Books |
Beatrix Potter: The Tales of Peter Rabbit
By
Published: Sep 09, 2014
Category:
Children
More than a century after Beatrix Potter first began writing and illustrating stories featuring four rabbits, almost 200 million of her books have made their way into homes where small children live. There you may also find Peter Rabbit stuffed animals, Peter Rabbit plates and cups, and Peter Rabbit wall decals — Potter was the J.K. Rowling of her time, a writer who became a brand with books that were instant classics.
Guest Butler Frank Delaney knows how she became that writer. Correction: Frank Delaney knows everything. He’s a novelist (most recently: The Last Storyteller) BBC host, expert on James Joyce, and more. NPR calls him “The Most Eloquent Man in the World.” We’re friends. When we have dinner, it’s easy to spot me: I’m the one who’s listening.
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The daughter of Manchester Unitarians rich from the cotton trade, Helen Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943), grew up in a fully serviced Kensington house, complete with butlers, governesses, grooms, nurses and maids — and that writer’s boon, the angst of loneliness. Her warmest early companions were pets: lizards, pigs, newts, birds, mice, bats and rabbits, cats and dogs.
Her mother equipped the nursery with picture books: Hans Andersen, the brothers Grimm, an illustrated bible — the usual suspects. But when the lonely child savored these books, she was more compelled by the pictures than the texts. By the age of seven, she was already drawing with individual line, tone and competence.
As prime material she made life drawings of her pets. (When they died, Beatrix skinned and boiled them in order to draw their skeletons.) These creatures opened a portal into the widest and most powerful arena of all: the natural world. In the year she was born, her Potter grandfather purchased a 300-acre Capability Brown estate at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. How enchanting to a child with a sketch-pad and burgeoning powers of observation: “The oaks moaning and swaying close to the bedroom windows in winter… trees in every hedgerow… in summer the distant landscapes are intensely blue…”
Annual family trips to the Lake District and Scotland clinched the deal. She recorded “the night-jar’s eerie cry, the hooting of the owls, the bat [that] flitted around the house the roe-deer’s bark…” Back in London, she used the solitude of the playroom to recollect in tranquility the cool woods of summer, and in a very short time the universe of wild nature became the permanent home of her spirit.
Her next important influence was her father, a barrister, club gentleman and failed amateur painter who turned to the new art form of photography. He chronicled his family without ceasing, and no matter what her age or pose, his daughter always looks as serious as a century. His greater service: His friend, the painter John Everett Millais, had him photograph landscapes that could be used as backgrounds in canvases. On some of these forays Beatrix went along with her father. She met Millais in his studio, he perceived her talent and interest, and he bared to her the very soul of working in oils — how to mix paint.
The creatures, the countryside and its enchanting details, the smell of the palette — this jigsaw of childhood experiences pieces together Beatrix Potter’s early adult portrait. That same leaning toward science that she practiced in dissections and anatomical drawings led her into botany; at 31, she submitted a scientific paper to the respected Linnean Society in London. By 1901 she had produced almost 300 watercolors of mushrooms and fungi.
But life as a dilettante wasn’t for her. She had been drawing greeting cards for art publishers to earn money for microscopes and slides and perhaps a printing press. In 1901 she turned to what she called “picture letters” — illustrated stories about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter, who lived with their mother in a sand bank under the root of a big fir tree…”
For “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” she created extra drawings, added the mouse with the “large pea in her mouth,” the white cat “staring at some goldfish,” and printed Peter as a Christmas gift in 1901. The warmth of its reception from friends and family astounded her, so she made an edition for sale, price one shilling, plus tuppence postage. All who received it enthused.
This modest repute reached a publisher, Frederick Warne in London, who said he would take it on provided that Miss Potter’s drawings could be in color. At first she refused; then her practical sense supervened. As “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” was published in 1902, she already had two more books in the hopper. She was 36 years old. [To buy “A Beatrix Potter Treasury” — the Peter Rabbit stories — from Amazon, click here.]
In the intensity of the publishing experience over the next two years, she and her editor, the youngest Mr. Warne, began to take notice of one another; Norman was tall, thin and kind, with a benign mustache. The relationship flowered, and in 1905 an engagement materialized, but marriage plans could not be discussed with any openness because her class-conscious parents regarded Norman Warne as “trade.” The two families agreed to keep it secret. A few days after this new happiness, however, Norman fell ill. Three weeks later, he was dead.
To contain and hide her grief, Beatrix quit London and went to Cumbria, where she had already been arranging to buy a small farm. There she gave birth to a host of later characters, created a Peter Rabbit doll and a board game, and became rich. She used her fortune to champion causes –– Herdwick sheep, for instance, a local breed, had been dying out; she founded a breeders’ association to bring them back — and to buy tranches of land, assembling in time as much as four thousand acres, which she left to the National Trust.
In 1913, eight years after Norman Warne’s death, she married the country solicitor who had been handling her land purchases. William Heelis, at 42 five years younger than Beatrix, was “dreadfully shy,” but, like Norman Warne, he was tall, thin and kind.
In 1940, a publisher asked her “to tell again how Peter Rabbit came to be written.” She mentioned that the boy who was the model for Peter Rabbit boy was now “an air warden in a bombed London parish,” then offered a thumbnail autobiography: “I do not remember a time when I did not try to invent pictures and make for myself a fairyland amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside; that pleasant, unchanging world of realism and romance, which in our northern clime is stiffened by hard weather, a tough ancestry, and the strength that comes from the hills.”
[Many thanks to The Public Domain Review, the admirable project which first published this piece.]
