*
Referring to herself in the third person, Beatrix described herself in 1925 as living ‘amongst the mountains and lakes that she has drawn in her picture books… She leads a very busy contented life, living always in the country and managing a large sheep farm on her own land.’30 Her shepherd Tom Storey described her as ‘quite smart for her age… a bonny looking woman’, robust at the start of her seventh decade.31 Ten years later, with ‘apple-red’ cheeks and blue eyes undimmed, she appeared ‘short, plump, solid’, to artist Delmar Banner, who painted Beatrix’s best-known portrait – a tweedy Mrs Tiggy-winkle figure at a sheep judging on the Coniston fells.32 Other observers noted marked eccentricities of dress : ‘the sacking she put over her shoulders in the rain’, ‘the use of a rhubarb leaf on her head against the sun in the hayfield’.33 Much to her amusement, a tramp on the Windermere ferry mistook Beatrix for a fellow vagrant. She dressed as she thought practical for a life spent in the fields, walking and watching. Banner described ‘a kind of tea cosy’ on her head and ‘lots of wool’ clothes.
Beatrix recognised the vagaries of her health. She understood that the life she led would inevitably exact its toll, but she had ‘no wish to give in and live as an invalide [sic]’.34 Over time, battered by the local climate and, beginning in 1939, three consecutive hard winters which troubled her chest and her heart, she oscillated between resignation to her own mortality and a stubborn desire to carry on. She had described the general anaesthetic necessitated by her hysterectomy in 1939 as ‘such a wonderfully easy going under ; and in some ways preferable to a long invalidism, with only old age to follow’.35 Crompton pluck brought her back from the brink and kept her busy ; she remained assiduous in overseeing her scattered property and still interested in the breeding programmes she had set in train years ago for Herdwick sheep and Galloway cattle. ‘Even on unsuitable occasions’ she remained mostly cheerful, ‘doomed to go through life grinning!’36 The resource she had always treasured, her memory, was sharp still, its balm ‘like soft music and a blissful vision through the snow’.37 She dealt with pain briskly ; she accepted without self-pity the malignity of old age.
From the second half of the 1930s she was repeatedly confined to bed, Tzusee and Chuleh useful foot warmers in the winter chill of Castle Cottage. When she closed her eyes at these moments, she wrote to her cousin Caroline, she found she could ‘walk step by step on the fells and rough lands seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog cotton grass where my old legs will never take me again.’38 During her final illness, after months of bronchitis, her thoughts retrod the familiar paths – divided between her farms, her family, with its far-flung network of cousins and cousins’ children, and a last story she had written, scheduled for publication in May 1944 in the twentieth anniversary issue of The Horn Book : ‘Wag-by-Wall’, about an old woman and a kettle, begun decades earlier. Beatrix died six months short of publication, on 22 December 1943 : she never read ‘Wag-by-Wall’ in print. William was at her bedside, the last person she saw.
Her instructions for the disposal of her property were characteristically precise and extended, inevitably, to animals : ‘No old horse or worn out dog to be sold ; either given to a really trustworthy person or put down.’39 No detail was too small for firm, clear instructions ; she allocated paintings and portfolios with care ; she had made her arrangements with the National Trust. Among her final requests was that a ‘looking glass… and the small chest of drawers which it stands on’ be moved from Castle Cottage to Hill Top. Today they occupy a place beside the window in Hill Top’s upstairs sitting room, with its view over Beatrix’s first garden.
In the near distance lies another garden, the ‘regular old-fashioned farm garden’ Beatrix made at Castle Cottage, ‘with a box hedge round the flower bed, and moss rose and pansies and black currants and strawberries and peas – and big sage bushes for Jemima.’40 In summer, when both houses are ‘nearly smothered with roses’41 – often, as Beatrix experienced them, weighed down with rain over the porch or the door – the outlook is intensely green. It stretches up and down the rises and inclines of Near Sawrey ; it stretches to the secret spot above Hill Top where William and Tom Storey scattered Beatrix’s ashes ; it stretches beyond, past stone cottages and snaking lanes to wooded copses and the blue slopes of mountains and the distant glimmer of sunlight on lake water, over the hills and far away.
• AFTERWORD •
‘Little friends of Mr McGregor & Peter & Benjamin’
‘“That story,” said Pony Billy, “has no moral.”
“But it is very pretty,” said Xarifa, the dormouse, suddenly waking up’
The Fairy Caravan, 1929
IT IS 31 JULY 2009, North Wales, a summer evening of a middling sort, blue-grey light stretching across the folded hills of the Clwydian Range, smudging the shadows of trees, pooling in hollows of banks and rises. At Gwaenynog, the ‘Gwaynynog’ of Beatrix’s letters and journal, Beatrix Potter’s great-niece Janey Smith, the great-granddaughter of Harriet Leech and her husband Fred Burton, has put on an apron and mob cap.
In the little theatre that stands at right angles to the house, chair legs shuffle over wooden floorboards. Many of the audience know one another. They have gathered (some by invitation) to watch a performance of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies. Snatches of conversation spill through the open theatre door across the yard choked by cars, over the garden Beatrix would still recognise : ‘two-thirds surrounded by a red brick wall with many apricots, and an inner circle of old grey apple trees on wooden espaliers… productive but not tidy, the prettiest kind of garden, where bright old-fashioned flowers grow amongst the currant bushes’, ‘cauliflowers [are] mixed with peonies & roses’ and there are ‘white and damask roses, and the smell of thyme and musk’.1
It is the same garden that inspired the story of the Flopsy Bunnies, first published a century ago, and Beatrix’s own garden at Hill Top ; and the evening will end – to the considerable surprise of some – with the audience singing ‘Happy Birthday, Flopsy Bunnies’.
On this occasion, most of the ‘actors’ are children, Janey Smith’s grandchildren, each linked to Beatrix Potter by a dribble of consanguinity, and my own son, Aeneas, just five, then living outside the neighbouring village of Nantglyn, probably the hillside hamlet Beatrix described to Noel Moore in 1895 as ‘a nasty dirty Welsh village’.2 The children are dressed as Flopsy Bunnies in brown leggings. In nearby Denbigh, Woolworths – soon to disappear from the British high street – has supplied hairbands with large brown rabbit ears. When the moment comes, the children’s responses to incarceration in Mr McGregor’s sack will vary, adding an inadvertent note of comedy. Potter scholar and biographer Judy Taylor has spent the day at Gwaenynog ; so, too, actress Rohan McCullough, who has recently toured the country with her one-woman show, The Tale of Beatrix Potter, and will narrate tonight’s performance. Janey plays the part of Mrs McGregor.
At curtain down, each child receives a copy of The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies in a special gold centenary dust jacket. Beatrix dedicated her story to ‘all little friends of Mr McGregor & Peter & Benjamin’ : admission to a golden circle. Aeneas’s copy stands on a bookcase in his bedroom, alongside Potter’s other ‘little books’.
*
As a young woman Beatrix Potter wrote in her journal, ‘There is something rather mournful in people dying without children, complete extinction.’3 It has not been her own fate, as that evening at Gwaenynog proved, despite her childlessness. With satisfaction, she could claim of Peter Rabbit at the end of her life, ‘his moderate price has at least enabled him to reach many hundreds of thousands of children, and has given them pleasure without ugliness’.4 Since first publication in 1902, Peter’s story has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide ; a recent estimate suggested that, somewhere in the world, one of Beatrix’s ‘little books’ is purchased every fifteen seconds. The appeal of Potter’s stories is perennial and the circle of ‘little friends of Mr McGregor & Peter & Benjamin�
� continually replenished.
She was fascinated by the childhood narratives of fairy tales and traditional rhymes and, in lesser measure, her own childhood ; her relish of poetic narrative was anchored by a solidly practical streak. Her love of nature was aesthetic, scientific, empathetic, obsessive ; capable of embracing everything from the ‘white scented funguses’ she found in a wood on a Highland hillside to the sure-footed Herdwick sheep which ‘heafed’ themselves to upland fell pastures. ‘I see no reason why common-sense should not foster a healthier appreciation of beauty than morbid sentimentality,’ she wrote once ; common sense underpinned her own endeavours, from management of the ‘little books’ and their lucrative ‘side-shows’ to her stewardship of her Lake District farms.5 She did not discount whimsy, but balanced it with sharply ironic humour – and not only within the tales. That she described herself as one of the ‘children-who-have-never-grown-up’ was an aspiration as much as an assessment.6
As Unitarians the Potters readily assimilated Darwinism and its body blow to the doctrine of creationism. The relationship between humans and animals in nineteenth-century evolutionary theories adds an extra dimension to the anthropomorphism of Beatrix’s stories, in different instances reassuring or unsettling. As a farmer, she loved, feared and respected nature in equal measure.
Beatrix described herself once as in thrall to fancies so real she could not distinguish between fact and imagining. She did not always attempt to do so and her best work emerged from a blurring of fancy and close observation. The vividness of her childhood drawings of a devil kept her awake at night : credibility was key to the success of all her work. On the printed page hers is simultaneously a vision of its time – offering a critique of contemporary mores through the harmless-seeming vehicle of talking animals, and shaped by Victorian conservatism as well as her unabashed joy in the world she depicted – and timeless in its sheer improbability and the repeated reinvention of the age-old trope of children versus adults. Beatrix’s work on the ‘little books’ was painstaking : ‘I like to do my work carefully,’ she wrote.7 Her husbandry of animals and the land betrayed the same conscientiousness. And she had confidence in her efforts. She told the Danish wife of a cousin’s son : ‘You share your nationality with Hans Christian Andersen. I tell you… my children’s stories will one day be as famous and as much read as his.’8 At Hill Top she correctly anticipated posterity’s verdict and created a museum to her own imaginings.
Unlike much Edwardian literature, Potter’s tales have escaped the coruscation of revisionist social, sexual and racial politics. To sing ‘Happy Birthday, Flopsy Bunnies’ in a private theatre at the end of a winding wooded drive amid the still-unspoiled upland fields of North Wales is, of course, a self-conscious act. But it is not impossible. It is just one measure of the extent to which Beatrix Potter, who married much too late for childbearing, defies extinction – and continues to beguile new generations of ‘little friends’ with her vision of nature improved but not perfected.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
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Endpapers
Plate Section
Author’s Note
Bibliography
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index
About Matthew Dennison
More Great Lives
An Invitation from the Publisher
Foxgloves are the subject of one of Beatrix’s earliest surviving sketches, from February 1876. This watercolour, with a pencil sketch of a bird, dates from 1903.
At Melford Hall in Suffolk, the home of Beatrix’s cousin Ethel, Lady Hyde Parker, she worked on The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester. At Christmas 1903, she painted this oak-panelled interior.
Beatrix painted Amanitopsis vaginata on 30 August 1897, the last summer of her fascination with fungi.
After her purchase of Hill Top, Beatrix painted a number of Lake District views, many for her own pleasure including ‘A view over hills and valleys’, c. 1905–13.
‘The Meal’ is one of a set of four illustrations which Beatrix called ‘The Rabbits’ Christmas Party’ and gave to her aunt, Lucy Roscoe.
Beatrix celebrated her lifelong love of old-fashioned rhymes in Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes and Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes – as well as a selection of unpublished illustrations like this farmyard scene of 1905 entitled ‘Come dance a jig to my Granny’s pig’
In her illustrations for The Tailor of Gloucester, her favourite of the ‘little books’, Beatrix combined her love of old china and historic textiles with her fondness for mice.
This sketch of water lilies on Esthwaite Water, painted in 1906, suggests backgrounds to The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, published the same year.
Author’s Note
For help and information I should very much like to thank Libby Joy and Mandy Marshall of the Beatrix Potter Society and Sue Osman of the Armitt Museum and Library. Judy Taylor Hough, doyenne of Potter scholars, offered support and encouragement. My former neighbour Janey Smith is among several custodians of Potter’s memory, a task she embraces with sincerity and lightness of touch.
My chief debt is to Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter : A Life in Nature, whose boundless generosity of spirit and helpful advice, dispensed unstintingly from Washington and Connecticut, provided a matchless fillip during the writing of this book.
I should like to thank Anthony Cheetham, Richard Milbank and Georgina Blackwell of Head of Zeus, and my exceptional agent, Georgina Capel, of Georgina Capel Associates.
As ever, my wonderful wife Gráinne showed extraordinary forbearance during the writing of this account of Potter’s life. Nor did my parents, Michael and Jane Dennison, object to a landmark birthday being hijacked for yet another Lake District sojourn.
This book is dedicated to my adored son Aeneas, at whose bedside I rediscovered Potter’s genius.
Matthew Dennison
Montgomeryshire, Trinity Sunday, 2016
Bibliography
Battrick, Elizabeth, The Real World of Beatrix Potter (National Trust and Jarrold Publishing, Norwich, 1987)
Beatrix Potter Studies I–XIV (The Beatrix Potter Society, London, 1984–2010)
Carpenter, Humphrey, Secret Gardens : A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Allen & Unwin, London, 1985)
Crowell Morse, Jane, ed., Beatrix Potter’s Americans : Selected Letters (Horn Book, Boston, 1982)
Davies, Hunter, Beatrix Potter’s Lakeland (Frederick Warne, London, 1988)
Denyer, Susan, Beatrix Potter : At Home in the Lake District (Frances Lincoln, London, 2000)
de Vasconcelles, Josefina, She was Loved : Memories of Beatrix Potter (Titus Wilson, Kendal, 2003)
Gere, Charlotte, Artistic Circles : Design & Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement (V&A Publishing, London, 2010)
Haining, Peter, Movable Books (New English Library, London, 1979)
Heelis, John, The Tale of Mrs William Heelis – Beatrix Potter (Sutton Publishing, 1999)
Hyde Parker, Ulla, Cousin Beatie : A Memory of Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne, London, 1981)
Jay, Eileen, Noble, Mary and Hobbs, Anne Stevenson, A Victorian Naturalist : Beatrix Potter’s Drawings from the Armitt Collection (Frederick Warne, London, 1992)
Lane, Margaret, The Tale of Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne, London, 1946, repr 1985)
— The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne, London, 1978)
Lear, Linda, Beatrix Potter : A Life in Nature (Allen Lane, London, 2007)
Linder, Leslie, The Journal of Beatrix Potter, From 1881 to 1897, transcribed from her code writings (Frederick Warne, London 1966 ; revised edition, 1989)
— A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, including Unpublished Work (Frederick Warne, London, 1971)
Linder, Leslie & Enid, The Art of Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne, London, 1975)
McDowell, Marta, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life (Tim
ber Press, Portland, Oregon, 2013)
Norman, Andrew, Beatrix Potter Her Inner World (Pen & Sword Books, Barnsley, 2014)
Price, John, Everyday Heroism : Victorian Constructions of the Victorian Civilian (Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2014)
Sheppard, F. W. H., ed., Survey of London, vol. 41, Brompton, ed. (London County Council, London, 1983)
Stevenson Hobbs, Anne, Beatrix Potter Artist & Illustrator (Frederick Warne, London, 2005)
Taylor, Judy, intro., Beatrix Potter’s Letters (Frederick Warne, London, 1989)
Taylor, Judy, Beatrix Potter : Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman (Frederick Warne, London, 1986)
— Beatrix Potter and Hill Top (National Trust, London, 1989)
Taylor, Judy, ed., Letters to Children from Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne, London, 1992)
— The Choyce Letters (The Beatrix Potter Society, London, 1994)
— Beatrix Potter : A Holiday Diary (The Beatrix Potter Society, London, 1996)
— Beatrix Potter’s Farming Friendship : Lake District Letters to Joseph Moscrop, 1926–1943 (The Beatrix Potter Society, London, 1998)
Taylor, Judy, Whalley, Joyce Irene, et al., Beatrix Potter 1866– 1943 : The Artist and Her World (Frederick Warne with the National Trust, London, 1987)
Wood, Christopher, Fairies in Victorian Art (Antique Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge, 2000)
Notes
The Journal of Beatrix Potter is referred to as BPJ after first listing ; Beatrix Potter’s Letters, BPL after first listing.
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