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Beatrix Potter

Helen Beatrice Potter

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Sunday at home in the stone-quiet of the third floor of Bolton Gardens. The pale, expressionless face of the girl, gazing inwards at a world of snails and frogs, flowers and fungi. Nobody speaks, least of all herself. The soundtrack to her life is the quarter-hourly chime of the grandfather clock, downstairs in the tomb-like hallway, with its solid furniture and its aspidistras. She has never been to school; her governess has moved on, having found her pupil her intellectual equal. In company, the cat has her tongue. She neither calls on friends, nor has them call on her. Her hair is three feet long; she has bright blue eyes. She has hardly travelled, in London, outside Kensington itself. The servants come and go, and she holds stilted conversations with them; better, true, is when she is in her brother's company, when she can involve him in her sketching, her painting, her mostly-dead menagerie of animals and insects. Or there is her imaginary companion, Esther. Now she is alone with her pen, and, in the most proper copperplate, she records her mental inventory of events - from the newspapers, the magazines, the occasional observations of her parents, with whom she does not eat. It is to be a secret. Away from the household, away from the tedious visitor from Oxford, the absurd Mr. Wilson, she has begun to confide in a journal, a journal written precisely in cypher. Firstly, she devises a version in pencil; then she carefully goes over her work in ink. She has been doing this now for about six months, and is sufficiently proficient in her own alphabet to write at a steady pace. This cryptic journal will continue for sixteen years.

The enumerator has her name slightly wrong: it is Beatrix, not Beatrice Potter. The house in which she lived in 1881 was the one in which she had been born on 28th July 1866. We know her as the creator of Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Mr. Jeremy Fisher et al., and their prototypes already existed in her internal world. Although she was almost confined to barracks, being considered by her excessively anxious parents as a potential invalid, and as in any case a child better protected from the noise of the distant city, she had at least travelled with them on their annual forays to the Lake District, to the South-West, to Scotland. The Scottish trips also involved most of the Potters' servants, and the butler, George Cox, was obliged to ensure that their days north of the border ran to the same, set timetable.

Her father Rupert had qualified as a barrister, but the inheritance he had received from his father (a self-made Manchester man, and a Liberal M.P. of some distinction) allowed him never to worry about practising his profession. Her parents, diligent but not obsessive Unitarians, were free to indulge the slow passage of time in patient rituals, few of them social. Rupert Potter was a good photographer; the painter Millais was one of his closer friends. When Millais painted his subjects, Rupert Potter sometimes complemented the portraits with photographic studies of his own - most notably of

Gladstone in 1884. Mr. Potter's mutton-chop whiskers were considerably more extravagant than his sitter. His daughter Beatrix was familiar with the galleries, and with the nearby Natural History Museum, to which she was allowed to go with one of the housemaids. It was there that she developed her artistic skills.

Beatrix's journal was only discovered after her death, and the cypher not cracked until the 1960s. She had never intended it for anyone but herself. In it she records her grandmother's rambling memories; the progress of various elections; and her sometimes acid remarks about the paintings she went to see. From a distance, she saw well-known figures of the time, like Ruskin, here described in 1884:

...one of the most ridiculous figures I have seen. A very old hat, much necktie and aged coat buttoned up on his neck, humpbacked, not particularly clean looking. He had on high boots, and one of his trousers tucked up on the top of one.

Or Gladstone, a b?te noir of Beatrix's (her Liberal antecedents did not prevent her from privately regretting that the Conservatives did not make more headway):

He really looks as if he had been put in a clothes-bag and sat upon. I never saw a person so creased...[he] has a wrinkled appearance of not filling his clothes.

And in the midst of her comments on debates and faraway campaigns, she throws in odd other nuggets from what she sees and reads:

I saw a most extraordinary tricycle pass today. A bath chair made of wicker work in which reclined a very smart lady, and behind, where one should push, a gentleman treadling, puffing and blowing and looking very sheepish... How the bicycles swarm now, and yet a few years ago, everyone turned round to stare at a velocipede!

But her daily life was increasingly solitary, interrupted only by her parents' expectation that she would continue to follow them round their ritual journeys, and put up (as she did) with their litany of minor complaints. Beatrix, at least, came up to scratch. Rupert and Helen Potter seem never to have imagined that she might lead a life independent of them. Her uncle, Sir Harry Roscoe, also a Liberal MP until the 1895 election, briefly encouraged her with her analysis of fungi. A paper was read at the Linnaean Society; and then forgotten. She was thirty; it was 1897; suddenly she concluded her cryptic journal. She had entertained herself in other ways - notably by writing, in 1893, to a sick child, Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of a former governess. Her letters resuscitated her childhood enjoyment of naming (and drawing) creatures, be they snails, lizards or, as here, rabbits. "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..."

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Now it was 1901. She was thirty-five, and continued slavishly to accept the rhythm of her parents' lives. It was claustrophobic. She was nineteen before she saw Whitehall or Strand. She did not see the inside of a City church until nearly thirty. Her parents seemed to have fixed, even arrested her age. Apart from illustrating, as "H.B.P.", a few verses for a tiny Christmas book in about 1890, she had produced material only for her own delight, or as gifts. She wrote to Noel on a hunch. Had he still got the letter? He had. She turned the tale of Peter Rabbit into an illustrated children's story. In this she was advised by a friend she and her father had made in the Lake District - Canon H.D. Rawnsley, one of the three founders of the National Trust. He had suggested a publishing house called Warne's as her first port of call. No dice. Five further rejections. So - since she had inherited money of her own - she published it privately, in an edition of 250. Perhaps to rub their noses in it, she sent one to Warne's. This time, they bit the bait, and offered to publish her book if the sketches were in colour. She obliged.

Peter Rabbit, and his successors, The Tailor Of Gloucester, Squirrel Nutkin, Benjamin Bunny, The Two Bad Mice and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, were immediate successes. Beatrix's father was thrown into a pother by legal issues of copyright. And Beatrix, too, discovered a new, more amicable existence, when she visited the Warne family in Bedford Square. Her parents were alarmed. They refused invitations to Bedford Square. They objected to her publications. She was only thirty-seven! By 1905, Norman Warne, two years her junior, had proposed. Beatrix wore her ring defiantly. But the Potters' objections were stifled in their throats by what happened next. Norman Warne fell suddenly ill; was diagnosed with leukaemia; and died in August.

The remedy Beatrix Potter found for this catastrophe was the purchase of a farm, Hill-Top farm, in Sawrey, near Windermere, in the Lake District she had come to love. She did not settle there; her parents, bewildered and pampered, reverted to their old demands, and she complied (her brother Bertram, who was pursuing an occupation as an artist, had moved to Scotland). But slowly, she began to spend more time in Sawrey. She became plumper, more assertive. She bought another property, Castle Farm. In the 1910 election, the political views she had confided to her journal were suddenly expressed in a series of hand-drawn posters opposing Tariff Reform. She protested as a would-be employer of British doll-makers. (The Liberals, however, won the election). Beatrix Potter also produced thirteen more books for Warne's before the First World War

In 1913, she became engaged to the solicitor, Willie Heelis, who had helped her buy Castle Farm. Her parents, now in their seventies, made desperate ructions. The marriage still went ahead. And her parents were given another pill to swallow - her brother Bertram supported her, and revealed that he had been married himself for some time. (As a matter of fact, the elder sisters of Willie Heelis themselves disapproved of the Potters, as being descended from "trade", and being dissenters!)

For the first time, Beatrix had her own life: cooking, growing vegetables and flowers, farming sheep. She vanished from the public eye, by her own design, re-appearing only when - to her surprise - she discovered that she had an American audience who appeared to value her as an artist rather than an investment. It rather irked her when a different Beatrice Potter, who had married Sidney Webb, was credited by a London newspaper as Peter Rabbit's creator.

Beatrix herself produced a few more books, but they lacked the total commitment of her earlier work. Her father survived her marriage by three months; Bertram died suddenly in Scotland in 1918; her mother, finally coaxed up to a new house in the Lake District in 1919, survived until 1932, dying at the age of 92. To the end, she rode in a landau with a coachman and a boy behind her, both liveried. Beatrix was busy harvesting when her mother appeared, insisting on an audience. Her now-independent daughter took a long-overdue revenge by stepping into the landau with two sheaves of corn.

It was Beatrix who was the dominant partner in the happy marriage; it was her influence which postponed the arrival of electricity - the cottage in which they lived was the last in Sawrey to be connected. Nor did she ever learn to drive. She enjoyed the quiet, rather deaf and self-absorbed qualities of her husband. She devoted her last years to purchasing land with the express intention of leaving it to the National Trust. She also left her copyrights to the Warne family. She died, two years before Willie, on December 22nd, 1943. By then, she was a stout, cheerful woman, devoted to two Pekinese dogs called Suzi and Chuli. During the London blitz, the Germans managed a direct hit on 2, Bolton Gardens. Beatrix Heelis was pleased: that "unloved birthplace", she called it.

For her last Christmas meal, in 1942, Beatrix Heelis went to a hutch outside her cottage to select something special to eat. It was a rabbit.

Sources:

The Tale of Beatrix Potter, by Margaret Lane, Warne & Co, 1946, revised in 1967

The Tale of Mrs William Heelis, by John Heelis, Sutton, 1993

The Journal Of Beatrix Potter, 1881-1897, Warne & Co, 1966

Beatrix Potter's Letters, selected by Judy Taylor, Warne & Co, 1989

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