C. W. Stephens, 31 January 1984, V & A; Linder, ‘Summary of Fungi Drawings, 1897 – 40, 1898 – 20’, BP to CMI, 21 September 1897 (unfinished), Notes, RBG.

  57. Every scholar since her death has searched for it. There is no record of the paper at Kew, or in the private papers of the other principals: Massee, Thiselton-Dyer, Roscoe, Ward or McIntosh. Leslie Linder, who would surely have discovered it if it were extant, concluded that it was burnt along with other papers before he had access to them; Linder to John Clegg, 9 September 1964; to Naomi Gilpatrick, 13 March 1972, V & A; Naomi Gilpatrick, ‘The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter’, Natural History, 81 (October 1972), 38–41, 88–97. It is unlikely that Potter destroyed it herself. VN, 101, 107–23.

  58. TBP, 33–4. MY, 40, 47–8. Alexander Grinstein, The Remarkable Beatrix Potter (1995), 42–3. Both Lane and Grinstein argue that BP was ‘bitterly angry’ and depressed by the Linnean experience. Thomas O. Brady, General Secretary, Linnean Society, 20 January 1964; Watling, ‘But if…’, 39; Gage and Stearn, Bicentenary History, 149, 155–9, 219; John Clegg, ‘The Lake District, Natural History and Beatrix Potter’, BPS Studies 2 (1986), 11–14; Roy Watling, ‘Beatrix Potter as a Mycologist before Peter Rabbit and Friends’, Linnean Society, London (24 April 1997). ‘Apology to end tale of Beatrix botanist’, The Times, 24 April 1997; Sandra Barrick, ‘We were wrong about Beatrix…’, Daily Telegraph (17 February 1997). The executive secretary of the Linnean Society publicly acknowledged that Potter had been ‘treated scurvily’ by members of the Society. Without her paper to judge, nothing more can be accurately claimed for Potter’s hypothesis. Howev
er, the evidence from her journal and extant drawings demonstrate that she was the first to succeed in germinating spores of basidiomycetes in Britain, and the first in Britain to argue for the symbiotic nature of lichens, preceded only by Schwendener in Switzerland. Not a bad record for an amateur.

  59. BP to CMI, 22 January 1897, Notes, RBG; BP to Walter Gaddum, 6 March 1897, in LTC, 100. Massee published prolifically and by 1911 had embraced the lichen hypothesis, but there is no evidence he did any further research on germination.

  60. Shteir, Cultivating Women, 11–31, 208–27, 233–7. Shteir raises the question of why Potter apparently did not know the work of Anna Maria Hussey, who painted fungi showing the sections a step back. Gates, Kindred Nature, 83–6; Roy MacLeod and Russell Moseley, Days of Judgement: Science, Examinations and the Organization of Knowledge in Late Victorian England (1982), 75–106; Allen, The Botanists, 161–71.

  61. BP to Henry Coates, c. 1923, quoted in M. A. Taylor and R. H. Rodger (eds.), A Fascinating Acquaintance: Charles McIntosh and Beatrix Potter (2003), 21, 28. BP wrote to McIntosh’s biographer in 1922: ‘He was a keen observer and a first-rate field naturalist fifty years ago, and the kind of student who would continue to learn through a long life’: Henry Coates, A Perthshire Naturalist: Charles McIntosh of Inver (1923), 210–31. McIntosh, ‘Notes…’ McIntosh continued to make important contributions to mycology, geology and ecology, particularly with his research on fungal pathogens. He recorded thirteen species of fungi new to Britain, of which four were new to science. Watling, ‘But if…’, 40; Findlay, Wayside, 25; Catherine Golden, ‘Beatrix Potter: Naturalist Artist’, Women’s Art Journal, 11/1 (1990), 16–20.

  62. BP to the writer of a letter published in The Times, c. November 1930, ‘about toads’, BPG; William Thiselton-Dyer to Henry Roscoe, 13 May 1900. English Manuscript 963.23, John Rylands Library; Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, The Life and Experiences of Sir H. E. Roscoe, DCL, LLD, FRS, written by Himself (1906); Drayton, Nature’s Government, 240–43. By the end of Thiselton-Dyer’s tenure Kew had in fact become what he boasted it would — ‘the botanical centre of the world’.

  63. ‘A Dream of Toasted Cheese’, 1899, PC; reproduced in Roscoe, Life and Experiences, 243; BP/AW, 85–6.

  64. BP/AW, 54–70. Ivy Trent to the author, 6–7 August 2001.

  65. BP Journal (17 November 1896), 435.

  6 Fantasies

  1. ABP, 219–31; The Day’s News, c. 1892; BP/AW, 56; BP’s Art, 66. BP to Kate Wyatt, 27 November 1920, FLP.

  2. Joyce Irene Whalley, ‘Beatrix Potter before “Peter Rabbit”: Her Art Work’, BPS Studies, 3 (1989), 22–7. BP Journal (16 September 1884), 107. Peter Hollindale, ‘Uncle Remus and Beatrix Potter’, unpublished lecture to the Beatrix Potter Society, AGM (March 2003), 2, BPS. Hobbs, ‘Beatrix Potter’s Writings: Some Literary and Linguistic Influences — With a Scottish Slant’, BPS Studies, 3 (1989), 32–4.

  3. The sequel, Nights with Uncle Remus, appeared about 1884 in England. The best-known illustrations are by A. B. Frost, originally published in Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892). His illustrations for Songs and Sayings did not appear until 1895. Potter would not have known these until she had begun her own versions. John Goldthwaite, The Natural History of Make-Believe (1966), 254–88, argues that Potter was singularly influenced by Uncle Remus. BP/AW, 66–9.

  4. Judy Taylor, LTC, has offered the definitive collection of extant Potter letters to children as of 1992; since then other letters have come to light. In 2004 Lloyd Cotsen published his collection in facsimile letters in The Beatrix Potter Collection of Lloyd Cotsen (CCP). BP to Frida (sic) Moore, 26 January 1900; to Marjorie Moore, 13 March 1900, LTC, 64–7; BP to Noel Moore, 24 April 1900, CCP.

  5. BP Journal (20 August 1892), 255–6. BP to Noel Moore, 21 August 1892, CCP; BP to Eric Moore, 21 August 1892, CCP.

  6. BP to Eric Moore, 28 March 1894, CCP; BP to Noel Moore, 13 February 1897, CCP; BP to Noel Moore, 27 February 1897; BP to Molly Gaddum, 6 March 1897, LTC.

  7. BP Journal (16 April 1895), 377–8; BP to Noel Moore, 21 April 1895, CCP. This is one of the few picture letters which illustrate something she has already described in her journal.

  8. BP to Eric Moore, 5 September 1895, CCP.

  9. BP to Noel Moore, 10 April 1895, CCP. This letter also tells about sea birds and how they catch fish. BP to Noel Moore, 7 August 1896, LTC.

  10. BP to Noel Moore, 26 August 1897, LTC; BP to Noel Moore, 14 June 1897, 5 October 1898, CCP.

  11. BP to Noel Moore, 30 March 1898, PC.

  12. Remark attributed to Bertram Potter; see Liz Taylor, ‘The Tale of Bertram Potter’, Weekend Scotsman (11 November 1978), 7. Gillian Avery, ‘Beatrix Potter and Social Comedy’, Rylands University of Manchester Bulletin, 76/3 (Autumn 1994), 185–9.

  13. BP Journal (3, 11 November 1895), 408, 411; (2 February 1896), 417; (3 December 1897), 437.

  14. R. K. Webb, ‘The Background: English Unitarians in the Nineteenth Century’, in Leonard Smith (ed.), Unitarian to the Core: Unitarian College Manchester, 1854–2004 (2004), 1–30; N. G. Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, in J. H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History (1955), 241–87.

  15. BP Journal (June 1894), 320.

  16. The honorary title was conferred for all these activities to better his ‘flock’, in the community and in the diocese, and he was always addressed as ‘Canon’ Rawnsley. In 1909 he was made a residentiary canon at Carlisle and thereafter was required to spend three months in residence; the rest of the year he served at Crosthwaite. See John Simpson, ‘The Most Active Volcano in Europe’: A Short Life of Canon Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, Vicar of Crosthwaite, Keswick 1883–1917 (n.d.), 16.

  17. Rawnsley and Hill had worked together in London before Rawnsley was ordained and it was Hill who sent him to recuperate in Ambleside in the Lake District when he suffered a breakdown of health. Rawnsley married Hill’s friend Edith Fletcher, whom he had met in Ambleside. Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill: A Life (1990); Nancy Boyd, Three Victorian Women Who Changed Their World: Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale (1982); Graham Murphy, Founders of the National Trust (1987), 44–68, 69–100. Robert Hunter (1844–1913), a solicitor to the Post Office, served as treasurer of the NT. Hill (1838–1912) never held a Trust office, but served on the executive committee until her death and took the lead in all the early acquisitions. Both Hill and Hunter were enthusiastic visitors to the Lake District.

  18. Christopher Hanson-Smith, ‘Beatrix Potter and the National Trust’, BPS Studies, 1 (1985), 6. Life Members were a special category of more expensive memberships. Rupert’s membership proves his regard for the Trust’s mission and confidence in Rawnsley’s leadership. As early as 1904 it was suggested that the English Lake District be nationalized. In 1907 the National Trust was registered under a special Act of Parliament.

  19. W. R. Mitchell, Beatrix Potter: Her Life in the Lake District (1998), 24–6; Eleanor F. Rawnsley, Canon Rawnsley: An Account of His Life, (1923), 107–16; Elizabeth Battrick, ‘Canon Rawnsley and The National Trust’, BPS Studies 7 (1997), 33; H. A. L. Rice, Lake Country Portraits (1967), 122–43.

  20. S. D. Dodgson and Noel Rawnsley, circular letter, Herdwick Sheep Association, 4 September 1899, PC.

  21. ‘Moral Rhymes for the Young’ was reprinted in Canon T. B. A. Saunders (ed.), Prelates and People of the Lake Counties (1948), 72. The original publication date is unknown, as the British Library did not catalogue children’s books at that time. Rawnsley, Canon Rawnsley, 346–70. ASC, 69.

  22. ABP, 75; BP’s Art, 106–7. Rain, August 1898. Wynne Bartlett and Joyce Irene Whalley, Beatrix Potter’s Derwentwater (1995), 49–59, 78–85. The Derwentwater Sketchbook, 1909, facsimile (1984), with commentary by Wynne Bartlett and Joyce Irene Whalley; original at BPG.

  23. BP to Marjorie Moore, 26 January 1900, LTC, 64–5.

  24. TNR, 26–30. Ruth K. MacDonald, Beatrix Potter (1986), 26–7.

  25. BP to Marjorie Moore, 13 March 1900, LTC, 66–7. It is in this
charming letter, the original of which is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, that she describes and sketches the Reading Room, telling Marjorie: ‘Next time Miss Potter goes to the British Museum she will take some Keating’s powder! It is very odd there should be fleas in books!’

  26. TNR, 32. Laura C. Stevenson, ‘A Vogue for Little Books’: The Tale of Peter Rabbit and its Contemporary Competitors’, in BPS Studies, 10 (2003), 11–27. Stevenson speculates that Nister was one of the ‘Grub Street’ publishers that Potter talks of arguing with. BP to Freda Moore, 24 April 1900, PC.

  27. Stevenson, ‘A Vogue…’, 22–4. Golliwog books were written by Ruth Upton and illustrated by her daughter, Florence.

  28. Ibid. 20–22. BP to BMM, BPA; BP to ACM, 12 December 1925, BPA, 8–9.

  29. Stevenson, ‘A Vogue…’, 21–2. TNR, 32–3.

  30. BP, ‘Roots’, BPA, 208. TNR, 36, 33. ‘Conversation with Miss Norah C. Moore, 17 December 1987’, PC. There is some suggestion that Rupert contributed to her initial effort, but more likely, he aided her private efforts later.

  31. Beatrix Potter and Canon H. Rawnsley, Peter Rabbit’s Other Tale, reprinted by The Beatrix Potter Society (1989). Stevenson, ‘A Vogue…’, 22–3. BP to Messrs Warne & Co., 11 September 1901, Letters, 55.

  32. F. Warne & Co. to Canon Rawnsley, 18 September 1901, FWA.

  33. TNR, 34–6. Arthur King and A. F. Stuart, The House of Warne: One Hundred Years of Publishing (1965), 28–36. F. Warne & Co. to Canon Rawnsley, 18 September 1901, FWA. Laura C. Stevenson to the author, 23 October 2002.

  34. Stevenson, ‘A Vogue…’, 11–17.

  35. Henry Brooke, Leslie Brooke and Johnny Crow (1982), 36–8; Stevenson, ‘A Vogue…’, 23–4. Stevenson makes clear that while Potter’s book was revolutionary in concept, Warne were receptive, in part because of the intensely competitive market for small picture books at just that time. TNR, 34, 36. Leslie Brooke would publish his own picture book, Johnny Crow’s Garden, in 1903. ASC, 74.