Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  As in so many similar households, Beatrix’s nursery was hermetic. Neither parent appears to have involved themselves unduly in third-floor life : their remoteness was shaped by convention, habit and, almost certainly, inclination. Unlike Tabitha Twitchit in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, they were not then anxious parents (even considering Rupert’s fidgetiness). They did not trouble themselves about friends for Beatrix. Other people’s children threatened germs or, worse, bad influences, and Beatrix did not form acquaintances among the children of her parents’ neighbours. She never would.

  Instead Nurse McKenzie imparted first impressions and something more than a nurse’s surveillance or solicitude. Her Calvinist bromides conveyed to her infant charge an unflinching assessment of human frailty. She sang hymns, read aloud from the Old Testament. ‘The sweet rhythm of the authorised translation’ made a lasting impression ;34 Beatrix remained a Bible reader into adulthood.35 Sin played its part in what Beatrix termed Nurse McKenzie’s ‘terrible’ creed. There was mention of witches and dark magic. Like the maid in a story called ‘The Hobgoblin’ by Maria Edgeworth, whose writing for children Beatrix read when young, she may have frightened her charge with ‘a hundred foolish stories… particularly one about a black-faced goblin’.

  On the nursery bookshelves, tales of stark didacticism reiterated the ugly warnings. Her least favourite – Sarah Trimmer’s eighty-year-old The Story of the Robins, in which a human family and a family of robins unite in embracing virtue – Beatrix remembered as ‘a fat stodgy book’ and hated it roundly. In time a handful of what she called in 1912 her ‘many books about well-behaved people’ would include a moral, though without the aspect of hellfire and brimstone. In Beatrix’s writing instruction emerged more playfully. Like Miss Louisa Pussycat in The Fairy Caravan, she enjoyed long words : ‘soporific’, ‘volatile’, ‘the amelioration of disposition’, ‘lamentable want of discretion’. Her tales reflect Victorian parenting habits : discipline and punishments for all ; rewards only for the well behaved. They punish ‘frivolity’ and ‘impertinence’, repeatedly through fear. And they delight in an elegant irony, which may be lost on younger readers.

  Happily, Nurse McKenzie’s role was not restricted to spiritual alarmism. The Potters were Unitarians, earnestly so in Rupert’s case ; Helen seems to have been less committed in her devotions. Unitarianism rejected the doctrine of the Trinity : it regarded Jesus as a human intermediary between man and God. Rationalism and a focus on conscience underpinned this dissenting faith ; rationalism came to underpin Beatrix’s beliefs. It was a habit of mind as much as a belief system. Pragmatic, it was capable of counterbalancing the grim assurances of Calvinism and, potentially, of responding to the century’s spiritual challenges: notably, in the decade of Beatrix’s birth, an ongoing debate on creationism provoked by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The Unitarian services Beatrix attended with her parents once they considered her old enough must have tempered the vim of Ann McKenzie’s sharp tenets. So, too, to her credit, the latter’s choice of reading material for Beatrix. Books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s story of ‘a good, steady, sensible, pious fellow’, and Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, both read aloud by Nurse McKenzie, encouraged simple Christian goodness and compassion. Yet for an imaginative little girl alone in her third-floor nursery, neither ‘improving’ novels nor Calvinist strictures could rival in allure Nurse McKenzie’s taste for fairy tales or her firm belief in fairies. Both would shape Beatrix’s imaginative life in the long term.

  Beatrix remembered looking for fairies as a child on holiday – making ‘a fairyland for myself amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside’ : a legacy of Ann McKenzie’s storytelling.36 Fairy tales thrilled her. She enjoyed Undine, the early-nineteenth-century German romance, read in an English translation : the story of a water sprite who marries a knight to gain a soul. Of it she remembered ‘as a small child [making] illustrations for the works of Monsieur le Baron de la Motte Fouqué !… [The drawings] were very bad but the devil was so unpleasantly terrific, that it used to keep me awake at nights, though of my own manufacture.’37 At her grandparents’ house, exploring basement domestic offices on her own, she found a window that, inexplicably, would not open : ‘I used to sit there for hours looking into the stableyard and wondering if there was an enchanted Prince below’.38 Later she painted illustrations for scenes from ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Tom Thumb’ ; she wrote her own version of ‘Puss in Boots’, Kitty in Boots, unsuccessfully offered to her publishers in 1914 ; in old age she conceived an unfulfilled wish ‘to do a set of fairy tales in thin volumes’.39 One story likens a tranquil seaside town to ‘the Castle of Sleeping Beauty’, while ten of her stories begin, like fairy tales, ‘Once upon a time’.40 The Fairy Caravan includes her own fairy story, ‘The Fairy in the Oak’. She described herself as a child ‘acquainted with fairies’.41

  Looking for fairies formed a part of afternoon walks with her nurse in Kensington Gardens or the Gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society, then sited between Queen’s Gate and Exhibition Road ; or to the South Kensington Museum (today’s Victoria and Albert Museum), opened in 1857 and in Beatrix’s childhood resembling a large conservatory in its still leafy surrounds. All lay within easy distance of Bolton Gardens.

  Nurse McKenzie’s surprising belief suggests a streak of Highland whimsy in an otherwise unsentimental figure. Whatever her intention, that fancy provided Beatrix’s initial encouragement to look beyond the appearance of things and glimpse the world imaginatively. Fairies and storytelling overlapped ; fairies meant secrets, magic, another layer of fascination to the natural world. In time, fairy magic played its part in Beatrix’s tales : in the crooked sixpence that, on Christmas Eve, found its way into a doll’s stocking in The Tale of Two Bad Mice ; in the miraculous workmanship of the Mayor of Gloucester’s wedding clothes, completed while the feverish Tailor slept. Beatrix the author simply recast fairies as mice.

  At Rupert Potter’s insistence, Christmas Day in Bolton Gardens was treated as an ordinary Sunday, without the excesses or the enchantment of that favourite childhood festival ; Beatrix remembered it as less cheerful than other people’s Christmases. A surviving present she gave to her mother – a small beechwood box, bought for 6¾d, with her own decoupage decoration of painted mice – certainly appears a modest gift. Even as an adult, still living with her parents, Beatrix envied neighbours’ Christmas trees ‘with the little doll angel up on the top’.42 An early attempt at financial independence – producing commercial designs for Christmas cards in her twenties – also represented independence of spirit. Little wonder that, in such a climate, she formed the habit as a child of seeking out the remarkable in the everyday. Drawing provided her earliest passport ; so, too, looking at pictures, ‘which seemed almost alive’.43 First her parents encouraged her drawing. Afterwards her governess, Miss Hammond, added her voice and, later still, Beatrix undertook courses in watercolour and oil painting with specialist tutors.

  In a small homemade sketchbook, begun in the spring of 1876, when she was nine years old, Beatrix drew and coloured sketches of rabbits. Like Rupert’s bonneted duck, most wore clothes. They wore spectacles, struggled with an inside-out umbrella, skimmed over ice or snow on sleds and sleighs. A lively squirrel accompanied them, running like Beatrix’s cairn terrier, Sandy. The rabbits walked on two legs, as would the animals of Beatrix’s fiction.

  At this stage they did not overwhelm her output, which also encompassed landscapes and nature studies, including unusually assured pencil drawings of flowers : narcissus, foxglove and periwinkle. The flowers may have been copied from primers or drawing manuals, like Vere Foster’s Drawing-Copy Books, published in the 1860s, though Millais himself commended young Beatrix’s powers of observation. Less in evidence were London sights. The capital scarcely touched Beatrix’s art. In time she would exclude it from her fiction. Even in her late teens
, her experience of London was mostly confined to the vicinity of Bolton Gardens.

  A matter-of-fact little person, was the grown-up Beatrix’s verdict on her childhood self, looking back after an interval of half a century.44 She grew up to value common sense. Her older self underestimated the extent of her childish imagination : she was fanciful and romantic, sometimes to the point of feyness. She was robust in her attitude to nature, as she would remain, with an unsqueamish curiosity about natural phenomena. Her interest in fairies was something different, a childhood whim and, at the same time, a nostalgic impulse of a sort that never left her ; throughout her life she believed in the existence of the Loch Ness monster.45 Her interior life then was not especially remarkable, and her pencil, like her mind, ranged widely. She was a serious child and, in her own assessment, old-fashioned.46 Her head would be turned – but not by Bolton Gardens or the careful, conventional world of her parents.

  • 2 •

  ‘I do wish we lived in the country’

  Rupert Potter’s many photographs of his only daughter capture her elfin prettiness. ‘Blue were her eyes like the wood violet’s blue, fair were her locks like the mary-bud’s gold,’ Beatrix later wrote of a ‘bonny lass’, a fitting description of herself when young.

  ‘Birds’ Place that I remember was in Hertfordshire, long ago when I was young. Perhaps the elms and chestnuts have been felled ; the passing swallows say the cedar is blown down.’

  The Fairy Caravan, 1929

  THE CHINA that made its way, several times daily, to the third-floor nursery – bearing plain-cooked meat, simple puddings or bread to be eaten with milk – included plates decorated in blue on a white ground, with pictures of birds and animals. Today several hang in Beatrix Potter’s Lake District farmhouse, Hill Top. Again the drawings were Rupert’s, the china specially made for Bolton Gardens to his own design. Impossible that Beatrix should remember a time when her attention was not drawn to and by the natural world, or when nature did not appear uppermost among subjects for her pencil and paintbox.

  Determined respectability and a degree of social isolation notwithstanding, 2 Bolton Gardens offered Beatrix spurs to imagination. Rupert Potter and Helen Leech had sketched in their youth ; Beatrix grew familiar with the sight of her parents busy with their sketchbooks on visits to the country or coast. Before her marriage Helen Leech painted landscapes in watercolour : accomplished, ladylike exercises that betray little of the hand behind them. Although Rupert did not paint, the directness and sure touch of his drawing appealed to Beatrix. If her mother approached art as a tool in her social armoury or diversion for leisurely days, her father’s engagement was more vigorous. Rupert had inherited his taste for art from his own father, one-time president of the Manchester School of Art and, in 1857, among organisers of The Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition of 16,000 works of art, held on a three-acre site in Old Trafford. Rupert Potter was a regular visitor to the Royal Academy ; he visited commercial galleries and London auction houses. As a teenager Beatrix accompanied him – as she accompanied him on his calls to Millais at 2 Palace Gate, a building of ersatz aristocratic splendour utterly remote from the houses Beatrix chose for herself when she too achieved commercial success. Rupert’s youngest sister Lucy shared his enthusiasm for photography and won a clutch of medals from the Photographic Society of London ; beginning in 1873, Rupert showed photographs of his own in the society’s exhibitions. Both John Leech and Edmund Potter had assembled collections of paintings. Among the former’s acquisitions was a landscape by Turner, which Beatrix saw in Grandmother Leech’s London house in Palace Gardens, while Edmund’s purchase of works by Landseer, Etty, Millais, Leighton and animalier Briton Rivière suggests an active interest in the art of his time ; in addition, he collected Chinese enamels and porcelain.1 Among Helen’s sisters-in-law was Rosalie Ansdell, daughter of animal painter and Royal Academician Richard Ansdell.2 Art formed a connective thread in the lives of Potter and Leech relations ; it was an occupation – and a preoccupation – for both sexes, and a subject for conversation within the family circle. Throughout her childhood an interest in art, even at its simplest level, drew Beatrix closer to her father. Rupert called Beatrix ‘B’. During his absences from Bolton Gardens he wrote her letters about animals, gardens or the progress of her frequent colds.

  As we have seen, it was Rupert who provided Beatrix with material for copying in the form of his own sketches, and Rupert who, intentionally or otherwise, first encouraged Beatrix to look beyond typically ‘feminine’ subjects in her drawing. In 1859, in Women Artists in All Ages and Countries, historian Elizabeth Ellet had explained that female artists were particularly suited to flower and still-life paintings, since ‘such occupations might be pursued in the strict seclusion of home, to which custom and public sentiment assigns the fair student’, a conventional statement of its time. Although Beatrix made many early flower drawings, her horizons were broader, inspired not only by personal inclination but Rupert’s sketches, the nursery china, birds in the garden, wildlife glimpsed on visits to the country.

  Beatrix’s tenth birthday present, ‘bound in scarlet with a gilt edge’, was a copy of Birds Drawn from Nature, by Mrs Hugh Blackburn.3 Beatrix devoured its plates with the relish of a connoisseur, washing her hands before she allowed herself to touch the hallowed pages. She particularly admired the pictures of ‘the young Herring Gull and the Hoody Crow’. She described the book, bought for her by her parents, as a gift from her father. For Beatrix, animals, picture books and drawing were Rupert’s enthusiasms more than Helen’s, though her diary records at least one instance of mother and daughter visiting an exhibition together without Rupert.4

  Her childhood coincided with developments in children’s publishing, including a sophisticated process of colour wood-block printing of illustrations called chromoxylography. Companies like Dean & Son and Raphael Tuck & Sons produced so-called ‘movable’ books, with pop-up, fold-down or cut-out details : pictures ‘moved’ to mirror events described in the story. Dean’s three-­dimensional ‘Scenic Books’ were first published in 1856, in a series that included Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Robinson Crusoe and Aladdin.5 In the 1870s artists Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott began illustrating and decorating a range of books for children, including, in Crane’s case, the popular children’s novels of Mrs Molesworth, which Beatrix read as they were published, and The Baby’s Opera. Clearly Crane’s illustrations appealed to Beatrix. (By contrast she remembered ‘ungratefully getting rid of a Kate Greenaway birthday book’ : ‘compared with Caldecott,’ she noted, ‘she could not draw’.6) Her copy of a picture of ‘Mrs Bond’ from The Baby’s Opera, an innocent-looking depiction of a woman on the brink of killing and stuffing with sage the ducklings in her pond, survives in a sketchbook from 1877.7 In format, such books gave equal prominence to design and written content. Three decades later, the same balance would characterise Beatrix’s own books, with the further innovation that in Beatrix’s books text and illustrations were fully integrated.

  Since Rupert Potter’s nursery forays were limited, and Helen Potter seems to have struggled to put her daughter at her ease, it was as well Beatrix enjoyed the books in the nursery bookcase and Nurse McKenzie’s stories. By way of alternative she claimed to care for two toys only : ‘a dilapidated black wooden doll called Topsy’ and a flannelette pig of grubby appearance that remained mostly out of reach in a drawer in her grandparents’ library.8 Perhaps surprisingly, she discounted the small toy rabbit with which Rupert photographed her, in company with her cousin Alice Crompton Potter, when she was five. Unlike the owner of the doll’s house in The Tale of Two Bad Mice, she was not especially attached to her three toys.

  Until the age of six she spent long intervals alone with her nurse, plagued by headaches and colds. On rainy days there were no walks with Nurse McKenzie to Kensington Gardens ; catching a cold led to prohibitions against going outside at all. In the nursery, a fire lit against the chill, she lis
tened to stories read aloud. Later she read to herself. She also learned passages by heart.

  When she was about seven, Beatrix accomplished a remarkable feat in committing to memory all six cantos of Walter Scott’s romantic narrative poem, The Lady of the Lake. Scott’s historical tale is boldly coloured. It delights, in passing, in the flora of its West Highlands setting – eglantine, hawthorn, hazel, ‘primrose pale’, violet, foxglove and nightshade – conjuring up a rich natural cornucopia of a sort Beatrix would celebrate in many paintings as well as passages of The Fairy Caravan. Years later, troubled by sleeplessness in her twenties, she learnt by heart entire plays by Shakespeare : The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a clutch of history plays ; in her journal she plotted the extent of her mastery.

  Aside from mental stamina, both undertakings point to the empty hours at her disposal. Like Griselda, the heroine of Mrs Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, published when she was eleven, the young Beatrix might have reflected of her sequestered existence, ‘It was very dull. It got duller and duller.’ Unlike Griselda, she occupied the yawning days ; she was not ‘obliged to spend the time in sleeping, for want of anything better to do’.9 She was an imaginative, spirited, evidently diligent child and, in her own assessment, ‘a cheerful person’ ; she read and, as if obsessively, she drew.10 Her childhood memories do not indicate unhappiness. Until Bertram was old enough to become a companion, and afterwards when he went away to school, Beatrix – a girl denied friends – entertained herself. Self-containment was an important facet of her make-up. It surfaces in her fictional characters : Jeremy Fisher, Mrs Tiggy-winkle, Mrs Tittlemouse. All live apparently fulfilled, largely solitary lives.