Beatrix Potter

Biography

In 1897 the paper “On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae” was read to the Linnean Society not by its author but by the botanist George Massee. The author, Beatrix Potter, as a woman, was not allowed to attend the meeting. Later she withdrew the paper: it turned out that some of her samples had been contaminated.

She was born on 28 July 1866 at Bolton Gardens in West Brompton, London, into a well-off family from the Manchester area. She was educated at home by governesses and had almost no friends outside her large extended family. With her younger brother Bertram she kept mice, rabbits, a hedgehog and bats in the schoolroom, collected butterflies and other insects, and drew them endlessly. In summer the family went to Scotland, to Dalguise on the River Tay, and in 1882 they went to the Lake District for the first time. There Potter met the vicar Hardwicke Rawnsley, later one of the founders of the National Trust, the charity that protects historic places and countryside in England. From about the age of fourteen she kept a diary in a cipher of her own devising; it was not deciphered until 1958, by Leslie Linder.

By the 1890s her interests had settled on fungi. At first she was drawn to their colour and their evanescence; then, after meeting the amateur naturalist Charles McIntosh at Dunkeld in 1892, she took it seriously: he taught her taxonomy, corrected the accuracy of her drawings and sent her live specimens in winter. She began making microscopic drawings of spores and in 1895 put forward a theory of their germination. Through her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, she gained access to the botanists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She convinced Massee; the director, William Thiselton-Dyer, brushed her off because of her sex and amateur status. She later gave her drawings of fungi to the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside, and mycologists still use them. In 1967 many of them appeared in a book on fungi by the mycologist Walter Findlay, as she had once wished. In 1997 the Linnean Society posthumously apologised to her for its treatment of her work.

She had been earning money earlier, too: in the 1890s she printed Christmas cards from her own drawings, and the firm of Hildesheimer and Faulkner bought drawings of her rabbit Benjamin for books of verse.

In September 1893, on holiday at Dunkeld, she wrote to Noel, the sick son of her former governess Annie Moore, a letter about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter”. She sent such letters with sketches to the Moore children for years, and Annie was the first to suggest that they might make books. In 1900 Potter reworked the story into a dummy book but found no buyer, and in December 1901 she published it at her own expense, in black and white with a coloured frontispiece. Rawnsley recast the text in verse and made the rounds of the London publishers. Frederick Warne, who had turned it down before, changed his mind on the advice of his illustrator Leonard Leslie Brooke; he rejected the verse, kept Potter’s prose and asked her to colour the drawings. On 2 October 1902 “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” was published and was an immediate success. In 1903 came “The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin” and “The Tailor of Gloucester”, also first written as letters to the Moore children. Norman Warne was her editor, and Potter produced two or three little books a year. In all there were 23: the last in this format, “Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes”, appeared in 1922; “The Tale of Little Pig Robinson”, written much earlier, came out in 1930. As early as 1903 she herself designed and patented a Peter Rabbit doll, and painting books, board games, wallpaper, figurines and china tea-sets followed, all licensed by Warne.

In 1905 Potter became engaged to Norman Warne, but her parents objected, regarding him as being “in trade”. A month later he died. That same year, with her earnings and a small inheritance from an aunt, she bought Hill Top Farm at Near Sawrey in the Lake District. I think she had decided on it before his death, but there is nothing to confirm it. When buying the adjoining pastures she turned to a local solicitor, William Heelis; on 15 October 1913, at the age of forty-seven, she married him at St Mary Abbots in London and settled permanently in Near Sawrey. “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck” and “The Tale of Tom Kitten” are set on her farm, and “The Tale of Ginger and Pickles” is about the village shop in Sawrey.

The second half of her life went to the land. She bred Herdwick sheep, in 1923 bought a large sheep farm, Troutbeck Park, and won prizes at local shows; in 1942 she was elected president of the Herdwick Sheepbreeders’ Association, the first woman to be chosen, but she did not live to take office. In 1930 the couple, together with the National Trust, bought and began to manage the farms of the large Monk Coniston Estate, including Tarn Hows. Her eyesight was failing and she drew less and less, but “The Fairy Caravan”, set on the Troutbeck fells, appeared in the United States in 1929 and in England only in 1952.

Potter died on 22 December 1943 at Castle Cottage in Near Sawrey. Almost all her property, more than 4,000 acres of land, sixteen farms, cottages and herds, she left to the National Trust; at that time it was the largest gift the organisation had received. Hill Top was opened to visitors in 1946. William Heelis outlived her by twenty months and died in August 1945.