Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  20. BPH to Nora Burt, 5 June 1931, NT.

  21. BPH to Margery McKay, 22 September 1930, PC.

  22. BPH to Kitty Holdsworth, 5 July 1928, 11 March 1935, Girl Guide Association, CRO/B; BPH to MFHP, 10 February 1928, BPA.

  23. TMH, 50–58; Willow Taylor, Through the Pages of My Life, edited by Judy Taylor (2000), 23–38.

  24. BPH to FW, 9 January 1924, Letters, 284; FW to BPH, 25 January 1924, FWA.

  25. BPH to FW, 19 June 1924; BPH to Miss L. C. Smythe, June 1924; L. C. Smythe to BPH, 30 June, 13 November 1924; BPH to FW, 2 July, 8 August, 24 October 1924, FWA. Copies of the extant Christmas cards are in the V & A and BPG. These drawings, in contrast to the familiar book illustrations, are practically unknown. Edwin Mullins, ‘The Unknown Beatrix Potter’, Weekend Telegraph, 92 (1 July 1966), 22–7.

  26. BPH to FW, 22 January 1924, Letters, 285.

  27. Beatrice Potter Webb’s Christian names were ‘Martha Beatrice’. The article in the Sunday Herald, entitled ‘Spite before Honour’, was written by Sir J. Foster Fraser. The retraction did not stop the error from being repeated in the Evening Standard, the Daily Dispatch and again as late as 1927.

  28. See Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926). Webb was eight years older than Heelis. Margaret Cole, Beatrice Webb (1946) and Deborah Epstein Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (1985). BPH to FW, 6 February 1924, Letters, 286.

  29. BPH to FW, 17 June 1921, Letters, 269. Owen (1858–1939) preferred the biblical spelling of her name, but changed it often; Beatrix is inconsistent. BPH to MFHP, 17 November 1933, 15 December 1935, BPA. Jane Morse, ‘Beatrix Potter’s American Neighbour, Rebecca Owen’, BPS Studies, 7 (1997), 52–9; Jane Morse, ‘Beatrix Potter and Rebeccah Owen’, BPSN, 13 (June 1984), 5–6; 18 (October 1985), 4–5; Carl J. Weber, Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square (1952), 3–29. The first American visitor to Hill Top was Charles G. Y. King, a watercolourist and photographer, who called in May 1913, stayed for tea, famously photographed Beatrix in the doorway at Hill Top and also took a favourite photo of Beatrix and Kep. BPH to C. G. Y. King, 27 May 1913, PC. Kenneth Hecht to Editors, Smithsonian Magazine (March 1989) and to Jane Morse, 24 March 1989, courtesy of Jane Morse.

  30. BPH to ACM, 24 June 1921, Letters, 270; Anne Carroll Moore, ‘An Appreciation’, in ABP (1955 edition), p. xvi.

  31. Ibid., pp. xviii–xx; BPA, pp. ix, 3.

  32. BPH to FW, 5 August 1921, Letters, 271.

  33. BPH to FW, 10 May 1922 (?), Letters, 276; BPH to ELC, 13 December 1922, ELCL.

  34. BPH to ‘Nicholas’, 22 October 1922, BPA; LTC, 148–51.

  35. William Lusk Webster Field, Headmaster, Milton Academy 1917–42. Author, interview with Herbert G. Stokinger, Milton, Mass., 5 May 2002; BPA, pp. ix–x, 5–7.

  36. A brief author profile was published in Realms of Gold (1929), a reference guide on children’s authors and children’s literature published under the auspices of The Horn Book. The rest of it appeared as “‘Roots” of the Peter Rabbit Tales’, The Horn Book, 5 (May 1929), 69–72. BPH copies her text in a letter to ACM, 12 December 1925, for approval. See BPA, 8–9. BMM to Margaret Lane, 25 September 1944, Simmons College Archive. Lolly Robinson, ‘Beatrix Potter’s American Friends’, BPS Studies, 11 (2005), 70–82. The Bookshop for Boys and Girls was supported by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU), founded in 1876 as a mission to help young women of humble origin become economically independent, and was affiliated with what later became Simmons College. Mahony had worked for the WEIU since 1906. The WEIU, known as the Women’s Union, still exists today.

  37. BPH to DH, 17 June 1920, 19 April 1922, 18 July 1924, PC. Daisy Hammond was a beneficiary of Rupert Potter’s will.

  16 Legacies

  1. Hardwicke D. Rawnsley, ‘A Crack about Herdwick Sheep’, in his By Fell and Dale at the English Lakes (1911).

  2. W. J. Malden, British Sheep and Shepherding (1915), 6–18, 59–61, 82–8. Malden’s book remains the definitive book on the subject of British breeds and breeding in the early twentieth century. C. Hanson-Smith, ‘The Herdwick Sheep of Cumbria’, BPS Studies, 2 (1986), 47–9.

  3. The Herdwick Sheep Association was ignored by R. H. Lamb, Herdwick: Past and Present. A History of the Breed (1936), 30–32, and H. D. and Noel Rawnsley’s involvement in its formation has been similarly undocumented and subject to misinterpretation. I am indebted to Eddie McDonough for sharing his extensive knowledge of the literature of Herdwick sheep and shepherding, and for copies of the documents cited below. Letter from S. D. Dodgson and Noel Rawnsley, 4 September 1899, proposing a Herdwick Sheep Association; ‘Report of the First Preliminary Meeting. Herdwick Sheep Association, September 6, 1899’, reprinted from the Keswick Guardian; letter from Noel Rawnsley, Herdwick Sheep Association, Crosthwaite, Keswick, to W. Barnes 3(?), 8 October 1899, PC. Dodgson was elected president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association (HSBA) in 1916.

  4. Rawnsley, ‘A Crack about Herdwick Sheep’, 47–54. Beatrix’s membership in the HSBA was a direct result of her purchase of Troutbeck Park. Records of the HSBA show that, as one of only a few female members, she attended five annual meetings between 1924 and 1943. But this does not reflect the number of local meetings she attended. See Geoff Brown, ‘Herdwick Sheep’, HSBA leaflet, 2002.

  5. Conveyance of Troutbeck Park Estate, Windermere, Westmorland, between John Mason, Stella Lockhart Hamilton and Alexander Cairns Hamilton (mortgagees) and the Troutbeck Park Green Slate Company Limited and Helen Beatrix Heelis, purchaser (1,875 acres, 1 rod and 16 perches), NT. A schedule of properties conveyed to the National Trust is in BPS.

  6. BP Journal (7 August 1895), 391; BPH to Bruce Logan, 14 October 1924, BPG. She enclosed a cheque for £2 saying if there was any left over to give it ‘to the hounds, with my compliments and thanks!’; BPH, ‘The Lonely Hills’, The Horn Book (May 1942), 156.

  7. The Leake family were tenants, not owners, of Troutbeck Park Farm. BPH to SHH, 26 July 1926, Letters, 298.

  8. The 1923 will is not extant. However, the same proviso appears in her will of 31 March 1939. The huts were not built in Mickelden, and the Trust purchased Bridge House on the beck side of Rydal Road.

  9. BPH to SHH, 31 January, 2, 3, 5 February 1925, 13 February, 18 March 1926, NT.

  10. BPH to SHH, 26 June 1926, Letters, 296–8.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Malden, British Sheep, 202, 216–18; Jane Upton and Dennis Soden, An Introduction to Keeping Sheep (1996), 74–103; Christopher Hanson-Smith, ‘The Fell Farmer’s Year’, ML, 28–33. The liver fluke parasite has several intermediate hosts, but water snails, Lymnaea columella, which act as a vector by enabling it to complete its life cycle, are the most common. Modern ecological remedies include encouraging flocks of ducks which feed on the water snail, but boluses and drenches are still common. Success depends upon how entrenched the worm is in the sheep’s liver. ‘Rotten’ animals are usually slaughtered.

  14. BPH to JM, 14 June 1926, ML. Yellows or icterus in dogs is a liver disease usually caused by a bacterial or viral infection or sometimes toxic plants. Veterinary medicine in the 1930s was unable to determine the cause or to treat it successfully.

  15. BPH to SHH, 26 June 1926, Letters, 296–7. The cupboard and table are still in the Troutbeck farmhouse. Interview with Gordon Tyson, Troutbeck Park Farm, 30 September 2001.

  16. Susan Denyer, At Home with Beatrix Potter: The Creator of Peter Rabbit (2000), 124.

  17. By tradition, fell farms that were tenanted passed on to the new owner a ‘landlord’s flock’ of hefted sheep, part of the valuation of the farm when it was sold. Valley farms carry only so many sheep, and each heaf carries only a certain number of sheep. Farmers take care to see that no more than the right number are allowed up to the fell. William Rollinson, Life and Tradition in the Lake District (1974, revised 1981), 87–96; BPH to SHH, 26 June 1926, Letters, 296–7. W. R. Mitchell, ‘Where Sheep Farming Stays in the Family’, Cumbria Magazine (November 1997),
39–41.

  18. Transcript of an interview by Elizabeth Battrick, ‘Recollections of Tom Storey’, Sawrey, 1985. Hereafter cited as Storey, ‘Recollections’; NT. Elizabeth Battrick, The Real World of Beatrix Potter (1987), 38–46, ‘Mrs Heelis Settles In’, BPS Studies, 4 (1990), 40–42.

  19. Storey, ‘Recollections’; Battrick, ‘Mrs Heelis Settles In’, 41. Storey’s interview discusses both the new capsule cure for fluke as well as an injection used against the ‘drop’, or hypomagnesaemia, a disease caused by a sudden deficiency of magnesium. The injection of 100 ml. of calcium borogluconate in several sites could revive an animal.

  20. Joseph Moscrop (1885?–1966). The Moscrop correspondence was initially deposited at CRO/C in 1967 by Joseph’s brother Richard Moserop’s son, Robert, augmented by his niece Rosalind. The National Trust now owns all the letters but one. All the letters are published as Beatrix Potter’s Farming Friendship (ML). The Carlisle Record Office still holds Joseph’s correspondence with Richard, as well as Richard’s farm accounts, recipes and spelling books.

  21. Rosalind Moscrop, ‘Joseph Moscrop’, ML; BPH to JM, 13 January 1928, ML. Frank W. Garnett, Westmorland Agriculture: 1800–1900 (1912), 90–91; David B. Grigg, English Agriculture: A Social History, 1850–1925 (1991), 47–60. Whitsuntide or Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter.

  22. It appears that Beatrix negotiated her own agreements with Moscrop and her other Troutbeck shepherds. While William kept the books, he had no idea about Beatrix’s management style or her insight into how and whom to pay. BPH’s letters to JM during the Second World War are particularly revealing of these subtle negotiations and her skill at them.

  23. BPH to JM, 14 June 1926, 12 April 1927, 25 June 1927, 2 April 1927, ML.

  24. BPH to JM, 13 January 1928, ML. Ted Wood may well have been the shepherd first charged with instituting Scottish methods of sheep raising at Troutbeck, an effort ridiculed by the locals and abandoned by Storey. See W. R. Mitchell, Beatrix Potter: Her Life in the Lake District (1998). Sheep show catalogues from 1919 to 1925 indicate that she won no prizes in that period but she entered sheep at Hawkshead, Keswick and Windermere every year. For the 1921 Hawkshead show, Beatrix and William were members of the show committee, indicating the level of her interest. Collection of Heelis sheep show catalogues, 1919–36, LDM@TA.

  25. Storey, ‘Recollections’. The smit mark for Troutbeck Park was a red ‘pop’ on the left hind shoulder. Smit marks in black or red or blue, and lug marks, various cuts on the ear, follow ancient usage of each farm and were recorded in a flock book and maintained by the various breed societies. Ownership of the smit mark follows the farm, not the farmer.

  26. Storey, ‘Recollections’. Phyllis Arkle, The Real Sawrey (n.d.), 19–21. Hawkshead Sheep Show Catalogue, 6 September 1927, LDM@TA. Second prize in the Best of Group of Herdwicks went to John Gregg, now farming in Langdale.

  27. Storey, ‘Recollections’.

  28. Liz Taylor, ‘The Tale of Bertram Potter’, Weekend Scotsman (11 November 1978), 7.

  29. Storey, ‘Recollections’. R. H. Lamb, Herdwicks Past and Present: A Study of the Breed (1936), 16–20. Interviews with Eddie McDonough (various dates).

  30. Mitchell, Beatrix Potter, 82–94; Storey, ‘Recollections’. This may have been the sheep’s head in a very bold ‘experimental style and vivid palette’, item 204 in BP’s Art.

  31. W. R. Mitchell, Letters from the Lakes (1995), 89–93.

  32. Malden, British Sheep, 201–39; Upton and Soden, An Introduction, 77–85. BPH to Samuel Cunningham, unknown date, quoted in TBP, 150.

  33. BPH to HPC, 28 June 1928, Letters, 311; BPH to JM, 13, 15, 18 January 1928, ML.

  34. BPH to GW, 28 December 1929, BPS. William joined her in interviewing the Walkers. There are important letters from Lucy Walker (George Walker’s wife) to Joseph, and from Margaret Lane to Joseph. The Walker letters are the property of BPS.

  35. BPH to JM, 9 January 1929, 4, 11 April 1929, ML.

  36. JM to Richard Moscrop, 7, 16, 29 May 1929, CRO/C; BPH to Ivy Steel, 12 August 1929, DIDJ. Mitchell, Beatrix Potter, 88–92.

  37. Storey, ‘Recollections’.

  38. BPH to AMK, 13 September 1929, BPA; Agricultural Fair Catalogues, Penrith, Gosforth District, Keswick, Cockermouth, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, LDM@TA.

  39. Agriculture Fair Catalogues, Ennerdale, Keswick, Loweswater, Eskdale, 1929, 1930, 1931, LDM@TA. BPH to Ivy Hunt, 21 October 1930, DIDJ. W. R. Mitchell, ‘One Woman and Her Sheep’, Yorkshire Post (30 March 2001).

  40. BPH to ELC, 28 August 1937, ELCL.

  41. BPH to Ivy Steel, August 5, 1935, DIDJ. Keswick Sheep Show, 4 September 1935; special prizes, Loweswater & Brakenthwaite Sheep Show, 12 September 1935, LDM@TA. BPH to Betty Harris Stevens, 4 September 1930, BPA.

  42. Mitchell, Letters from the Lakes, 91–3; Mitchell, Beatrix Potter, 86–105. There are many versions of her shepherd’s recollections, some in print, and some from oral interviews, and many points of disagreement.

  17 Americans

  1. BPH to FW, 21 November 1924, FWA. Letters, 291 and n. ASC, 164–6. During his 1924 visit Charles Hopkinson painted a landscape featuring Beatrix’s houses called Far Sawrey. In 1907 he painted HHR Meets Peter Rabbit on the Path. His daughter Isabella (Halstead) remembers the visit. Isabella Halstead to Leslie Linder, 4 December 1968, V & A.

  2. BPH to FW, 21 November 1924, FWA; 28 October 1926, 13 January 1927, Letters, 299, 300.

  3. Bruce L. Thompson, The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty (1949), 118.

  4. BPH to BMM, 20 May 1927, Letters, 304. Receipts from the sale are missing. Some drawings appear to have been of other subjects than Peter Rabbit. Rose Kennedy (mother of President Kennedy) is thought to have purchased nine drawings, one for each of her children.

  5. Ibid. ‘Peter Rabbit and His Homelands’, The Horn Book (August 1927), 18–19. Barbara Bader, ‘Peter Says Please’, The Horn Book (March April 1999), 119–22. BPH to MFHP, 30 November 1927, 10 February 1928, BPA.

  6. ‘Biographical Sketch of Marian Frazer Harris Perry by her niece, Elizabeth H. Stevens’, n.d., courtesy of Mrs Nonya Wright.

  7. Beatrix was born in July 1866, Marian Perry in December. Her father, James Smith Harris, was an astronomer, topographer, civil engineer and surveyor who worked on the Northwest Boundary Survey in 1857. Her mother, Delia Brodhead, was the daughter of the President of the New York Stock Exchange. The Revd James DeWolfe Perry was a descendant of the naval explorer Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794–1858), who initiated the opening of Japan to the West in the mid-nineteenth century. Interview with Mrs Nonya Wright, 14 April 2005, Berwyn, Pa. Obituary, Very Rev. James DeWolfe Perry, Jr’, New York Times (21 May 1927), 27. Marian Perry died in 1960. BPA details the history of this friendship.

  8. BPH to MFHP, 17 February, 25 April 1929, BPA.

  9. Henry P. Coolidge (1914–99), ‘Notes on Meeting Beatrix Potter’, Lecture at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1977. Coolidge to Judy Taylor Hough, 30 October 1990, LTC, 210–14. ‘Obituary. Henry Parsons Coolidge’, Lincoln Journal (14 January 1999); obituary, Boston Globe (13 January 1999). Interview with Judith Coolidge Jones, 17 May 2005. Mary-Abigail (‘Gail’) Parsons Coolidge was the daughter of a Unitarian family from Kennebunk, Maine and New York City. At the time of this visit Gail Coolidge was a director of the WEIU.

  10. BPH to GPC, 15 September 1927, BPA.

  11. LTC, 212.

  12. Coolidge, ‘Notes on Meeting Beatrix Potter’. Henry P. had finished his studies at Belmont Hill School near Boston and went to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He entered Harvard College in 1933, earning two degrees in English. He served as Instructor in English there and at Tufts University.

  13. Ibid. See BPA, illustrations 132, 135, 143; LTC, 212. It is impossible to know exactly which drawings Beatrix gave Henry P. on this visit except for the ones she dated on the picture. She generously gave him others on subsequent visits. HWBP, 203. BPH to BMM, 11 October 1940, BPA. />
  14. BPH to GPC, 21 September 1927, BPA; Coolidge, ‘Notes on Meeting Beatrix Potter’.

  15. BPH to GPC, 21 September 1927, BPA.

  16. BPH to GPC, 30 September 1927, BPA.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Henry P. wrote an account of his visit to Hill Top and Beatrix Potter which Mahony published as ‘A Visit to Beatrix Potter’, The Horn Book (February 1928), 48–50.

  19. These stories would become part of The Fairy Caravan (1929).

  20. BPH to HPC, 28 June 1928, BPA.

  21. BPH to HPC, 10 December 1928, BPA, ‘Birds’; Place’ and ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’ were sent to Henry P. ‘Birds’; Place’ was a part of Edmund Potter’s property at Camfield Place near Essenden in Hertfordshire. The Almanac was published in September 1928.

  22. BPH to Mrs Charles Hopkinson, 12 December 1927, Letters, 309. Alexander McKay (1886–1953) and his brother James inherited their father’s distinguished Philadelphia publishing firm in 1918 and established their children’s list by buying Street and Smith’s extensive line of children’s books, among others. There is evidence that sometime in the mid-1930s, Alexander McKay bought an Altemus piracy of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published about 1907, when Altemus went out of business. The title appears for sale in the David McKay catalogue for 1935. There is no indication that Beatrix, Frederick Warne & Co. or The Horn Book was ever aware of this offering. It appears McKay waited to include it in his catalogue until he was fairly certain Beatrix would not publish more books in the USA. Obituary, Alexander McKay, New York Times (5 September 1953). John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, 2 vols. (1975), vol. ii, pp. 421–3.

  23. ASC, 165. Stephens was a double relation: brother to Fruing’s wife Mary and the stepson of Fruing’s sister Edith. He was thus Fruing’s step-nephew as well as his brother-in-law.