Beatrix Potter\u2019s life fell into three distinct phases, and the \u2018little books\u2019 that made her famous occupied only the shortest of them. Born in 1866, she spent more than 30 years in education, as a Victorian young lady dominated by her family. Perhaps unexpectedly, as she was later famous for her stories of the countryside, she was forced to spend much of her life in city streets.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy brother and I were born in London because my father was a lawyer there,\u201d she wrote in her later life, \u201cbut our descent \u2013 our interest and our joy was in the north country.\u201d Her salvation was the long summer holidays her family spent first in Scotland, then in the Lake District.<\/p>\n
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A sheltered childhood<\/h3>\n
She and her brother Bertram would travel north and back with a menagerie of pets \u2013 a jay and an owl, a hedgehog (called Mrs Tiggy), rats and bats, and a whole succession of rabbits, which Beatrix used to take out on a dog lead.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven the usually idiotic hutch rabbit is capable of developing strong character, if taken in hand when quite young,\u201d she wrote. But though devoted to her pets she was quite unsentimental, even boiling the skeleton when an animal died to study bone structure for her drawings. As a 15-year-old, she wrote in her journal: \u201cThe chestnut horse is disposed of at last. Papa sent Reynolds to the Zoological Gardens to enquire the price of cat\u2019s meat: \u00a32 for a very fat horse, 30\/-[shillings] for a middling one, thin ones not taken as the lions are particular.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\""Beatrix\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/02\/HRHBWG-69fb3e1.jpg?quality=90&resize=312%2C413"\" "\\"\"Young\\"")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>That coded diary, which Potter kept from her mid-teens until the age of 30, often recorded feelings of despair. (The code was not cracked until the 1950s, years after her death.) As she grew up in the restricted world of an unmarried daughter at home, she wrote of how she feared the future, how she longed to be \u201cunderground\u201d.\u00a0 \u201cOnly a year,\u201d she once wrote, \u201cbut if it\u2019s like the last it will be a lifetime\u2026 There is nothing to be done, I must watch things pass.\u201d She wrote of how only painting could help \u201cwhen I have had a bad time come over me\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the 1890s, Potter\u2019s interest in the natural world turned to serious research in mycology \u2013 though, she wrote, \u201cof all hopeless things to draw, I should think the very worst is a fine fat fungus\u201d. She tackled the vexed question of how fungi reproduce themselves, formulating the theory that they spread through an underground form, a mould. On 1 April 1897, the prestigious Linnean Society of London recorded a paper being read: \u2018On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae<\/em>\u2019 by Miss Helen B Potter (Beatrix\u2019s full name).<\/p>\n The paper was sponsored by George Massee of Kew Gardens since, as a woman, Potter could not present it herself; though well received it was not then published. Her accurate drawings, however, are still admired by scientists. Though some of her conclusions, inevitably, have now been superseded, in 1997 the Linnean Society acknowledged that she was \u201ctreated scurvily\u201d. But Potter\u2019s real problem was that life in the family home was still a constrained one. She was in her mid-thirties before, in 1901, she paid for The Tale of Peter Rabbit<\/em> to be printed privately.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The Tale<\/em> had begun life as a picture letter, sent to the son of her old governess. Though the mischievous Peter has always been the public\u2019s favourite character, he was no favourite of Potter. \u201cAt one time I almost loathed Peter Rabbit, I was so sick of him\u201d, she later wrote. Soon, however, a publisher brought out a commercial version of Peter\u2019s Tale<\/em>. It had to be reprinted six times within the space of a year, and other books quickly followed: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin<\/em>, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny<\/em>, of the hedgehog Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, of Two Bad Mice and Mr Jeremy Fisher. The vast majority of her famous \u2018little books\u2019 would be written over a comparatively short period \u2013 the next dozen years.<\/p>\n Potter would be passionately involved in every aspect of her stories, from the layout of the books to the materials used for the merchandise. They were accompanied by everything from rabbit dolls to wallpaper, slippers to stationery; \u201csideshows\u2019, as she called them, that were as successful as the books themselves. Her flow of stories had brought her increasingly close to her publisher Norman Warne, and in July 1905, despite her parents\u2019 disapproval, they agreed to marry. But it was not to be. Just a month after the engagement, Warne died, leaving Potter once more a \u2018spinster daughter\u2019 at home \u2013 facing \u201cpainful unpleasantness\u201d from her parents about her work \u2013 although she was almost 40.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Potter had, before Warne\u2019s death, begun negotiating to buy Hill Top farm in the Lake District, in the village of Near Sawrey where she had spent family holidays. The weeks she was able to snatch up to spend there, away from her parents, became a lifeline as, for the next eight years, she continued to produce her twice-yearly books. The house and village \u2013 and the animals she knew there \u2013 featured regularly in her stories. \u201cIt is in here I go to be quiet and still with myself\u201d, she once told a young relative. And it was in the Lakes that the next great phase of her life would begin.<\/p>\n In October 1913 Potter married the Lake District solicitor William Heelis, who had helped with her continuing purchases of property in the area. \u201cHe is 42 (I am 47) very quiet \u2013 dreadfully shy, but I\u2019m sure he will be more comfortable married,\u201d she wrote in a letter to her cousin Fanny. \u201cWe have every prospect of happiness \u2013 if it pleases Heaven.\u201d Happily, it did \u2013 despite Potter\u2019s evident qualms. A relative described Beatrix and William as two horses in front of the same plough. They settled into Castle Cottage, just across a meadow from Hill Top, which was kept as a writing retreat, a repository for all Potter\u2019s treasures \u2013 and it remains a place of pilgrimage for Potter fans today.<\/p>\n By this time in her life, she had already begun to produce books less frequently, and more reluctantly. Now the flow dwindled to a trickle, as other interests evidently came to the fore. The recently-released 1921 census lists \u2018Helen Beatrix Heelis\u2019 under the profession of \u2018farmer\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cSomehow when one is up to the eyes in work with real live animals it makes one despise paper-book-animals,\u201d she wrote. She was immersed in the practical business of farming; the \u201chorrid slaughter\u201d of the turkeys; crops and cost; knowing her sheep and the fells on which they grazed \u201clike a shepherd\u201d. She became a breeder, judge, and conservator of the tough Herdwick sheep, and a famous local figure in her well-worn tweeds.<\/p>\n She also, in the 1920s and 30s, became a passionate defender of the Lake District, which was threatened with extensive development for holiday homes. Working together with the National Trust, which had been founded in 1895, she was able to buy and to preserve some of Britain\u2019s most spectacular scenery, from the dramatic beauty of Tarn Hows to the brooding mystery of Troutbeck. \u201cIt seems that we have done a big thing\u201d, she wrote, after purchasing the huge Monk Coniston estate to leave to the Trust in her will, on the understanding they would give her half the cost once they could raise the money. She bequeathed the Trust, in the end, more than 4,000 acres \u2013 some 15 farms, forests and houses. It is a vital part of her legacy.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n But interest in her other world, the world she created, never died away. More than 150 million copies of Beatrix Potter\u2019s books have been sold; they\u2019ve been translated into more than 35 languages, from Latin to Lowland Scots; while screen versions of Peter Rabbit keep on coming. And she herself, though she may have stepped back from the books\u2019 production line, never ceased to inhabit the world of her characters, often writing to young fans with the continuation of their stories. In the 1920s (as we know from the 2020 TV film Roald & Beatrix: The Tail of a Curious Mouse<\/em>) a young Roald Dahl<\/a> was just one of the admirers who travelled to meet her<\/a> at her Lakeland retreat.<\/p>\n A hitherto unseen letter in the V&A exhibition, to another child, has Squirrel Nutkin writing to Old Brown Owl requesting his tail back\u2026 only to be told crossly that Owl has eaten it, and it nearly choked him. That letter displays not only the way in which her characters continued to live for Potter, but the lack of sentimentality that came from her observations of the natural world.<\/p>\n![\""Portrait\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/02\/GettyImages-2119050-02c14b0-e1644499290908.jpg?quality=90&resize=314%2C413"\" "\\"\"Portrait\\"")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>![\""A\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/02\/GettyImages-583633204-cdd2dfe-e1644499235216.jpg?quality=90&resize=619%2C413"\" "\\"\"In\\"")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>The birth of the famous Tales<\/h3>\n
![\""A\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/02\/GettyImages-583632694-07b7914-e1644490686703.jpg?quality=90&resize=619%2C413"\" "\\"\"A\\"")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Finding solace in the Lake District<\/h3>\n
![\""Farmhouse\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/02\/GettyImages-147498183-cb0456c.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C409"\" "\\"\"Farmhouse\\"")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>![\""Beatrix\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/02\/FF8TAN-1ddd703-e1644499348791.jpg?quality=90&resize=300%2C413"\" "\\"\"Beatrix\\"")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>An enduring legacy<\/h3>\n