The Real Beatrix Potter

by Nadia Cohen

  A century later, in 1997, the Linnean Society issued a posthumous apology to Beatrix, finally agreeing that her meticulous research had been ‘treated scurvily’. Today, many of her original drawings are still consulted by mycologists all over the world.

  But at the time Beatrix was left badly bruised by the whole experience, and after withdrawing her academic papers she also decided that she would never return to her coded journal either. After fifteen years and thousands of pages written in secret, she was ready to communicate in a way that others could understand.

  It was time for Beatrix to grow up, and science’s loss was to be literature’s gain.

  Chapter Five

  After fungi, in the catalogue of Beatrix’s obsessions, came writing. The catalyst for the change was to be her final but favourite governess, Annie Carter.

  Beatrix was painfully bored stuck at home with almost no stimulation, entertainment or company. By the time she reached her late teens, Beatrix knew it was too late for the education she had longed for. Beatrix resented her parents for denying her any formal schooling; she knew they could easily afford it, yet despite her repeated pleas Beatrix was never allowed to go to school. Instead she was educated in a haphazard fashion by a succession of governesses at home, in the nursery on the top floor of the Potter’s imposing house in Kensington.

  Without the influence of other children, and never having experienced a classroom setting, Beatrix never really understood how she was supposed to behave. As a result, she was a handful.

  She asked a lot of questions and it is very probable that she was smarter than most of the meek and mild governesses her parents hired, none of whom tended to stay very long. Various governesses came and went from Bolton Gardens, including a Miss Cameron and another teacher, known simply as Mrs A, who attempted to teach Beatrix figure drawing and oil painting, although her parents complained about the cost. These art lessons appeared not to have been much of a success, perhaps because Beatrix believed she already knew better and made it clear that she would rather be left alone to paint and draw exactly as she wished without any outside interference or instruction: ‘I don’t want lessons, I want practice,’ she had complained in her journal.

  I hope it is not pride that makes me so stiff against teaching, but a bad or indifferent teacher is worse than none. It cannot be taught.

  Of course I shall paint just as I like when not with her. I am convinced it lies chiefly with oneself. I don’t much like it, which is disappointing. Wish it did not cost so much.

  It is tiresome when you do get some lessons to be taught in a way you dislike and have to swallow your feelings out of considerations at home. I do wish these drawing lessons were over so that I could have some peace and sleep of nights.

  Once Beatrix had decided that artistic talent was inherent - that one either had it or not, and it could therefore not be taught - the lessons became entirely pointless to her, since she was convinced that the only way to improve was to be left alone to practice in peace as often as she could.

  As she developed into a young woman, Beatrix isolated herself from society yet further still as she began suffering from various physical ailments, including fainting fits, rheumatic pains and bouts of fatigue. Whenever she felt unwell all she wanted to do was draw. Desperate for fresh views or anything that might spark a flash of inspiration, she would sketch anything and everything she could – once even a bucket of swill used to feed the animals when it was all she could lay her hands on: ‘I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result’, she wrote. ‘And when I had a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest thing, worse than queer sometimes. Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the backyard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.’

  She continued drawing for her own pleasure, sitting and sketching anything she saw – garden tools, Roman sandals unearthed in excavations, butterfly wings and water fleas magnified under her brother’s trusty microscope. She painted illustrations to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and folk tales about Uncle Remus.

  While she loved art galleries, she hated the crowds, and even though she longed to be taken out of the confines of the house, Beatrix tired very easily and the pressures of London society left her baffled, bemused and ultimately exhausted. She wrote: ‘How is it that these high heeled ladies who dine out, paint and pinch their waists to deformity, can racket about all day long, while I who sleep o’nights, can turn in my stays, and dislike sweets and dinners, am so tired towards the end of the afternoon that I can scarcely keep my feet?’

  When she was just nineteen Beatrix complained openly about already being tired of life and feared she had nothing else to look forward to in her future. The idea of settling down into the monotony of married life in London left her cold: ‘Oh life, wearisome, disappointing, and yet in many shades so sweet, I wonder why one is so unwilling to let go this year? Not because it has been joyful, but because I fear its successors – I am terribly afraid of the future.’

  In the depths of her misery and despair, Beatrix did not write in her journal again for another six months. As well as feeling deeply emotionally depressed, she was also far too weak from a rheumatic fever to even be physically capable of writing. When she did eventually return to her diary after a long and slow period of convalescence she explained: ‘Part of the time I was too ill, and since then laziness and unsettledness consequent on weakness have so demoralized me, that I have persevered in nothing for more than a week at a time except toothache.’

  During this particularly debilitating bout of illness, Beatrix’s hair, which by then had grown almost down to her knees, began to fall out in clumps. Eventually she decided the most practical solution would be to hack it all off into a close crop as short as her brother’s in a bid to save what she could: ‘My hair nearly all came off since I was ill’, she revealed. ‘Now that the sheep is shorn I can say without pride that I have seldom seen a more beautiful head of hair than mine. Last summer it was very thick and within about four inches of my knees, being more than a yard long.’ Needless to say her mother was absolutely horrified at the sight of her daughter with a terrible boy’s haircut, and begged her not to leave the house without wearing a bonnet to cover her head.

  The fever returned several times over the next few years but gradually Beatrix started to regain her strength and life returned to normal, which meant that yet again she felt stifled and confined by the excruciating boredom of doing almost nothing for hours on end.

  She urged her parents to provide some stimulation as she entered adulthood, and they grudgingly employed a woman who would be the last of Beatrix’s three governesses. Annie Carter immediately became her favourite. Annie was only three years older than Beatrix when she arrived and they quickly became close friends, staying in regular contact for the rest of their lives. She had been hired initially to teach Beatrix conversational French and German in her teens – yet another failed attempt to turn Beatrix into suitable wife material – but she made quite an impression on Beatrix. Miss Carter had already travelled abroad, and supported herself financially; Beatrix was intrigued by the idea of being emancipated from her family.

  Unfortunately for Beatrix, she did not stay with the Potters very long as she fell in love with a civil engineer called Edwin Moore. After they were married she went to live with her new husband in Wandsworth, south west London, and had to stop working for the Potters.

  Mr and Mrs Moore soon started a family, and had eight children in fifteen years, all of whom Beatrix adored and lavished with attention. She would often ride down to visit them in her pony carriage, showering the children with presents of her cast-off shawls and silk dresses, boxes of pet mice, rabbits, and her tame hedgehog Mrs Tiggy. She even once turned up with a lizard called Sally. She wrote to them all constantly, almost from birth, and if Beatrix ran out of news to share with the family in her letters, she made up stories about anima
ls for them instead, illustrating the tales with whimsical pen and ink sketches.

  Beatrix found herself enthralled by watching Annie’s children develop, and was surprised at how easily and clearly she was able to remember each stage of her own early childhood as they reached them in turn. Beatrix realised she had no trouble recalling just how she had felt at the age of 5, which was when it had first occurred to her that animals could take on human characteristics and individuality. One of her earliest and most vivid memories was feeding white ducks in a park in Putney and being convinced that they were watching her with a look of surprise at what she was wearing.

  Beatrix would also take regular walks around Brompton cemetery, a graveyard close to Bolton Gardens, where she noted down some interesting sounding names carved on to the ageing headstones. Peter Rabbett, Jeremiah Fisher, Mr Nutkins, Mr Brock and Mr McGregor have all since been found on graves, confirming local rumours about the source of her character’s unusual names.

  The discovery was made in 2001 by James McKay, a member of the Friends of Brompton Cemetery committee who decided to research the matter as part of his quest to win National Lottery funding for the cemetery, which is run by the Royal Parks Agency. He scoured the computerised burial registers at Chelsea library, which record more than 250,000 burial sites in the cemetery. ‘It was all terribly amateur, of course,’ he said,

  But the names on the register clearly match up with some of the graves, so it wasn’t guesswork. I thought, this can’t just be coincidence. It is a very big claim to make and I have to be frightfully cautious. But I became convinced that the story is genuine when I found an old edition of the Jeremy Fisher story which had the character down as Jeremiah Fisher. Then I found a gravestone in the cemetery for a Jeremiah Fisher and that’s when I thought the rumour was true.

  When we tried to locate some of the graves, quite often they had disappeared altogether and all we had was a patch of grass. But we have the records.

  Judy Taylor, the chairman of the Beatrix Potter Society said: ‘I had never heard these rumours about the gravestones and had never stopped to think where Beatrix Potter got her names from. But it is an enchanting and delightful thought. She was a very down-to-earth person, so it does not surprise me to think that she might have got her characters’ names from a cemetery.’

  She recalled these unusual names as she spent time with Annie’s eldest son Noel, telling him stories and drawing pictures for him with pencils and paints. Noel adored Beatrix because she treated him as an equal and spoke to him quite unlike any other adults, with a complete lack of sentimentality, almost as if she were telling the stories for her own pleasure and not simply for his entertainment.

  When Beatrix played with Noel and his younger siblings, it was clear that she had not fully left her childhood behind, nor had she quite reached the maturity of adulthood either. Looking back several decades later she mused: ‘I have just made stories to please myself, because I never grew up.’

  Beatrix was certainly not a Peter Pan-type character; physically she had developed normally, and some of her attitudes had matured accordingly, but it was clear that she had not quite lost her childish imagination. And so when Noel fell seriously ill at the age of 5 and Beatrix was not able to visit him as often as she would have liked, she started sending him a series of longer letters, telling him all about the adventures of a naughty little rabbit she decided to call Peter. The charming short stories were illustrated with dozens of tiny, intricate drawings and sometimes she simply let the pictures tell the story, with hardly any words at all.

  The first of these letters was sent on 3 September 1893 from the Potter’s holiday home in Dunkeld. Beatrix wrote:

  My dear Noel,

  I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits, whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.

  They lived with their Mother in a sand bank under the roof of a big fir tree. ‘Now my dears,’ said old Mrs. Bunny, ‘you may go into the field or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr McGregor’s garden.

  She posted the letter and that was that. It was a perfectly formed children’s tale, but neither Beatrix nor Noel could have imagined in their wildest dreams what lay ahead, although luckily the little boy decided to hang on to the letter and kept it stored safely.

  Beatrix was brimming with story ideas but had no outlet for them other than amusing children. The very next day she wrote another letter to Noel’s brother Eric: ‘My dear Eric, Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank of a river. One morning Mr Fisher looked out and saw drops of rain,’ it began.

  She also wrote to Annie’s daughter Freda, every one of the letters scattered with similar pen and ink illustrations, which seemed to flow from Beatrix just as easily as the words did. As well as drawing dozens of mice, squirrels, rabbits, dogs and frogs, she also included little sketches of herself walking with an umbrella or gathering mushrooms.

  Still finding herself in search of something to occupy her long and empty hours at home, Beatrix carried on drawing dozens of illustrations of her pet rabbit Benjamin Bouncer, although she guarded them fiercely just as she did with most of her work. She rarely showed her sketches to anybody and usually kept them hidden away inside the drawers of her desk unless she was giving them away as greetings cards or calendars.

  In 1890, however, she decided something must change, and she unexpectedly took the rare and daring step of sending a few sketches off to a London publishing house called Hildesheimer and Faulkner. Beatrix boldly suggested they might like to use her drawings of rabbits as Christmas cards, but by a stroke of luck they just happened to be looking for some animal illustrations at that time to accompany a small book of verses by the poet Frederic E. Weatherley. To Beatrix’s enormous surprise and delight she had her work published for the first time, in a seven-page booklet held together with a pink silk cord, which was sold to children for four pence and halfpenny. The little pamphlet of poems was called A Happy Pair and Beatrix’s initials H.B.P. appeared in the corner of each picture of rabbits, although they are not really recognisable as what would later emerge as her signature style.

  One of the final pictures, showing a rabbit waiting on a railway platform, accompanied a poem called Benjamin Bunny. It later emerged that the poet, a Bristol-based barrister, had by complete coincidence heard about Beatrix’s habit of taking her pets on train journeys with her.

  After he inadvertently led to her first book deal she wrote: ‘That charming rascal Benjamin Bouncer. What an investment that rabbit has been in spite of the hutches.’ On good days, she noted, Benjamin was ‘Amiably sentimental to the point of silliness’; on bad days, he nibbled away at the insides of her paint box. Beatrix would even dream about her beloved Benjamin: ‘Bunny came to my bedside in a white cotton nightcap and tickled me with his whiskers’, she revealed.

  Beatrix and her beloved rabbit had been inseparable from 1885 until he died in 1892. She never forgot the little Belgian rabbit who was indirectly responsible for her big break, although he would not appear in any more of her published stories until 1904. Benjamin was supposed to feature in The Tale of Peter Rabbit – the first book in the series which appeared in 1902 – but he was later edited out, only to emerge once again as the star of The Tale of Benjamin Bunny two years later.

  He would also become the model for Beatrix’s famous Bunnykins china and crockery many years later. When it came to creating a range of children’s plates, bowls and mugs, Beatrix sent an old photograph of Benjamin to Joseph Mott, who was the art director at Royal Doulton, the pottery company which was keen to start featuring characters from her tales. Mott took the photograph home and showed it to his children who agreed that Benjamin was the perfect model for Bunnykins.

  Beatrix had written on the back of the picture postcard: ‘For Mr Mott’s children – This is a photograph of the real old original Mr Benjamin Bunny – he was a Belgian rabbit, very tame & clever
.’

  It has since been suggested that Beatrix’s father may have taken the picture rather than Beatrix herself, and over a century later the 5.5 by 3.5 inch card was sold at an auction in Gloucestershire for £1,100 by a member of the Mott family.

  Libby Joy, chairman of the Beatrix Potter Society, commented after the remarkable sale in 2013:

  Benjamin Bouncer was a Belgian rabbit and was the first of Beatrix Potter’s pet rabbits. He was acquired in about 1885. She brought him home from a London pet shop in a paper bag.

  We think the photograph on the postcard was taken by Beatrix herself, though it could have been taken by her father, who was a prolific photographer. We know quite a lot about Benjamin because Beatrix wrote about him in her journal, and he was the model for most of the rabbits in her early published work in the 1890s - greetings cards and so on - that predated the little books.

  In the book she eventually dedicated to him, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, the title character joined his cousin Peter Rabbit to return to Mr McGregor’s garden and look for the clothes Peter had accidentally left there as he escaped in the first story. During the risky escapade, the two bunnies became trapped under a basket by Mr McGregor’s cat and had to be rescued by Benjamin’s father.

  Illustrating the poetry pamphlet was to prove disappointing for Beatrix. Finally seeing her work in print should have been the most thrilling step forward, but she was frustrated by having such a small and insignificant role in the whole process and vowed never to contribute her illustrations to any stories or verses which had been written by another writer again. Complaining about how unsatisfactory she found the process, Beatrix wrote:

  With regard to illustrating other people’s books, I have a strong feeling that every outside book which I did, would prevent me from finishing one of my own. I enjoy inventing stories – any number – but I draw so slowly and laboriously that there are sure to be favourites of my own left undone at the end of my working lifetime, whether short or long.