Before Flopsy was the mycologist
John McEwen
A VICTORIAN NATURALIST: BEATRIX POTTER'S DRAWINGS FROM THE ARMITT COLLECTION by Eileen Jay, Mary Noble and Anne Stevenson Hobbs Warne, f25, pp. 191 Too many of the illustrations are reproduced skew-whiff — a vulgar magazine style which had me groping for my sea-sick pills — but otherwise this is an excellent book, crisply designed and adding greatly to our knowledge of one of our few 20th-century immortals. Margaret Lane, in her classic biography, covered this ground in four pages.
Beatrix Potter was born and brought up in Bolton Gardens, but her heart was always in the country — satisfied by annual summer holidays in Scotland or the Lake District, the land of her forebears on both sides, damp, ferny places, full of the detailed delights of moss and mineral made popular in pictures by Pre-Raphaelites ulti- mately indebted to Diirer's clump of grass. For her, as for so many Victorians, science and art were not exclusive, science merely providing a firmer foundation for aesthetic response. Botany was the rage, but mycolo- gy (the study of fungi) was in its infancy. Helped by Charles McIntosh, known as the Hygrocybe punicea, the Crimson or Blood-red Wax Cap, painted at Coldstream in October 1894 Perthshire Naturalist, an authority on all forms of natural history through his daily 15-mile walks as a postman, Beatrix became an expert mycologist, but because she was a woman she was not taken seriously.
Later in life she left most of her scientific work to the Armitt Trust in Ambleside, the only donation to a public collection that she made. Now, for the first time, technol- ogy has enabled the reproduction of these sheets. The fungus paintings are particular- ly notable, combining artistic beauty and scientific accuracy. She really loved fungi: I cannot tell what possesses me with the . fancy that they laugh and clap their hands, especially the little ones that grow in troops and rings amongst dead leaves in the woods.
From someone else it might sound twee, but from her it has the conviction of truth, no less than her description of the Com- mon White Helvella as 'a spluttered candle'.
Frustrated in her attempts to be accept- ed by the entirely male scientific establish- ment — the end of the century even saw science supplanted by Latin and Greek in major girls' schools — she turned to writing the 'Tales'. It is the strength of Peter Rabbit and the rest that they are based on the twin rocks of scientific truth and the prose of the King James Bible — a combination which protects her from feminists even now, for much the same reason as they spurn the equally Cobdenite Lady Thatch- er. When Squirrel Nutkin plays marbles on the beech-stump, those mushrooms in the roots are not whimsical decoration; nor are they the `agarics' of the caption — Warne's should know better. No, they are Lyophyl- lum decastes.
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