Happy
birthday Beatrix Potter: the author’s legacy 150 years on
As Peter Rabbit and
friends return in a brand new tale and on Royal Mail stamps, Nicholas
Tucker remembers the writer, illustrator and sheep farmer
Nicholas Tucker
Thursday 28 July
2016 06.59 BST
The only picture
Beatrix Potter drew of Kitty-in-Boots. Illustration: courtesy
Frederick Warne & Co and the V&A Museum
Beatrix Potter was a
writer of strong contradictions. A keen business woman, the first
author to license fictional characters to a range of toys and
household objects still on sale today, she allowed herself to be
short-changed over her royalties for years. She was an expert in
natural history, boiling down animal corpses to extract their
skeletons so she could understand their anatomy well enough to draw
them, yet she wrote stories in which rabbits wear blue jackets and
hedgehogs pinafores. A huge success, she turned her back on her
literary achievements in middle age to pursue a career as a
sheep-breeder.
She had a lonely
home-bound childhood with parents intent on keeping her on as their
companion, but she still managed to get engaged twice despite their
disapproval. She lost her first fiance, Norman Warne, through his
premature death and married her second, William Heelis, at 47. By
then she had become as tough as the old boots she wore to sheep fairs
or while working in her Lake District garden. Often seen in her
oldest clothes, her resemblance to Mr McGregor, the distinctly
unsmart gardener in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was sometimes remarked
on locally.
My friend, the
fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones, claimed that in 1940 her younger
sister and a friend were slapped by Potter for swinging on her gate.
But with respect, I doubt this. Diana’s family and mine were living
in the same Quaker commune on Lake Coniston to escape the blitz.
There were many cross old ladies who resented noisy young evacuees up
from the south, any one of whom could easily have been mistaken by us
children for Potter.
She was certainly
austere, insisting on good manners from visiting children. But the
number of beautifully illustrated letters she sent to appreciative
readers attests to someone with a great love for the young, albeit
more easily expressed at a distance.
What remains
indisputable is her genius as an author-illustrator. She insisted on
a miniature format for her works. This was unpopular with bookshops,
which preferred uniform sizes, but was ideal for small hands. Often
using a bare minimum of words on the page, she made her illustrations
play an active part in taking the story forward. She was devoted to
the King James Bible, always open by her bedside, and revelled in its
cadences and vocabulary. “Children like a fine word occasionally”,
she wrote to her publisher. Later she insisted on retaining
“scuttered” to describe the hurried movements made by an evil
family of rats even though neither she nor her editor could find this
term in a dictionary.
Her stories have the
same toughness found in fairytales, with foolishness punished and
danger never far away. But her cottage interiors, with their open
fireplaces, inglenooks and vernacular furniture, provide a vision of
country living at its most charming.
She helped to
establish the National Trust; her wish that none of her tenants
living in traditional Lake District farmhouses should be allowed to
build indoor lavatories or have wireless masts is offset by her
generosity in leaving to the nation large tracts of countryside.
The exhibition of
her illustrations in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the
Royal Mail’s special stamp set released on what would have been her
150th birthday are testament to a remarkable author and artist. And
there is still one more story to come. The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots,
published on 1 September with illustrations by Quentin Blake,
includes favourite characters, from the sinister badger Mr Todd to
Peter Rabbit, now “older, slower and portlier”. It won’t just
be children who want to get their hands on this final offering.
• Beatrix Potter’s
London is at the V&A, London SW7, from Thursday. vam.ac.uk.
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Potter had been a
disciple of the land conservation and preservation ideals of her
long-time friend and mentor, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, the first
secretary and founding member of the National Trust for Places of
Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. She supported the efforts of the
National Trust to preserve not just the places of extraordinary
beauty but also those heads of valleys and low grazing lands that
would be irreparably ruined by development. She was also an authority
on the traditional Lakeland crafts, period furniture and stonework.
She restored and preserved the farms that she bought or managed,
making sure that each farm house had in it a piece of antique
Lakeland furniture. Potter was interested in preserving not only the
Herdwick sheep, but also the way of life of fell farming. In 1930 the
Heelises became partners with the National Trust in buying and
managing the fell farms included in the large Monk Coniston Estate.
The estate was composed of many farms spread over a wide area of
north-western Lancashire, including the Tarn Hows. Potter was the de
facto estate manager for the Trust for seven years until the National
Trust could afford to buy most of the property back from her. Her
stewardship of these farms earned her wide regard, but she was not
without her critics, not the least of which were her contemporaries
who felt she used her wealth and the position of her husband to
acquire properties in advance of their being made public. She was
notable in observing the problems of afforestation, preserving the
intake grazing lands, and husbanding the quarries and timber on these
farms. All her farms were stocked with Herdwick sheep and frequently
with Galloway cattle.
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