by Nadia Cohen
THE REAL
BEATRIX POTTER
Dedicated to
Mum and Dad,
Diana and Martin.
Thank You
THE REAL
BEATRIX POTTER
NADIA COHEN
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by
PEN AND SWORD WHITE OWL
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
Yorkshire – Philadelphia
Copyright © Nadia Cohen, 2020
ISBN 978 1 52675 275 8
ePUB ISBN 978 1 52675 276 5
Mobi ISBN 978 1 52675 277 2
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Introduction
Say the name Beatrix Potter almost anywhere in the world and it immediately conjures up enchanting images of adorable and mischievous animals scampering through the pages of her instantly recognisable little white books. Synonymous with Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, Beatrix and her classic children’s tales have been firmly established nursery favourites for generations.
What is less known about the whimsical children’s author is that she was also a shrewd businesswoman, a canny marketing expert and a hardworking, often irritable, farmer who bought up great swathes of land across England’s picturesque Lake District to protect it from the onslaught of modern development. She was a passionate environmental campaigner, something of an eco-warrior and a trailblazing feminist many years before the terms had even been coined.
Despite her privileged and sheltered upbringing in Victorian London, Beatrix defied the genteel social conventions of the time and refused to settle down and churn out children with whichever wealthy and well-connected husband her parents deemed a suitable match. She had no interest in being squeezed into the latest fashions and paraded around high society balls and parties, where she was expected to secure herself a suitable man.
As a result of this fiercely rebellious streak, Beatrix endured an unhappy and stifling childhood, frustrated by the rigid confines of her prosperous family’s townhouse in Kensington where her mother reminded her repeatedly that her only true purpose in life was marriage and motherhood. One thing was abundantly clear – Beatrix was not remotely interested in either.
A quiet life was never going to be enough for this fiercely outspoken and clever woman who did not find a husband until she was 47 years old – far too late to start a family – and although she was never granted the education she craved, she consoled herself with studying the anatomy of animals and plants, and teaching herself to draw with remarkable accuracy.
From a very early age Beatrix desperately longed for the cerebral stimulation of a life beyond the snobbery of her social class, and rejected much of the wealth and luxury that came with her aristocratic birthright. Beatrix simply could not see the point of her family’s social life. She would much rather have spent her time dissecting frogs in the countryside, or sketching the pet hedgehog she kept hidden in her bedroom without her parents’ knowledge.
At a time when it was rarely considered worthwhile to educate girls of her class (school and university would have been a waste of time and money since the goal was merely marriage and motherhood), Beatrix stood out a mile. She could not abide the other women of her class, who appeared to be content to fill their days taking tea and discussing the weather. Beatrix was desperate to learn something more than piano and embroidery, and when she realised she had no choice but to teach herself, that is precisely what she did.
By the time she reached her teens Beatrix was entirely self-taught in a wide range of subjects and held strong opinions about them all, although she was far too cripplingly shy to ever dare voice her views in public. Instead, she had to content herself with pouring her heart out into the pages of her secret coded diaries. Bored at the long empty hours which stretched out as she was confined to the nursery of the Potter’s townhouse in Bolton Gardens, Beatrix confided in one of her earliest journal entries: ‘I must draw, however poor the result. I will do something sooner or later.’
Despite her parents, Rupert and Helen, doing all they could to drag their only daughter to debutante balls in the vain hope that she might lure a wealthy aristocrat, Beatrix felt stifled and awkward in London. Instead, she longed for the wide-open landscapes of the English countryside; preserving its breathtaking beauty would eventually become her mission in life.
Desperate to find as many different ways as she could think of to pass the time, Beatrix began to send lavishly illustrated letters to her friend’s children, and started to wonder if her homespun stories could potentially earn her an independent income, which would allow her to escape from Bolton Gardens and live the life she dreamt of. Her first attempt at a children’s story The Tale of Peter Rabbit was rejected several times by publishers who failed to spot its enormous potential. When it did eventually appear – after she had paid to publish it herself privately – Beatrix was astonished to find herself in great demand. Suddenly she had an eager publisher, who was not only clamouring to publish more and more books, but also wanted to marry her too. Life at her parent’s stifling townhouse in Kensington, West London, was not so dull after all. Tragically, her happiness was short-lived. Beatrix’s fiancé Norman Warne died barely a month after he proposed and she fled to the Lake District to grieve in private.
Her children’s books were proving phenomenally popular, but writing them could never bring Beatrix the satisfaction or contentment she craved after she discovered a new way of living in the Cumbrian hills and fells. Beatrix only ever really felt motivated to write when she needed money in order to be able to buy more farms and cottages to thwart ruthless developers who were eager to capitalise on the popularity of the Lake District. She feared that pa
ndering to tourists would destroy the area’s natural beauty.
Although Beatrix’s books led to global fame and a vast fortune, in the close knit rural community where she retreated for the rest of her life she always kept her star status concealed. She eventually married a local solicitor, William Heelis, and became known simply as his rather stout and loyal wife. Together they lived a quiet and frugal existence in their remote cottage, and Beatrix once described herself and William as being ‘like two horses in front of the same plough, walking so steadily beside each other.’
By today’s standards Beatrix would have been a millionaire many times over, the modern-day equivalent of Harry Potter author JK Rowling, but she cared so little for the trappings of wealth that she was often mistaken for a tramp as she stomped through the lanes in wet and windy weather, carrying a sack across her shoulders. She did not even bother to have electricity installed in her house, although she could easily afford it, but insisted on it running through all the barns in order to boost productivity on her farms.
Once she had escaped her interfering and overbearing parents in London, farming always came first for Beatrix, along with the welfare of women. When she discovered that women in remote locations were dying in childbirth she paid for a District Nurse to visit them, and while she scoured the countryside recruiting the best shepherds and labourers to help run her businesses, she insisted on paying their wages directly to their wives. In Beatrix’s opinion men simply couldn’t be trusted not to spend the cash ‘inappropriately’. Tant Benson, a shepherd at Troutbeck Park, recalled: ‘I was there 17 years and she never paid me once. She always gave the money to the missus. “That’s where it should be,” she would say, “for the housekeeping”. She never paid me – not once.’
Beatrix relished being incognito, indeed most of her neighbours and business acquaintances only discovered her true identity after she had died and they read her remarkable obituaries in the newspapers. The legacy she left to children’s literacy lingers on, as does the remarkable gift she left the British people in the form of many thousands of acres of farmland she bequeathed to The National Trust, to be protected and cherished in her memory forever.
Chapter One
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly for a woman who passionately committed her life to do all she could to conserve the lakes, forests and fells of the English countryside, Beatrix Potter was born into the fast-paced hustle and bustle of metropolitan London’s high society.
Her father Rupert was a wealthy man, thanks in part to his own father, Edmund Potter, who had been a successful self-made businessman from Glossop in Derbyshire. A calico printer by trade, Edmund had originally been born into terrible poverty in 1802 but he worked hard and gradually hauled himself up to become the owner of the largest calico printing works in England.
Edmund was well-respected, dynamic and popular, moving up through society’s ranks to become a successful local magistrate, before being elected as a Liberal Member of Parliament for Carlisle. Edmund used his position of political power to campaign for popular education, religious education and tolerance for all. Edmund’s fearsome wife Jessie Crompton was known to be a great beauty, who claimed she was so desperately sought after by men that she was actually mobbed on the streets of Lancaster, and received as many as three marriage proposals a week. She was certainly a catch for Edmund, and their son Rupert grew to become a successful and handsome man too.
Rupert was a student at the elite Manchester College when he met Helen Leech, the daughter of Jane Ashton and John Leech, a prosperous cotton merchant and shipbuilder from nearby Stalybridge. As well as standing to inherit a vast fortune, Helen was also very well connected as her cousin was Thomas Ashton, the first Baron Ashton of Hyde. She would make an excellent match for Rupert, and as soon as he had qualified as a barrister, he proposed.
Both families were delighted by the smooth connecting of these two key industrial northern families, and the wedding took place in August 1863 at Hyde Unitarian Chapel in the village of Gee Cross, just outside Manchester, conveniently just after Helen had inherited a fortune of £50,000 from her father.
The newlyweds would want for nothing, although as a result of being so comfortably off they were not particularly driven or ambitious when it came to earning money of their own. Rupert had been given every opportunity, but with Helen’s encouragement Rupert’s intended legal career at the bar took a back seat in favour of their glittering social life. Needless to say, an upwardly mobile couple like Mr and Mrs Rupert Potter soon found life in the north somewhat restrictive and made the move down to London as soon as they could. They felt better able to enjoy the trappings of their wealth in a large white stucco townhouse in an exclusive part of Kensington, where they set up home complete with an army of footmen, lady’s maids, a butler and a coachman. Their regular weekend retreat was Camfield Place, a sprawling stately home near Hatfield in Hertfordshire which Rupert’s parents bought for them, and where their granddaughter Beatrix would later be a regular visitor. Beatrix was always very close to her maternal grandmother and spent many happy hours at Camfield listening to Jessie’s stories about her ancestors. Jessie often insisted loudly that she, and therefore also Beatrix, was a Compton – and a Potter merely by marriage.
When Beatrix came to research their family tree in her old age, she discovered her great-grandfather Abraham Compton had been an outspoken, radical, eccentric character, who fascinated her. She felt sure she had inherited many of Abraham’s interesting characteristics, and wrote later: ‘I am descended from generations of Lancashire yeomen and weavers; obstinate, hard-headed, matter of fact folk.’
Rupert and Helen, on the other hand, did not much care to be reminded of their gritty northern roots: they preferred to think of themselves as far more refined once they had moved to London. The genteel squares of Kensington, with their immaculately tended gardens, large houses with room below stairs for servants, and separate entrances for tradesmen, suited Rupert and Helen’s carefully crafted new image perfectly. Bolton Gardens was considered a highly desirable place to live; theirs was one of eight new homes constructed in 1862, on a sprawling 5-acre plot which had been a market garden and prior to that a cherry orchard – several of the original grand walnut trees remained intact, although they were felled while the Potters lived on the street.
The third floor of their tall and imposing townhouse would become the nursery on arrival of their daughter Helen Beatrix, who was born on 28 July 1866. As an only child for the first five years of her life, Beatrix led a solitary existence under the care of a series of nannies until her brother Walter Bertram followed in March 1872. Both children were always known by their middle names, a common Victorian tradition.
Rupert may not have stretched himself to undertake much in the way of paid legal work, but he was not without business acumen and invested his funds wisely in the stock market. On top of that he stood as the sole heir to inherit his father’s wealth, which was just as well since maintaining their London lifestyle was a challenge which Helen relished. She threw herself wholeheartedly into employing a small army of domestic staff, including butlers, coachmen and of course a constantly changing supply of uniformed maids on hand to serve her friends tea in the drawing room every afternoon at 4 pm.
Their leisure pursuits were studiously genteel. Although Rupert had chambers at Lincoln’s Inn in London where he officially practiced equity law and conveyancing, he was rarely seen at work, preferring to focus instead on indulging his hobbies of fishing, collecting art and photography, which was at the time in its early infancy. Cameras were the latest new invention, and everything about photography fascinated Rupert; he frequently treated himself to the very latest equipment as it became available, and soon became a highly accomplished amateur lensman.
Helen meanwhile had a weakness for canaries which she kept in ornate birdcages, trips to the seaside and the conversation of attractive gentlemen. She had a wide circle of appropriate and suitably connected friends among the cream o
f high society, and prided herself on how often her resemblance to the middle-aged Queen Victoria was remarked upon.
But for Beatrix the time dragged excruciatingly as every day fell into the same rigid, and often dreary, routine. Her parents would have breakfast in the dining room together at exactly the same time every morning, although the meal was eaten in silence and the children were not welcome at the table. Rupert would then depart for one of the gentlemen’s clubs he frequented, either the Athenaeum or the Reform Club, where he read the newspaper and enjoyed a convivial lunch with other gentlemen of leisure.
Meanwhile, back at Bolton Gardens the children barely left the confines of the top floor. Beatrix had a governess who taught her to read, write and play the piano. They would take a short break from these rudimentary lessons when a maid would deliver lunch to the nursery on a tray. Beatrix was served the same meal almost every day: a lamb cutlet followed by a bowl of rice pudding. Dinner, served sharply at 6 pm, was a solemn affair too, and of course another time when children were banished silently upstairs so as not to disturb their parents’ evening activities. Occasionally she was summoned to join her parents and their friends downstairs, but only ever for a matter of minutes.
Beatrix always had to wear a crisp and clean starched frock, striped cotton stockings and lace up boots, which she carefully polished every day. Vanity of any sort was very much frowned upon. She had plenty of toys and books, and was only allowed to leave the house if she was accompanied by her nurse or governess, who would take her out for a short walk each afternoon if the weather was fine and there was no risk of her catching a chill.
