Of celebrations devoted to Beatrix Potter there seems to be no end. In film, merchandise, and museum exhibitions, like the one currently on tour from the Victoria and Albert Museum at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the woman continues to fascinate [see Sarah Bilotta, “Current and Coming: Peter Rabbit and Co. in Atlanta,” September/October 2023]. But whether her twenty or so books about Squirrel Nutkin, Johnny Town-Mouse, her alter ego Peter Rabbit, and the rest of her tiny companions still speak to twenty-first-century children is another matter—one that I will try to consider here.
In the meantime, however, we have Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, a meticulous display of her lifelong fascination with flora, fauna, and the spirit that animates it all. Before she turned to the stories that made her famous, Potter was, like many Victorians of the upper-middle class, an amateur naturalist adept at collecting and drawing ferns, fossils, mosses, and mushrooms. But she clearly differed from her contemporaries (and from most of us) by the intimate and vigorous ways in which the natural world spoke to her; and that is what inspires her drawings and her stories—in the same way as, later in life, it fueled her vigorous campaign to save England’s Lake District, as significant a part of her legacy in Great Britain as Peter Rabbit.
Quotations from her journals and letters displayed alongside her early scientific drawings show a young woman passionately alive to every nuance of color and texture in nature. No wonder she considered a scientific career, even though that was not possible for women at the time. What she did instead was to thread the needle between her ambition and the behavior expected of her by her family—being dutiful especially to her class-conscious mother, living at home in London until she married at age forty-seven, while quietly, almost subversively, pursuing the interests encouraged by her best (and only) companion, her brother, Bertram. Together they maintained a rotating menagerie of rabbits, albino rats, bats, and frogs, among ninety-some other creatures. She confided their delights alongside her discontent with the restrictions of home to her journals. Numerous family vacations to country places, especially to her grandmother’s house in Hertfordshire, occasioned journal passages of Wordsworthian ecstasy. She hated London.
Bertram also lived a bifurcated life, eventually leaving home as young men were allowed to do and secretly marrying an “unacceptable” woman, a mill hand, while continuing to visit the family to keep up appearances until he died of alcoholism at forty-six. I mention this because there is more than a measure of heroism to Beatrix Potter’s survival and eventual triumph. How did she do it? It’s all there in the little books.
I went back to the stack of twenty-four, slightly smudged volumes we read to our daughter and she read to herself some forty years ago. It was clear to me that Beatrix Potter had brought her moments with nature to each drawing and sentence. Compare her images to those of a near contemporary like Arthur Rackham (1867–1939), whose superb illustrations for Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows memorably caricature Toad, Mole, Ratty, and Badger. By contrast, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Benjamin Bunny, Squirrel Nutkin, Peter, and the rest are not caricatures; they may wear hats, don raingear, smoke pipes, and iron clothes, but their anatomy is recognizable, almost scientific.
Like her art, Potter’s prose is also pungent and exact. You can hear her speaking in a voice at once charming and distinctly unsentimental. The books were, as she said, “not made to order” for the marketplace; they originated as stories for the children of a former governess, and she didn’t mind underlining their realism with first-person interjections: “Old Mrs. Rabbit was a widow; she earned her living by knitting rabbit-wool mittens and muffetees (I once bought a pair at a bazaar).” Their frequent themes are the themes of her life: secrecy, subterfuge, rebellion. . . and the dangers that await the adventurous—being baked in a pie, rolled into a pudding, and so forth. Perennially appealing themes for any child, I would think.
When it came to her own menagerie, Potter was not especially soft-hearted. She took the death of pets in stride, and that live-and-let-die spirit infuses her books. Jemima Puddle-Duck must accept her eggs being gobbled by a dog and live to lay more, “but only four of them hatched.” As with nature red-in-tooth-and-claw, so with the marketplace: Ginger and Pickles (a tomcat and a terrier) run a shop that extends credit to all customers. They fail, close, and go on to other pursuits while Tabitha Twitchett, whose shop does not extend credit, succeeds. And then there is the Tailor of Gloucester, a man on the verge of failure whose bacon is saved by the labor of others—a band of industrious mice who sew all night, making garments the tailor sells to the rich merchants of Gloucester while he “grew quite stout, and he grew quite rich.” Life lessons for sure.
In considering what these stories might mean to children today, we shouldn’t ignore the whippings that Benjamin Bunny and other miscreants occasionally receive. Children know that rabbits don’t whip their young; I’m not sure that there is anything wrong with telling them that once-upon-a-time parents routinely did. Or is there?
If anything interferes with an appreciation of Beatrix Potter’s tales today, it’s undoubtedly the number of narrative distractions available to every child. Forty years ago, there was only television (we sometimes did not have one) and the occasional movie. By contrast, my granddaughter, who is passionate about animals—especially dogs and seals—has books of many more kinds to turn to. Her appreciation of Potter is genuine, but mild by comparison with her mother’s.
Does it matter if Squirrel Nutkin and his like vanish from childhood? Maybe. Certainly, reading Potter’s superb sentences aloud and encouraging close attention to the depiction of flora and fauna in the books will, by slowing things down, open a world for the attentive child. And since schools are especially concerned with environmental issues today, it might be a good idea to link these stories to their author’s use of her immense profits to fuel a successful campaign on behalf of her country’s Lake District. Though by no means a populist—it was the land, its farms, and its wildlife and not so much the public she cared about—she preserved and passed on to the National Trust some four thousand acres.
So let the Potter celebrations roll on, in museum, classroom, and, let us hope, at home.
