Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  Throughout the 1890s, Beatrix worked on illustrations. The undertaking offered diversion from the yawning, empty hours and possibility of payment. A Frog he would a-fishing go, another of her Caldecott-influenced variants on the Jeremy Fisher story, was published by Ernest Nister ; the same company also published what Beatrix described as a cat drawing with ‘a shop background’.11 Two sequences of illustrations to rhymes using mice as models – ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe’ and ‘Three little mice sat down to spin’ – failed to find publishers to turn them into booklets along the lines of A Happy Pair. (Instead, an illustration from the former provided the template for Hunca Munca and her babies in The Tale of Two Bad Mice ; Beatrix reprised one of her ‘Three little mice’ sketches in The Tailor of Gloucester. She was thrifty with her work and set a high value on her creativity.)

  Beatrix illustrated scenes from Uncle Remus stories, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and ‘Cinderella’. Consistently avoiding ‘forming what has never been seen’, in each case she used Peter as her model – for Carroll’s Knave of Hearts, a white rabbit complete with tabard and ruff, and for the team of six rabbits in harness, who draw through moonlit streets Cinderella’s pumpkin coach.

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  In The Tale of Mr Tod, a footpath winds slowly up a wooded slope. Wood sorrel and moss fringe its course. In a thicket where trees have been cleared are ‘leafy oak stumps, and a sea of blue hyacinths’. In The Fairy Caravan, Pringle Wood is ‘almost silent, almost still ; save for a whispering breath amongst the golden green leaves, and a faint tingle ringle from the bluebells on the fairy hill of oaks… beneath the trees, wave upon wave, a blue sea of bluebells’.

  Beatrix loved woodland, ‘rich land, scattered clumps of fine timber and a fringe of natural wood’.12 As a child, she witnessed the felling of the last walnut trees in Kensington : the disappearance of a rural past. Among her disappointments on revisiting Dalguise was the loss of the ancient plum tree in the garden. A story letter she wrote in 1916 described consequences of tree felling : a tree fairy without a home, its lifeline severed. She incorporated a version of this story in The Fairy Caravan : ‘Surely it is cruel to cut down a very fine tree  !’ Her fondness encompassed fantasy : for Beatrix, woods were liminal areas, the margin where reality and unreality merged. She claimed that fir woods in the Lake District ‘recall[ed] one’s childish fancies of wolves, a very striking background they would make for Grimm’s Fairy Tales’.13

  Woodland provided habitat for many of the animals she wrote about. At ground level it was also home to fungi. For a decade, fungi occupied many of Beatrix’s thoughts, her intense engagement far outstripping her apparently light-hearted creation of first versions of her stories of Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher. As with woodland, her engagement had an imaginative aspect – sometimes to the point of whimsy. She remembered sitting on Oatmeal Crag, near Esthwaite, ‘and all the little tiny fungus people singing and bobbing and dancing in the grass and under the leaves all down below… and I sitting above and knowing something about them. I cannot tell what possesses me with the fancy that they laugh and clap their hands… I suppose it is the fairy rings, the myriads of fairy fungi that start into life in autumn woods.’14 At other times the excitement of mycology was artistic or scientific. Of all Beatrix’s natural history interests, her study of the ‘forty thousand named and classified funguses’ came closest to compulsion.15

  Her wholehearted absorption provided Beatrix with occupation, typically during the second half of long family holidays, when the weather and time of year combined to carpet the Highlands and the Lakes with specimens. Legitimately, Beatrix could spend time apart from her parents engaged in her search, driving herself in a carriage and pony to likely spots ; the solitariness of her pursuit was itself a recommendation. As she commented in her journal, summing up the family’s Scottish holiday in 1894, ‘it is somewhat trying to pass a season of enjoyment in the company of persons who are constantly on the outlook for matters of complaint’ ;16 she had no need to identify those ‘persons’. In addition, mycology provided distraction at a time when Beatrix continued to feel isolated and discontented, particularly following the death in 1891 of her adored grandmother, Jessy Potter. Jessy’s death at the age of ninety resulted in the sale of Camfield Place. Another part of Beatrix’s childhood was consigned to memory. She asked for – and was given – bedroom furniture from Camfield : ‘the bed with green damask curtains… because the green curtains were full of pretty dreams’.17 Thirty years later, she used it in one of her last illustrations, ‘Louisa Pussy-cat Sleeps Late’, in The Fairy Caravan.

  She found her first fungus specimens in the Lake District, at Lingholm in 1887. Camfield Place (until its sale), Putney Park and woods in Berwickshire and Perthshire also proved fertile hunting grounds ; she combed the rubbish heap at Wray Castle and, in Coldstream, with her customary lack of squeamishness, she spotted ‘a Cortinarius, brittle and graceful on bleached horse-dung in [a] bog’.18 From the beginning, the process of discovery contributed an excitement that never abated. She was lucky in encountering rarities : fungi ‘like a spluttered candle’, ‘one with white spikes on the lower side’ and, in March 1897, a ‘little fungus like red holly berries, it had only been found once before in Scotland’.19 On 18 August 1894, with something approaching salivation, she described her discovery of ‘an ideal heavenly dream of the toadstool eaters’ ; the setting was the wood near Hatchednize, in Coldstream.20

  As formerly with plants and insects, and like her passion for fossils, her interest lay in the patient, precise recording of as many varieties as possible, and she painted and photographed her finds. Hatchednize Wood did not disappoint ; successful identification added to her pleasure. ‘The fungus starred the ground apparently in thousands, a dozen sorts in sight at once, and such specimens… I found upwards of twenty sorts in a few minutes, Cortinarius and the handsome Lactarius deliciosus being conspicuous and, joy of joys, the spiky Gomphidius glutinosus, a round, slimy, purple head among the moss, which I took up carefully with my old cheese-knife, and turning over saw the slimy veil.’ Lingeringly she inventoried the treasure trove in her journal. She described her capture of Gomphidius glutinosus with the sensual relish of a sexual encounter. Breathless, she revelled in each lubricious detail : colour, texture, fragility. Two years later, the memory remained fresh : ‘One has a pleasant sensation sometimes. I remember so well finding Gomphidius glutinosus.’21 In Hatchednize Wood Beatrix stepped into a private fairy tale, her ‘ideal heavenly dream’. She had ‘[found] a totally new species for the first time’ ; it inspired feelings of ‘extreme complacency’.22 Here was the satisfaction whose absence she so often bewailed. She painted Gomphidius glutinosus amid the moss and low growth of the woodland floor, the sheen of its slimy cap and the gills beneath the cap : an image as minutely detailed as any early work by Millais. It was one of ‘about 40 careful drawings of fungi’ she completed that summer. Other subjects included the fairy ring fungus, Marasmius oreades.23 Observing the state of crops in surrounding fields, she asked ‘how without the aid of the fairy-folk… could there be so little mildew in the corn ?’24

  Her interest in fungi would bring Beatrix happiness but, ultimately, frustration. In the short term she was fortunate to find a fellow enthusiast. Until his retirement, Charles McIntosh had been the rural postman at Dalguise, ‘a scared startled scarecrow… very tall and thin, stooping with a weak chest, a long wisp of whisker blowing over either shoulder, a drip from his hat and his nose’, a ‘painfully shy’ man who, despite none of Beatrix’s advantages of background, had made himself a recognised authority on British fungi.25 A member of the Cryptogamic Society of Scotland (dedicated since 1875 to the study of lichen, mosses, ferns, algae and fungi), he discovered thirteen new fungus species ; botanical notes by McIntosh were used by Francis Buchanan White in compiling The Flora of Perthshire in 1898. For as long as Beatrix could remember, the sight of Charles McIntosh on his fifteen-mile daily round, undertaken on foot
in all weathers, had been a feature of Potter family holidays.

  In October 1892, Beatrix was staying with her parents in Birnam, on the opposite bank of the Tay from Dunkeld ; Bertram had lately travelled south for his first term at Oxford. At the end of the month, after ‘trying all summer’, she spoke to Charles McIntosh at last. (She had overcome their mutual shyness as well as the social restrictions that impeded an unmarried young woman approaching an unmarried man of different class.) The meeting was a success. Beatrix showed McIntosh her drawings ; McIntosh ‘became quite excited and spoke with quite poetical feelings about [fungi’s] exquisite colours’.26 He promised to post specimens to her in London, and did so.

  Beatrix repaid his kindness by sending him copies of her fungus paintings. In her letters she refers to herself in the third person as ‘Miss Potter’, a formality that underlined the gulf between them. McIntosh replied in kind to ‘Miss Potter, Madam’. But he also offered guidance and advice, notably that her drawings include ‘separate sketches of sections’ of a given specimen.27 Beatrix consulted McIntosh over identification and, once, concerning the ‘curious’ emergence of a pale yellow, hundred-‘fingered’ fungus on a piece of broom ‘put away in a tin canister & forgotten… in a hot cupboard near the kitchen chimny [sic]’.28 Specialist publications in Rupert Potter’s library made few concessions to the layman ; to Beatrix’s considerable frustration, the staff of the Natural History Museum ‘[took] no interest whatever in funguses at large’.29 In her letters McIntosh became her sounding board and her authority. The description of their meeting in Beatrix’s journal suggests condescension on Beatrix’s part: in her letters they are equals, conspirators who share an obsession.

  The Potters returned to Perthshire the following summer. Rupert took a large house in Dunkeld, called Eastwood. Beatrix and Charles McIntosh resumed their collaboration. In the Eastwood garden Beatrix unearthed another rarity, Stribolomyces strobilaceus ; naturally she painted it. It did not occupy her thoughts exclusively. Fossils continued to fascinate her : with their monochrome colouring, they too posed specific challenges for the watercolourist. The day after she painted Stribolomyces stribolaceus she wrote to Noel Moore about ‘four little rabbits’ ; the next day she invented a story about a fishing frog. Her rabbit letter included a Scottish gardener called McGregor. Beatrix disclaimed the existence of a model for Peter’s tormentor. With his long, thin face and straggling beard, and the suggestion of a ‘broken lamppost’ in his gangling gait, he resembled Charles McIntosh.

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  On the third floor at Bolton Gardens, Beatrix germinated fungi – eventually as many as forty to fifty different kinds of spore, according to a letter she wrote to Charles McIntosh in February 1897. Her purpose is unclear. Within days of this letter, she wrote to Walter Gaddum, nine-year-old son of her cousin Edith Potter, ‘I have been drawing funguses very hard, I think some day they will be put in a book but it will be a dull one to read.’30 Her interest was simultaneously scientific and artistic. To McIntosh she described what was clearly botanical research ; to Walter, she indicated that her goal was botanical illustration. At what stage, or indeed why, the balance of her interest tipped from the painterly to the scientific is not certain. The mechanics of nature had always engrossed her. That she should steep herself in ‘curious work with fungus spore’, trying to unravel a theory, at the same time as transforming her specimens as accurately as possible into works of art, is not out of character.31 Again Beatrix’s approach was ‘painstaking’ and ‘thorough’.

  In May 1896, Beatrix had met the director and assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, William Thiselton-Dyer and George Massee. She owed her introductions to her uncle, Sir Henry Roscoe. Vice-chancellor of the University of London and a former Liberal MP, Roscoe was also a distinguished chemist. For his work in inorganic chemistry, especially photochemistry, he had won considerable acclaim ; his Spectrum Analysis of 1869 ran to multiple editions. At Christmas 1889, it was Roscoe who had encouraged Beatrix to find a publisher for her Christmas card designs.

  If such an offhand commendation amounts to championing his niece, it is possible that Roscoe had recognised something uncongenial to Beatrix in the atmosphere at 2 Bolton Gardens during the difficult decade of her twenties. He may have been impressed by the rigour of her study or simply have shared the fascination of his shy and otherworldly niece with the complex processes of fungus reproduction ; Beatrix did her part to fuel his interest, even writing to him secretly from the family holiday in the autumn of 1896. Either way, it was apparently Roscoe, the professional scientist, who gave fuel to Beatrix’s fixation by encouraging her to collate and order her findings in the form of a research paper. To that end, he facilitated two interviews with Thiselton-Dyer at Kew, and, through the latter, a reader’s card for Beatrix to the Kew libraries to assist her in her studies.

  The story of Beatrix Potter’s thwarting by the authorities at Kew Gardens has been told before. It was indeed the case that Beatrix, busy with microscope and slides in the nursery at Bolton Gardens, uncovered aspects of the process of fungus germination by spores, and that her discoveries appeared to challenge work in progress by George Massee at Kew. With naïve heavy-handedness Beatrix assured Thiselton-Dyer that her work was groundbreaking and worthy of Kew’s attention ; she forecast that, with no one to validate her theories, German researchers would get there first and ‘it would be in all the books in ten years’.32 The Kew director did not rise to the bait. Instead, in their second interview he referred Beatrix to the Professor of Botany at Cambridge, Henry Marshall Ward, himself (unlike Thiselton-Dyer) a specialist mycologist. Correctly Beatrix interpreted the rebuff. She characterised Thiselton-Dyer as cynical and boastful, ‘a short-tempered, clever man with a very good opinion of his Establishment, and jealous of outsiders’ ; she described his manner of address as ‘on the outside edge of civil’.33 Her opinion was apparently justified by the letter discussing her proposals that he subsequently sent her uncle. Roscoe considered it ‘rude and stupid ’ and concealed its contents from Beatrix. Beatrix accurately guessed its bent. Her assessment of Thiselton-Dyer as a martinet – and misogynistic to boot – was close to the mark.

  Afterwards Beatrix stated that it was Roscoe’s annoyance ‘at the slighting of anything under his patronage’ and his ‘animosity against the authorities at Kew’ that had influenced his determination that her paper be read to the Linnean Society in order to gain the acknowledgement he had decided it merited ; the impulse was not her own and her journal contains no indication that she sought either the society’s endorsement or its acclaim.34 Nevertheless, it was Kew’s George Massee – more willing to countenance Beatrix’s theories than Thiselton-Dyer – who, on 1 April 1897, presented her paper, ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae’, to members at Burlington House (as a woman Beatrix was ineligible for Linnean Society membership and barred from meetings). Massee told Beatrix its reception had been positive, but that the society felt the paper needed further work. It seems unlikely that Beatrix’s paper, the work of a female amateur, was ever seriously considered. No copy of it survives. That summer, again on holiday in the Lake District, Beatrix completed additional fungus paintings, including an image of the startling scarlet waxcap, Hygrocybe coccinea. Unlike the lost paper, she took particular care of them for the rest of her life.

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  Eight years separate Beatrix’s story letter to Noel Moore from publication of a privately printed edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit on 16 December 1901.

  If the intervention of Sir Henry Roscoe failed to benefit Beatrix’s mycological studies, the encouragement of Annie Moore, who first suggested Beatrix turn her story into a book, and the assistance of Hardwicke Rawnsley, who redoubled that encouragement, proved more fruitful in her search for a publisher.

  Rawnsley was rector of the church of St Margaret of Antioch, Wray-on-Windermere. A mercurial temperament and wide-ranging interests earned for him the epithet ‘the most active volcano in Europ
e’. The founder of the Lake District Defence Society and the Keswick School of Industrial Arts – the latter intended ‘to counteract the pernicious effect of turning men into machines without possibility of love of their work’ – he campaigned over a number of years for what, in 1895, became the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty ; Rawnsley acted as honorary secretary until his death in 1920.35 So extensive were his commitments, including his position on Cumberland county council and as a canon of Carlisle Cathedral, that, in 1898, he was forced to decline promotion to the bishopric of Madagascar. Instead he protested tirelessly against bugbears that included white bread, slot machines on station platforms and saucy seaside postcards. Somehow he found time to write more than forty books, many on Lake District subjects, and prodigious quantities of poetry. His Ballads of Brave Deeds of 1896, inspired by ‘reverential admiration for affecting and splendid self-sacrifice’, was followed, in 1897, by the popular Moral Rhymes for the Young.36

  Energetic and sociable, Rawnsley visited the Potters at Wray Castle in the summer of 1882. This vigorous dynamo in his early thirties, stocky in build, with startlingly blue eyes, ought to have overwhelmed the cripplingly shy sixteen-year-old Beatrix. Instead, engaged in inventorying the excavation of a nearby Roman villa, he talked to her about archaeology and geology. A former student of Ruskin and friend of painter G. F. Watts, he encouraged her in her drawing. According to Rawnsley family legend, he fell a little in love with Beatrix.