Near Sawrey, Cumbria
Beatrix Potter, from her teens until the age of 30, kept a secret diary. It was in code and the handwriting was tiny: “No one will ever read this,” she declared. She was wrong. In 1958, Leslie Linder cracked the code. Out spilled the uncensored reflections of the Victorian artist as a young woman.
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was already a talented painter and her diary trains a critical eye on the famous artists of her day; the Pre-Raphaelites, she notices, are not so different in their subject matter from other painters, but “everything [is] in focus at once.” She admired Millais’s painting of Ophelia, but thought the rosebush in the corner inaccurately colored. She was also politically engaged, disparaging William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister. Fiercely intelligent and bored, she felt adulthood stretch out before her like a dark passageway with little prospect of “[doing] something” at the end of it.
Entrepreneurship, however, ran in her family. Her grandfather, a self-made man, had been the successful owner of a calico-printing factory in Derbyshire. A nonconformist, a radical, and eventually a member of Parliament, he left £400,000 on his death, a sum equivalent to multiple millions now. This background allowed Beatrix a financially comfortable upbringing in which her parents spent long holidays in Scotland and northern England, where Beatrix enjoyed an outdoor life, sketching trees, fungi, animals, and birds. Back in London, she brought creatures into the nursery, including rabbits, hedgehogs, bats, lizards, mice, frogs, newts, and snakes, who became not only pets but objects of study and, finally, characters.
She began by selling her watercolors of animals dressed in human clothes as designs for Christmas cards. Then she thought of self-publishing her picture-letters to friends’ children. Her success in these areas helped her to negotiate with her eventual publisher, Frederick Warne, as she already knew her market. She wanted high-quality small books at prices small enough for children to afford. It was she who invented a Peter Rabbit board game, insisted on patenting and sourcing her own Peter Rabbit dolls, and licensed wallpaper based on her designs.
Her female bunnies, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, may have been fluffy, but Beatrix Potter certainly was not.
Potter—whose 150th anniversary Britain has been celebrating this year with exhibitions, a 50-pence piece featuring Peter Rabbit, and the issue of a new Potter book, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots—deserves to be remembered for a variety of achievements. In natural history, she was a significant illustrator of rare fungi and developed scientific hypotheses about them that were ahead of their time. She theorized that a lichen was a symbiosis between an alga and a fungus (she was right). She was also the first person in Britain to germinate certain fungi from spores. She submitted her findings to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and to the Linnean Society; but as a woman and an amateur, she was roundly ignored.
In literature, she offered children something new: books in which animals in human costume retain the meticulously rendered anatomy, coloring, and traits particular to their species. She set the stories in recognizable environments with vivid detail, drawn from her years of sketching old stairwells, potting-sheds, even a swill bucket.
There is also a comic brio to her tales that is refreshing. The Two Bad Mice show up the artificiality of the Edwardian domesticity (a doll’s house) that they try to inhabit; the ham on the sideboard is made of plaster and they lay waste to it in fury when they discover it is inedible. Tom Kitten and his sisters discard their best bib and tucker, shaming their snobbish mother, who wants to show off her children at a tea party for friends. In this story, one feels Potter herself gleefully shrugging off the memory of those uncomfortable clothes—the Alice band, the starched white pinafore, and the zebra-striped stockings—in which Victorian mothers who had read Alice in Wonderland trigged out their daughters. The ducks at the end of The Tale of Tom Kitten lose the pinafores in a pond, where (Potter’s story jokes) you can see them perpetually looking for them, their bottoms in the air. They can go fish.
There is a third achievement for which we should celebrate Beatrix Potter. That is her preservation of a very significant part of the Lake District through giving her farmland, carefully amassed in her later years, to the National Trust.
Founded in 1895, the trust had some of the force in Britain that John Muir’s national parks movement had in America. Potter was friends with one of the founding members, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, and with him she devoted herself to protecting the Lake District from hydroplanes and unsightly development. She also encouraged open paths and the use of her land by Girl Guides so that those from the city could enjoy the countryside. At her death, her legacy comprised over 4,000 acres—an astonishing gift.
Potter was serious about farming: A countrywoman who, in later life, preferred real pigs and sheep to their nursery-fiction counterparts, she followed her shepherds out into the fields and relished the hands-on work of restoring a farmhouse, even falling through the ceiling. In her late thirties she had suffered tragedy when her publisher-fiancé, Norman Warne, died suddenly of leukemia. But she recovered from this—and from her class-conscious parents’ opposition to her romantic choices—and embarked on a happy marriage in middle life to a country solicitor.
She thrived on the wholesome rural labor that her privileged, but sometimes isolating, childhood had not allowed. She weathered. Photographs from the 1930s show a woman in tweeds who looks as if she enjoyed a roast dinner, a laugh, and a long walk in the wind.
The Lake District has been celebrating Beatrix Potter’s anniversary with various events and exhibitions. A few months ago I took myself to the Newlands Valley to experience some of the pleasures of the scenery she captured in her books. I stayed at Littletown Farm, where the heroine, Lucie, lives in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Lucie is apt to drop her handkerchiefs and finds that they have been gathered up and laundered by the hedgehog washerwoman, who invites her for tea in her tiny home under the hill called Catbells. It is still a charming place, and the owners were kind enough both to give me tea and to do laundry for me in an emergency, so the spirit of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle clearly persists.
A 17th-century farmhouse, Little-town is both a bed and breakfast and part of a working sheep farm, run by the descendants of Thomas Swainson, from whom Beatrix Potter bought some of her sheep. Little about the landscape has changed since Potter’s time. When you wake in the morning you hear birdsong, rushing water from the river that runs through the valley, ewes bleating, and lambs responding. The views are spectacular: In every direction there are high hills with soft flanks, furred with bracken, and long sharp ridges like the spines of sleeping animals.
I loved the six-mile hike to Buttermere, which takes you past Moss Force waterfall, streaming down like skeins of white hair on rock as gray as storm clouds. You pull up a steep climb through a pass with dramatic prospects of Derwent Fells and Causey Pike, before descending to Buttermere itself, a tiny village by a lake of mystical beauty.
It would be easy to imagine the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend rising from this glassy pale water, fringed with reeds, over which Fleetwith Pike, another high hill, crouches like a giant turtle, green and brown and strangely symmetrical. It holds your eye and seems to mark your progress as you swing right or left by sundial degrees toward its inevitable snout. No wonder Beatrix Potter, riding her pony out for long days spent sketching, felt liberated here: Even in the age of mass tourism there is a deep stillness, a sense of space above and around, that tempts the imagination—that wild and wary creature—to emerge.
After an excellent night’s rest, and a hearty breakfast of local bacon and fresh eggs, I was eager to explore Potter’s home at Hill Top Farm at Near Sawrey (about an hour’s drive away), which is in the care of the National Trust. It is a delightful cottage with a garden, on either side of a long path, that in summer overflows with scented roses, purple geraniums, green lady’s mantle, and Sweet William. There is also an old orchard and vegetable garden where a watering can and hoe seem artfully placed to recall Mr. McGregor’s garden in The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
Inside, the rooms are snug, with low wooden ceilings, window seats, and old farm furniture of the kind Potter collected from local sources: An oak dresser carved with pomegranates and vines and the date 1667 was her most prized find. You can see Potter’s china dogs over the mantelpiece: not a pair of upright spaniels (as is most common), but greyhounds, each with a dead rabbit in its jaws. The author of Peter Rabbit was neither squeamish nor sentimental.
Upstairs, there are objects and scenes that bring back the books. You come upon the landing—and the floorboard—where Tom Kitten was rescued from the malevolent rat, Samuel Whiskers, who had intended to make him into a roly-poly pudding. Here is the dolls’ house, crafted by Norman Warne, Potter’s first fiancé, which temporarily accommodated the Two Bad Mice. There is also a darkroom, which reminds us that Potter (taking after her father) was a keen photographer and used the medium to capture favorite animals such as her rabbit, Benjamin Bouncer.
In the town of Hawkshead, a few minutes, distant by road, Potter’s husband William Heelis had his solicitor’s office. This is now a gallery devoted to Potter’s artwork and well worth a visit. Looking closely at the tiny vignettes of Jemima Puddle-Duck, you can see the delicacy of Potter’s use of line and watercolor: the blue bonnet and pink shawl of our foolish romantic heroine, lured to an assignation by the rakish Mr. Fox, blooms against the varied greens of foliage and Lakeland Fells. Jeremy Fisher, the frog, boats his lilypad across Derwent Water like Henry Raeburn’s famous oil painting of a skating clergyman, an irresistible mixture of formality and humor.
It is quite possible to boat yourself on Derwent Water, and stunning views reward the excursion. Motor launches leave every hour or so from Keswick and stop at various points on the lake, so you can hop on and off, exploring beaches and woods where otters and red squirrels still reside. You can see Derwent Island House, a mansion on an island owned by the eccentric Joseph Pocklington. He built a fort there and encouraged local citizens to try to attack it once a year while he shot at them with cannons.
The enterprising modern visitor can hire a canoe and paddle out to St. Herbert’s Island, which Potter transformed into Owl Island in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. No cannons will fire, but rainwear is recommended. Sudden changes in the weather are part of the drama of this countryside, where the dry-stone walls are often the only dry things visible.
A photograph of Beatrix Potter as a teenager shows her with shorn hair after a fever, fearlessly holding a mouse on her hand. Her look is direct: There is something of Joan of Arc in her crop-headed stare. Her grandfather may have made a fortune out of chintz, but Beatrix Potter was a woman for our own time: shrewd, practical, and capable of reinventing herself.
She always professed surprise that Peter Rabbit, from her first book, remained the most popular of all her creations: She preferred the kindly mice of The Tailor of Gloucester. But at heart she must have known why. Peter is told not to go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. So, immediately, he does just that.
Animals squeeze under the fences that confine them. Her secret was to do the same.
Sara Lodge, a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, is the author of Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics.
