When Peter Rabbit stamps . . .
Charlotte Moore
BEATRIX POTTER: A LIFE IN NATURE by Linda Lear Penguin, £25, pp. 554, ISBN 0713995602 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 ‘T he bride is a successful exhibitor at local agricultural shows of short-horn cattle and her name is known now all over the country for those charming books for children ...’ Thus the Westmorland Gazette announced the marriage of Beatrix Potter and William Heelis in 1913. Beatrix would have concurred with the Gazette’s sense of priorities. Though she took pride and pleasure in her ‘little books’ and defended their merit — ‘There is more in the books than mere funniness’ — one feels that she would have relished being the first woman president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association more than her acclaim as a best-selling author.
Linda Lear’s solid biography is evenhanded in its treatment of Potter’s achievements as author, artist, farmer and conservationist. She points out that if Potter had been born male she could have been an expert in archaeology, botany, ornithology, mycology, geology, entomology and more. The story of Potter’s oppressed girlhood is well known. Her intelligent but overbearing father and her miserable snob of a mother exercised a shocking degree of control over their daughter. Beatrix recorded her woes in a secret journal not deciphered until after her death. She was allowed few companions and no personal freedom, but she was allowed to keep a surprising variety of creatures — bats, lizards and toads as well as the more usual rabbits and mice — in the schoolroom of her ‘unloved birthplace’, 2 Bolton Gardens, Kensington. She studied their behaviour and appearance in minute detail. Her precocious talent for drawing and her extraordinary powers of observation made her pictures useful scientific documents, though their value was unrecognised by the all-male hierarchy of late Victorian natural historians. ‘Now of all hopeless things to draw I should think the very worst is a fine fat fungus,’ wrote Beatrix aged 26 in 1892, but her studies of fungi are so accurate that modern mycologists still refer to them for purposes of identification. A century later, the Linnean Society issued a retrospective apology for having overlooked the importance of her work on the symbiotic nature of lichens.
‘Force is said to be interminable. I sometimes reflect what may happen when Peter Rabbit stamps, which is one of the most energetic manifestations of insignificance which has come under my notice.’ This fascination with the workings of the natural world informs and enlivens the whole of Potter’s work. Linda Lear understands that the quality of the ‘little books’ lies in the combination of scientific observation, artistic skill, humour without sentimentality and a fine literary ear. Given the nursery-tea-set industry that has arisen from the books (and which Beatrix, as an astute business woman, encouraged), the stories themselves are remarkably free from whimsy, and such as there is arises from the need to satisfy public demand. ‘It is an unfortunate fact,’ wrote Beatrix, ‘that animals in their own natural pretty fur coats don’t sell so well as dressed up.’ As Lear observes, the stories are set in ‘real, rather than imagined, nature’. The Potter parents deprived Beatrix of much, but they did provide her with long summer holidays in a beautiful part of the country. A natural countrywoman, Beatrix devoted the second — happier, freer — half of her life and the whole of her considerable fortune to preserving her beloved Lake District. She left 4,300 Lakeland acres to the National Trust, including complete valley heads at Troutbeck and Eskdale.
‘With opportunity, the world is very interesting,’ wrote Beatrix as a frustrated, imprisoned young woman. Slowly she created her own opportunities. From the ‘picture letters’ she wrote to amuse children of her acquaintance (Lear explodes the myth that Potter didn’t like children; she loved them) she developed the 23 ‘little books’, perennial bestsellers and saviours of the small family-run publishers Frederick Warne and Co. Beatrix’s fertile working partnership with Norman Warne developed into a love affair. They became engaged, despite the Potter parents’ inevitable opposition, but only a month later Norman died suddenly. Beatrix faced this desolation with admirable courage. Later, with the county solicitor William Heelis, she discovered late domestic happiness, but she wore Warne’s engagement ring on her right hand for the rest of her life.
As an exercise to ward off depression, Potter memorised Shakespeare plays in their entirety, and she was well versed in the Old Testament. Cadences from these sources and from the ancient rhymes and riddles she loved mean that her prose stands up to endless re-reading. She felt that her literary skills were underestimated — ‘Never does anyone ... write to tell me that I write good prose!’ It is interesting to find Graham Greene praising her selective realism and citing her as an influence on his own writing.
Potter wove all her passions into her stories — her love of old furniture and china, of folklore, of traditional practices in housekeeping, gardening and farming, of fabrics, tools and potting sheds as well as landscape. In 1934 she wrote, ‘I am “written out” for story books, and my eyes are tired for painting, but I can still take great and useful pleasure in old oak — and drains — and old roofs — and damp walls.’ Lear does an excellent job in bringing all the various aspects of Potter’s life into focus. Her analysis of the ‘Tales’ is heavyhanded — there’s an unconvincing attempt to interpret Pigling Bland as an allegory of Potter’s escape from parental oppression — and her observations can be banal — ‘it may have been her intense blue eyes and her obvious intelligence that initially attracted [Heelis]’. But she is good at describing the texture of Lakeland life; Beatrix’s working relationships with her shepherds, her kindness to underfed Girl Guides camping on her farm (‘A sheep shall die tonight!’ she gleefully tells their leader, to relieve their wartime diet), her successful campaign to prevent the building of an aeroplane factory at Windermere. Lear marshals huge amounts of detail to create a coherent, if slightly ponderous narrative. Best of all, through frequent quotation, she allows Beatrix’s own voice to be heard, and it is, after all, the voice of one of the most interesting Englishwomen of her time. When she died in 1943, Beatrix ordered that her ashes be scattered secretly by her shepherd, and that there should be ‘no mourning, no flowers & no letters’. She considered that by far her most important legacy was the protection of an unspoilt corner of England — ‘a world of beauty that will survive . . . whatever happens to us’.
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