Short History Of... - Beatrix Potter

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Beatrix Potter’s tales and illustrations of Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten and friends, set in quintessential English villages and on Edwardian farms, have charmed children for decades. But alongside being an artist and author, Beatrix Potter was a natural scientist, a conservationist, a farmer, sheep-breeder, and shrewd businesswoman. So how did this shy, sheltered Victorian girl become a literary phenomenon? What did it take to succeed in the male dominated world of publishing? Why did she focus so much of her attention on the conservation of the Lake District? And what was the tragedy that might have stopped her career in its tracks?  This is a Short History Of Beatrix Potter. A Noiser Production. Written by Fiona Veitch-Smith. With thanks to Libby Joy, from the Beatrix Potter Society. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's the end of the summer of 1882, and a maid is standing beside a butler on the marble steps of a luxurious Kensington townhouse. This is Bolton Gardens, one of the genteel squares of Victorian London. A clop of hooves and creak of axle alerts the maid to a horse-drawn carriage turning into the square. of Axel alerts the maid to a horse-drawn carriage turning into the square. She straightens her apron while the butler steps forward in his pristine black tail suit, ready to supervise the return of the family of the house from their summer holiday in the Lake District. The carriage, heavily laden and sitting low on its wheels, comes to a stop. First to exit are the parents, Helen and Rupert Potter. The maid holds out her arms while they divest themselves of their travelling cloaks and hats

and wearily head into the drawing room for tea. Rushing in after them is ten-year-old Bertram, sporting a tweed frock coat over brown breeches. Friendly as always, he greets the maid by name before hammering up the stairs towards the nursery. Following more sedately behind is his older sister Beatrix. Quiet and serious, the 16-year-old nods to the maid, her blonde curls bobbing beneath her bonnet.

Then she lifts her long skirt to follow her brother up the stairs. The maid steps out to the street to help unload the luggage. Just one of a small army of servants, she is given a wicker basket and carries it indoors. Other members of staff carry an array of suitcases, trunks, crates, boxes, glass tanks, and cages, from which can be heard squawks, mews, and snuffles. The maid allows herself a small smile. Clearly, the Potter children have been collecting creatures again on their holidays.

She climbs to the nursery, a suite on the top floor that includes bedrooms, a playroom, and a schoolroom. As the maid goes to set the basket on the floor, Bertram flings open the door to the playroom. It's already full to the gills with glass tanks housing reptiles, a noisy aviary, a flea circus, and a large, straw-filled hutch, home to rabbits, guinea pigs and hamsters. Now Beatrix beckons the maid over to see the new creatures, stopping for a moment to scoop up her old pet tabby cat, Tom, who purrs and rubs his face under her chin. The teenager opens a glass tank with a metal lid, then reaches under the leaves and moss and lifts out a fat green frog.

This fellow, she tells the maid, was one of her first finds of the holiday, discovered in a pond not far from their lodgings. She carefully places it in a larger tank with an embedded pool surrounded by pebbles and stones. She then opens a small wooden crate and brings out a hedgehog that has curled itself into a tight ball. The maid refuses the offer of holding it, so Beatrix shrugs and opens a hutch door next to the guinea pigs and places the creature gently inside. Finally, with Bertram jumping up and down with excitement beside her, Beatrix opens the maid's basket and reveals a fluffy brown and white rabbit. This is more like it. The maid allows Beatrix to place it in her arms and proclaims its name will be Peter.

But the rabbit's black eyes are frightened, and though the maid strokes its ears and makes soothing noises, suddenly he springs from her grasp. There is chaos as the rabbit, pursued by Beatrix and Bertram, leaps over furniture, knocking bottles, boxes, and a coat stand to the floor. With much laughter from the children and the young maid, Beatrix finally manages to catch hold of Peter the rabbit and puts him back in his hutch. The commotion ends just as another servant arrives carrying a tray of tea and sandwiches. As the maid selects a suitcase to begin unpacking, Beatrix opens a drawer in a desk and takes

out pencils and paper. She settles down to sketch her new rabbit, Peter, and then, smiling to herself, draws him wearing a little jacket. Beatrix Potter's whimsical tales of Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten, and friends set in quintessential English villages and on Edwardian farms, have charmed countless children and parents. Her sets of little books, with their distinctive white covers, have been a staple of nursery libraries for generations. And, with the advent of the ubiquitous merchandise, including Peter Rabbit wallpaper, cuddly animals,

and Beatrix Potter-branded toys and tea sets, her illustrations have become iconic and instantly recognizable. But alongside being an artist and author, she was also a natural scientist, a conservationist, a farmer, a sheep breeder, and a shrewd businesswoman. As a key supporter of Britain's National Trust, her conservation work helped preserve the english lake district as the place of natural beauty it is today so how did this shy sheltered victorian girl become such a literary phenomenon what did it take to succeed in the male dominated world of? Why did she focus so much of her attention on

the conservation of the Lake District? And what was the tragedy that might have stopped her career in its tracks? I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Network. This is a short history of Beatrix Potter. In July 1866, Helen Beatrix Potter is born into the well-to-do Potter family of Bolton Gardens, Kensington, London. Her father, Rupert Potter, trained as a lawyer, but is independently wealthy enough not to need to work for a living, while her mother, Helen, is the daughter of a cotton merchant. Beatrix is an only child, until her brother, Bertram, is born six years later. Her upbringing is similar to the daughters of other socially aspirational families of the period. Girls are not raised to work or have careers of their own, but to learn how to supervise servants, entertain guests, and, in time, to attract the right kind of husband.

So when Bertram is sent away to school at the age of seven, Beatrix remains at home. Libby Joy is from the Beatrix Potter Society. So the environment that Beatrix Potter grew up in was a wealthy one, but it was also a limited one. And most of the family friends and their social circle were other nonconformist professionals of various sorts, doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, and so on. As was the convention with girls of that age and from a wealthy background, Beatrix was not sent to school. She was educated at home by governesses. We might think of that as being a restriction on a child's education, or these days we might think that.

But she herself was very glad that she was not sent to school because she felt that she would have been, well, as she put it, it would have rubbed off her originality. So I think she was probably quite lucky in that she had good governesses. She appears to have been well-educated, broadly educated, from geography and history to French and German. geography and history to French and German. One subject that Beatrix excels in from an early age is art.

Her father, Rupert, is an enthusiastic amateur artist and quickly recognizes a precocious talent in his daughter's sketches of her pets. With London's leading art galleries and museums on their doorstep, he takes Beatrix to exhibitions and employs private art tutors to help develop her artistic skills. In her diary, protected by a secret code which is only cracked decades after her death, Beatrix is not shy to give her opinion about the works of great artists. After a visit to the National Gallery, she writes, I say fearlessly that the Michelangelo is hideous and badly drawn. And then, as an aside, no one will read this.

Like other wealthy Victorian families, the Potters spend three months of each summer away from London, living in rented manor houses or on country estates. During Beatrix's childhood, this is mainly in Scotland, but when she turns 16, the family start holidaying in the Lake District. It is here that she meets Canon Hardwick Rawnsley, the vicar of the local church. He is concerned that visitors will turn the Lake District into a tourist trap, and if housing developers buy up too much land, the area will become urbanized and the rural way of life will be lost. He shares with the Potters his vision of starting a charity to preserve the land and conserve

historic buildings, something that will eventually become the National Trust. Beatrix is intrigued, and with her parents' permission, he corresponds with her by letter and helps shape her ideas about conservation between the family's yearly holidays to the area. During their country retreats, Beatrix and Bertram spend most of their days unsupervised, roaming the fields and woods. spend most of their days unsupervised, roaming the fields and woods. As is fashionable for amateur naturalists at the time, they collect specimens for scientific study. Insects, butterflies, rocks, fungi, and small animals. They bring these animals back with them to London and set up an entire menagerie in their nursery. The creatures provide opportunities for the siblings to study and sketch their anatomy

and to be subjects in beatrix's self-taught botany and biology lessons but ever creative beatrix also begins to make up whimsical stories about her pets and other animals influenced by the tales of brer rabbit aesop's Fables, and Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat. Beatrix was very interested in natural history of all sorts. And all her life, she painted and drew flowers, animals. She learned to use a microscope. So from a very early age, she was drawing microscopic studies of butterfly wings or beetle legs. And in her teens, on holiday in Scotland and also on the first holidays in the Lake District, she became interested in fungi.

And her initial interest in fungi was because she thought they were such attractive shapes and colours. So her early fungi paintings are very much from an aesthetic point of view. But as she drew them and learnt a bit more about them, she became more and more interested in the actual science, the mycological science of what she was drawing. the psychological science of what she was drawing. With her teens now behind her, Potter is still living at home. Her fascination with mushrooms and toadstools continues, and she reads voraciously around mycology, the study of fungi. Under the guidance of her uncle, the eminent scientist Henry Rosker, she conducts experiments into the germination of lichen spores.

Roscoe makes introductions to experts at the Natural History Museum, who further direct her studies. She eventually writes a scientific paper on her findings and, with Roscoe's help, submits it to the eminent Linnaean Society. and, with Roscoe's help, submits it to the eminent Linnaean Society. The paper is accepted for a first reading, but as a woman, she is not allowed to present it herself. A male scientist from Kew Gardens reads it on her behalf, and Potter is asked to do more work on the paper. But around now, she stops writing her journal.

So what happens after this event is a mystery. So we don't really know what happened after that Linnaean Society meeting. Did she do more work on the paper, represent it, find that it was never going to be quite up to scratch? Did she feel rejected and decide not to do any more work? Did she feel that she already had other interests that were supplanting her interest in mycology? We don't really know. But the fact is that had she wanted to continue with her mycological studies, she probably could have done so. She seems to have been genuinely good at what she was doing. Even so, as she enters her thirties, Potter abandons her efforts to make a mark on the scientific world.

But she continues painting and drawing and illustrating greeting cards which she sends to family and friends. Shy and a little awkward, she is still unmarried, despite her parents' attempts to find her a suitable husband. While Bertram has by now given up on studying law and moved to Scotland to become a farmer and professional artist, Beatrix is still under her parents' authority, as is usual for an unmarried woman of the time. But despite living so far apart,

the siblings remain in touch and encourage one another in their artistic endeavors. Her brother is just one of the people she stays in close contact with by letter. Potter is a prolific correspondent. She writes to family and friends and eventually their children too. When she runs out of news, she starts to make up and illustrate little stories based on the pets she has kept throughout her life. When the five-year-old son of her former nanny, Annie Carter Moore, is bedridden with illness, Potter writes him a story based on her own real-life rabbit. story, based on her own real-life rabbit. I shall tell you a story, she begins, about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. The story of Peter Rabbit, who, against his mother's warnings, gets into trouble when he sneaks into Mr. McGregor's vegetable garden, is such a success that the sick child's

brother wants a story too. So Potter tells him a tale about a frog called Jeremy Fisher. But it is the tale of Peter Rabbit that proves to be the most popular with the children. Their mother suggests that Potter turn it into a book. So in 1900, she takes the story with her illustrations around the London publishers. She started with the letter about Peter Rabbit. She turned it from a picture letter into a manuscript with illustrations, and she sent it round to six publishers, all of whom said no thank you. So, not deterred, she published the book privately. And the book got a certain amount of attention, and it sold copies so quickly that she had to reprint it. Her 150 self-published copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit include a coloured cover and internal black line drawings.

With the help of friends, Potter convinces some bookshop managers to stock the book. It attracts the attention of the publishers Frederick Warne and Co., who had previously rejected it, believing readers wouldn't be interested. But now, with proven sales and evident readership appeal, they reconsider their position. They ask Potter to redo all the interior line drawings as watercolors and agree to use her distinctive little book format. The book is published in 1902 with an initial print run of 8,000 copies, a substantial number given that most children's first editions of the period range from 1 to five thousand copies.

It does so well that Warne and co. approve a second print run. The youngest of the Warne brothers, Norman, is appointed as her dedicated editor. It is 1902, on a bustling street in London's Covent Garden. Flower sellers and drapers sell their wares at the market, with stallholders calling out, hoping to attract the attention of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen. A carriage pulls up in front of an elegant brown brick building, with topiary shrubs on either side of a glossy black door. These are the premises of Frederick Warne & Co., a successful publisher in the booming

British book trade. The coachman climbs down and assists two women out of the carriage. The first, a maid dressed in grey with a neat black hat and matching gloves, steps onto the cobbled street, before turning and reaching out her hand to help the second passenger down. Beatrix Potter, wearing a smart green skirt and box jacket over a white ruffled blouse, holds a leather folder under her arm. Inside are samples of watercolour illustrations

of a naughty squirrel called Nutkin. Now 36 years old, Beatrix still has the blonde curls of her youth, but hides them more demurely under a straw boater hat, trimmed with a green velvet ribbon. As the ladies enter the building, Mr. Norman Warne hurries over to greet them. The editor, in his mid-thirties and sporting neatly trimmed mutton chop sideburns, leads them into the basement of the building where the printing presses are hard at work. He tells them

that the first copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit are just being printed. Amid the huff of pistons and hiss of steam, giant sheets of paper are fed through inked rollers. Now, printed with multiple pages, the sheets emerge from the rollers and are then inspected by senior print supervisors in rolled-up sleeves and brown canvas aprons. The employees check to see that the colors are crisp and clear, and that the illustrations and text are correctly positioned on the page. Once approved, their apprentices pile the pages onto trolleys and roll them to another room in the basement. Here, Norman shows Beatrix how the large sheets are cut into pages using an industrial guillotine.

It is dangerous work, and the man operating the machine warns the visitors to stay clear of the blades. Norman then opens the door to another room. Women in grey dresses and aprons are busy getting the pages glued, stitched, and bound into green cloth board covers, while yet another supervisor checks the finished books for quality. Some fail the test and are set aside, but those that pass are piled onto a trolley and taken to the next stage in which a full-colour plate of Peter Rabbit is glued to the front.

The books are then slipped into white dust covers, ready to be boxed up and sent to a bookshop. Norman hands one to Beatrix. She catches her breath as she holds a real book with her name on the cover. Her own words, her own illustrations, and a little brown and white rabbit who is about to change her life. After the tale of Peter Rabbit is published in 1902, other little books follow, thick and fast. For children then, these books were a bit of a novelty.

They were small. Beatrix Potter made them deliberately small for what she called small hands. And they weren't too expensive because she wanted children to be able to buy them with their own pocket money. It was not so common then for an author to also be the illustrator of their work. And I think this played a huge part in the success of the little books because they were so carefully thought out with the balance between the text and the illustrations and the way the page turning furthered the story, the sense of adventure, the sense of excitement. So although children were used to the idea of anthropomorphic animals in their storybooks, these were in a slightly different league. And the illustrations themselves, because Beatrix was a natural history artist, the drawings and the illustrations were very realistic, very easy for a child to understand and to accept.

very easy for a child to understand and to accept. They were a novelty, they were attractive, they were the right size, the right price. Between 1901 and 1905, Beatrix and Norman published seven little books, including The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. They sell like hotcakes. Potter relishes being involved with every step of the process, from discussing the structure of the stories and types of illustrations, to selecting just the right kind of paper and coloured inks.

Her professional relationship with Norman soon grows into a personal friendship, and he invites her to meet his family. However, as an unmarried woman, she is unable to spend time alone with Norman without a chaperone, even in her late thirties. Her parents, believing Norman to be socially beneath them, disapprove of their involvement, but the pair still manage to find ways to meet over a period of four years their professional and personal relationship blossoms norman liked her ideas he liked her style and she was shy but determined and i think that in norman she found the really important link that meant that she was going to continue with her career because he believed in what she was doing in a serious way. He thought

that her books had literary merit. A lot of people regarded them as what she called toy books, which annoyed her. He gave her confidence. He gave her the courage to think through her ideas and to see that actually there was merit in what she was doing. I think that without Norman, it is possible that Beatrix's career as a children's book writer might not have taken off. I think it's impossible to underestimate the influence that he had on her.

I think it's really on her confidence, on the idea that this was something she could do and something she could be good at, and that he was prepared to back her and support her. Beatrix and Norman spend more and more time together, often facilitated by Norman's sister Millie, who acts as a sympathetic chaperone. In contravention of the wishes of her aging parents, Potter spends Christmas at the Warne House and feels welcomed into the large, warm family. Norman builds a doll's house and buys dainty furniture,

which he gives to Potter so she can use them as models for her sketches and paintings. She is almost 40 when he eventually proposes marriage to her in 1905, four years after they first met. She happily accepts. Without her parents' knowledge, she uses some of the proceeds of her books to buy Hilltop Farm in the village of near Sorey, close to Windermere in the Lake District. She starts furnishing it in preparation for when she and Norman will use it as a holiday love nest after they are married. She also writes to her brother Bertram and tells him her happy news. He replies,

offering her support. Potter hopes to use a holiday in Wales to break the news of her engagement to her parents. But before she has a chance to do so, tragedy strikes. She receives a letter from Millie telling her Norman is desperately ill with pernicious anemia, a blood condition that if untreated can be fatal. She rushes back to London, but it is too late. Norman dies before she can reach him. Heartbroken, she retreats to Hilltop to grieve. She believed that was the end of her chance at happiness. Norman was entirely responsible, I think, for getting her started and keeping her going. But though she returns to live primarily with her parents, while using Hilltop as a place of retreat, her friendship with Norman's family continues, as does her professional success.

Norman's older brother, Frewing, takes over as her editor, and they worked together for many years. She went on living at home with her parents for the next nearly 10 years, but Hilltop became a place of sort of refuge for her. So whenever she could, she would get away and go and spend two or three days there or as long as she could be spared. With the money that she was earning, she decided to invest in more land and more farms in the Lake District. Her duty was to her parents. And I think it would have been very, very difficult for her to break away from them without marriage. That was just the way society operated in those days. Despite continuing to live with her parents, as she enters her 40s, Potter's independence is expanding, both personally and financially. Still single after her tragically short-lived romance, she now pours her energy into her dual passions, her books and conservation work.

She has been friends with Canon Hardwick Rawnsley, who has by now helped to found the National Trust for 25 years, and is now in a position to financially support his work. Sharing his views on the need to preserve the rural way of life, she buys up key properties of historic or cultural significance as well as swathes of land to protect it from development. Over time she becomes one of the Trust's most important supporters, also purchasing ordinary homes at risk of being sold to developers and renting them out to locals at affordable rates. These years are some of Potter's most productive as an author. She publishes at a rate of two a year,

including some of her most beloved stories, the tale of Jeremy Fisher, the tale of Tom Kitten, and the tale of Jemima Puddleduck. As she spends more and more time in the village of Nearsorey and Hilltop Farm, the residents and locations of the area start to replace her pets as inspiration. Betsy and Ralph, the children of her farm manager, John Cannon, make an appearance in Jemima Puddle Duck, along with their mother, Mrs. Cannon. And the staircase at Hill Top, as well as Potter's own four-poster bed,

are where Tom and his siblings get into such mischief in the tale of Tom Kitten. During these years, she works with her publisher to consider merchandising opportunities. Potter creates the very first Peter Rabbit doll, which her publisher patents on her behalf, as well as designing wallpaper, tea sets, board games, baby blankets, and coloring in books. As her brand grows and spreads around the world, Potter and her publisher earn vast sums of money,

much of it from Potter's ideas to create spin-off material from her characters she uses most of her profits to finance her conservation work and it's through her many purchases for the national trust that another crucial relationship begins It is a rainy day in 1912. A bus stops near Lake Windermere ferry port and lets off some passengers, including 46-year-old Beatrix Potter. Wrapped up against the inclement weather in a green Macintosh, she waits with her suitcase at her side for the ferry to dock, while the rain beats down on the roof of the shelter. Though the children, now amusing themselves by splashing in puddles in their wellingtons, will have read her books, few of the tourists, hikers, walkers, and even locals waiting alongside her know that this middle-aged woman with frizzy hair is a world-famous author.

Despite the heavy cloud and persistent rain, the view of the lake hemmed by forests and hills is breathtaking. Swans float by and ducks quack to one another, a familiar accompaniment to the rhythmic lap of the lake. Soon the surge of engines and the clanging of a bell announce the arrival of the ferry. The waves splash against the hull as Beatrix boards with the foot passengers, accompanied by horses, carts, and even a motor car. A quarter of an hour later, and the ferry berths on the other side of the lake.

Waiting for her is a man in his forties, wearing a dark overcoat and a trilby hat, sheltering under a large black umbrella. A solicitor from a family firm, William Heelis, waves as he sees her and comes over to take her case. Beatrix has engaged his professional services for a number of years and now counts him as a close friend. William suggests they hail a passing pony and trap, but Beatrix prefers to walk for

two miles up the hill to her house, even in the rain. As they traipse up the winding road, they pass one whitewashed cottage with roses arched over the front porch, which William tells her is for sale. When he adds that the land behind it is also being sold, Beatrix decides she would like to buy it and donate the land to the National Trust. William promises to put it in motion. They begin to cross an open field, flecked with sheep and lambs. But what catches Beatrix's eye is a group of tourists

who have been taking shelter from the rain under a spreading tree. Though they've packed up their picnic basket and are heading off to continue their walk, they've left behind sandwich wrappers and empty glass bottles. Beatrix calls out to them to pick up their rubbish. They wave, but ignore her instructions.

So incensed, Beatrix grabs the umbrella from William, climbs over a stile, and strides through the field, brandishing the umbrella at the group. Shamefaced after their dressing down from the furious writer, they pick up the offending items and hurry away. Triumphant, Beatrix returns to a chuckling William and they continue on their way. Soon they're approaching the dry stone walls around Hilltop Farm. Beatrix returns the enthusiastic greeting of the farm manager's two border collies, then unlocks the door of her two-story cottage

and invites William in for tea. They have a lot more business to discuss. By 1913, Potter's friendship with her solicitor, William Heelis, has intensified, and they decide to marry. They started out with a professional relationship. He was her solicitor, helping her with property purchase. She respected his advice. They became friends, and then he proposed marriage. Again, her parents objected, but she was older, she was stronger, she was more determined. It was less difficult to stand up to

them. They share similar interests and their relationship revolves around their mutual work, which mostly involves buying properties on behalf of the National Trust. Describing him to a friend in a letter, she says, he is 42, very quiet, dreadfully shy, but I'm sure he will be more comfortable married. I have known him for six years. He is in every way satisfactory. But though she is for six years. He is, in every way, satisfactory. But though she is ready to move on with William, Potter will never forget Norman, her first love, whose surviving family are still an important part of her life. Writing to Norman's sister Millie about her new love, she says,

You would be only human if you felt a little hurt Norman was a saint if ever a man was good I do not believe he would object But Millie and the rest of the family are not hurt They express their happiness for Potter and expect to be invited to the wedding Potter's parents, however, are not so understanding They consider William even further below their daughter's station than Norman was and refuse to give their blessing. But Bertram now speaks up on his sister's behalf and reveals that he himself has been secretly married to a shopkeeper's daughter in Scotland

for the last eleven years. After this bombshell, the Potters agree to meet William and eventually consent to the marriage. The wedding is a low-key affair at the Potter's local church in Kensington. Potter is now 47 and, as a married woman, is able to finally leave her parents' home in London and relocate permanently to the lakes. The newlyweds move into Castle Farm in near Sore, just across the road from Hilltop, which holds so many memories of Norman. Potter keeps Hilltop as her writing retreat. William understands that Norman will always be important to his wife and accepts that she will continue to wear his predecessor's engagement ring on her right hand. She remains close to Norman's sister Millie and his brothers who are still her publishers. However, tragedy continues to stalk her.

In 1914, only a year after her marriage, her beloved brother dies of a stroke. He's only 43 years old and leaves a wife but no children. Bertram's death comes as a shock. He always provided friendship, especially backing her when their parents disapproved of her marriage plans. Soon after Bertram's passing, her father also dies. Her mother, left alone in London, becomes increasingly demanding of Potter's time and attention. Tiring of traveling all the way from the lakes to London and leaving William behind, Potter finally convinces her mother to buy a house near Windermere. With her mother settled and her existing books continuing to earn money,

Potter turns her attention to farming, particularly the breeding of herdwick sheep, on which she becomes quite an expert. Sadly for her many literary fans, due to her worsening eyesight, the time taken up by farming, and her work for the National Trust, her literary output slows, and she produces far fewer books. She does, however, continue to paint and makes every effort to reply to letters from young readers desperate for more stories. In a letter to a young girl called Phyllis, who asks for a book based on her rabbit Fluffy, Potter writes, You don't know what heaps of letters I get from all over the world,

and so many of them want a book about some special animal. She stays happily married to William for the next 30 years. Though unable to have children of their own, they're close to William's nephews and nieces. Through two world wars, like other British farmers, they do their bit to help feed the nation, as directed by the war office. But Potter, now increasingly confident and outspoken, corresponds regularly with the government, making no secret of her grievances with what she sees as their unqualified meddling in rural affairs.

Despite her vast wealth, they live modestly, and Potter doesn't even have electricity installed at her hilltop cottage. She takes her role as employer very seriously and introduces a district nursing scheme to improve the health of her tenants and workers. One of the things that she realized was that women in particular needed better medical care. They lived in remote villages, on remote farms, very hard life. There were difficulties with childbirth. There were difficulties with childhood illnesses. There was a great need for somebody to help and support these women. She had a strong,

strong sense of community. You know, people lived on farms that were many miles from the nearest village. They were cut off in the winter. They had no electricity. They probably had no running water. It was a very, very hard life. And she understood that and did her best to help with it. It's not the only way in which Potter demonstrates an interest in advancing the lot of ordinary women.

While her opinion on the tactics used to achieve votes for women may have been conservative, she was nonetheless supportive of their end goal. The suffragists were the ones who felt that the women's vote was only ever going to be achieved by debate and discussion and so on. by debate and discussion and so on. And it's quite clear from one or two things that Beatrice Potter said that she did not approve of the suffragettes. And there is evidence and research to show that she did support the suffragists

in that she is known to have made a donation to their campaign. in that she is known to have made a donation to their campaign and she was sympathetic to the idea of women being better represented in society. There's an interesting little aside to that. At least one of her farmer's or shepherd's wives, when interviewed in later life after Beatrix had died, said that when the wages came, Beatrix insisted on paying them to the wife, not the shepherd or the farmer.

But I think that's just a little interesting sort of background bit to show that she was conscious of needing to support women in their roles and in their lives. Meanwhile, she continues to buy up acre after acre of land to prevent housing development. She also purchases curbside properties to stop roads from being widened. She is determined to keep the Lake District as rural and charming as possible, and to preserve the culture District as rural and charming as possible, and to preserve the culture of the traditional fell farmer. She tries to live as anonymously as she can, opting to go by her married name of Mrs. Helis,

and presenting herself as a lady farmer and wife of a country solicitor. Many of her neighbors seem unaware of her worldwide fame. But that fame continues to grow. Foreign tourists, particularly from America, start making pilgrimages to near Surrey, in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. Finding the educated and wealthy Americans to be less offensive than the English day-trippers, she invites some of them in for tea. This includes an American publisher called Alexander Mackay, who in 1927 knocks on her door in the hope of coaxing her to write another book. There has been an alarming visitation, she writes to a friend of the incident.

An American publisher who took the trouble to come all the way from London in search of a book that does not exist. Though reluctant to upset her existing publishers, she agrees to creating three new books, The Fairy Caravan, Little Pig Robinson, and Sister Anne, written exclusively for the American market. But not all Americans are as successful in wooing the reclusive author. In 1936, she turns down a request by Walt Disney to turn Peter Rabbit into a film, saying she thinks enlarging her illustrations on screen will show up all the imperfections. But this phase of her life also sees Potter stretch her wings socially.

In later life, she developed very strong female friendships, which I think are quite instructive when one looks at how she'd moved on from being such a shy child with a limited number of acquaintances and so on. And I think those female friendships with similarly independent, feisty women are another example of how she had brought herself out of her background and so on. She had very good friendships with American women who were quite different from English women that she knew because they were much more independent, much more outspoken. And I think she took her cue from them as well. During the Second World War, the harsh farming life begins to take its toll. Her health deteriorates, and in the cold winter of 1943,

just a few days before Christmas, Beatrix Potter dies of pneumonia and heart failure. She passes away in her bed at Hilltop with William at her side. She is 76 years old. The couple have no children, so she leaves her literary estate to a favourite nephew of Norman's, who is by now a partner in Frederick Warne and Co. Everything else is bequeathed to William, but after his death two years later in a care home in York,

it passes, as per her instructions, to the charity that was so important to her. The National Trust receives 4,000 acres of land, 16 farms, her prize-winning flock of sheep, and dozens of cottages and other properties. The estate forms a large part of what will eventually become the Lake District National Park in 1951, and her cottage at Hilltop is kept exactly as it is and open to the public. Ironically, the land that she worked so hard to preserve in its natural state will soon become a must-see tourist destination for Beatrix Potter fans around the world.

I think she would be surprised at how huge tourism now is, but I don't think she would be entirely surprised because it was already a problem in her day. There was already an issue with the number of cars, with the number of coaches, with people trespassing on property to have picnics and lighting fires. But I think she would really struggle with the idea that it had become such a huge money-making industry. And that would be distressing for her because however hard the National Trust or the Lake District National Park or wherever it might be tries to preserve the nature and the feel of the area, it is very difficult to do that when there are literally hundreds of thousands of people turning up to visit it.

However, it is Beatrix Potter's literary and artistic legacy for which she is best remembered. The Beatrix Potter Society is founded in 1980 to promote the study and appreciation of her work, while collections of her paintings and original drawings are held in the victorian album museum in london not far from her family home there are beatrix potter collectors across the globe with a substantial art collection at the free library of philadelphia in the united states the merchandising of her work continues apace with endless children's bedrooms decorated with their characters. And Peter Rabbit does eventually become televised by the BBC in 1992, and more recently makes his appearance in a Hollywood blockbuster, though still without the involvement of Walt Disney. Beatrix Potter's unique characters and stories continue to captivate audiences many decades after her death.

Her books have, to date, sold over 250 million copies in 35 languages. But there is more to her mythology than her literary and artistic output. A Victorian woman forging a career when women were not encouraged to, her savvy business decisions are still earning money for her publisher three quarters of a century after her death. And though following her passion led her to accumulate a vast personal fortune, she used most of it to preserve a way of life and a place of beauty for the benefit of future generations. I think the things that make her an interesting feminine role model

are the fact that she managed to change her life so dramatically from its early Victorian, slightly restricted beginnings to the woman that she became. Hard work, determination, and a desire for independence, all those characteristics helped her to overcome the fact that she was a woman, really, in what was then still very much a man's world. To be continued...