Over the Hills and Far Away Read online

  With Rupert Potter Hardwicke Rawnsley shared his interest in Wordsworth, photography and conservation ; Rawnsley subsequently lay behind Rupert’s life membership of the National Trust. Although the Potters later based themselves elsewhere in the Lake District – in houses at Ambleside, Windermere, Keswick and Sawrey – Rawnsley’s appointment in 1883 as vicar of Crosthwaite and rural dean of Keswick, where he remained until retirement in 1917, afforded him ongoing, if sporadic, contact. As a successful children’s poet, he was an obvious choice for Beatrix to consult in 1901 following Annie Moore’s suggestion of publishing her picture letter as a full-length story.

  Rawnsley made a number of recommendations ; Bertram also offered suggestions. To each in turn Beatrix dispatched the manuscript she temporarily entitled ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr McGregor’s Garden’. ‘The original Peter went all round the town before he found a publisher,’ she wrote : every response disappointed and she apologised to the Moore children for keeping their picture letters so long.37 Four years previously, she had weathered the combined indifference of Thiselton-Dyer and the Linnean Society, ultimately with something like equanimity. Now, rejection by publishers provoked a degree of obduracy. With the same impatience of obstacles she had outlined fifteen years earlier in her journal concerning her need to paint, Beatrix set about publishing the book herself.

  Like Jemima Puddle-duck intent on hatching her eggs – ‘I wish to hatch my own eggs ; I will hatch them all by myself’ – Beatrix in her early thirties had become determined one way or another to see her story in print in her own preferred format : ‘a booklet 5 x 3¾ inches, on rather rough stout paper’, illustrated in black and white in order to avoid ‘the great expense of colour printing – and also the rather uninteresting colour of a good many of the subjects which are most of them rabbit-brown and green’.38 On personal recommendation she entrusted her commission to Strangeways & Sons, of Tower Street, London. Illustrations were engraved by the Art Reproduction Company of Fetter Lane and a coloured frontispiece – the only colour picture in the book – produced by Hentschel of Fleet Street. Beatrix ordered 250 copies from Strangeways, and 500 frontispieces in the event of a reprint. The undertaking proved costly and tells us much of her confidence in the enterprise and her single-mindedness.39 Certainly this was the light in which she herself regarded the venture : ‘I think I may say I have shown considerable spirit in bringing it out myself  !’ she wrote.40 She showed similar spirit in tenaciously selling and distributing all 250 copies and ordering a reprint of a further 200 copies. She recouped her costs, she indicated, through sales to ‘obliging aunts’ ; word of mouth evidently played its part too.41

  Among purchasers of the privately printed version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories had been turned down in 1886 by Frederick Warne & Co. With mingled pleasure and diffidence, on 19 January 1902 Beatrix reported Conan Doyle’s ‘good opinion of the story & words’.42 It was a response that would become, as it remains, all but universal. By then it was also the opinion of Frederick Warne & Co.

  Ten years previously, in the gentlest of rejections, Warne’s had outlined to Beatrix possible interest in an illustrated book. Rawnsley rekindled their lukewarm favour. He informed them of Beatrix’s arrangement with Strangeways & Sons and offered them a version of the Peter Rabbit story rewritten in cloying doggerel of his own. This time, at last, the publishers bit. Declining the clergyman’s versifying, in September 1901 Frederick Warne & Co. resumed a correspondence with Beatrix Potter that would continue for the remainder of her life.

  • 6 •

  ‘All the beasts can talk’

  Shy but self-contained, Beatrix at twenty-six, photographed at Birnam in Scotland.

  ‘Duchess was quite delighted with her own cleverness!’

  The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, 1905

  AS LONG AS she remained under her parents’ roof, Beatrix led a sheltered life. Rupert and Helen Potter’s stifling parenting ensured that their daughter’s experiences outside the family circle were virtually non-existent. In the wake of her cousin Kate’s mésalliance in 1885, Beatrix had appraised Rupert’s social connections : ‘If he had a beautiful daughter like Kate there is no doubt he could marry her very well.’ She pointed to her father’s intimacy with ‘rich and respectable Unitarians’ and even ‘fashionable society’.1 But time passed and Rupert failed to find a suitor for his own daughter.

  It may not have been Rupert’s fault. Without apparent regret Beatrix noted of the party her parents hosted within weeks of her nineteenth birthday, ‘Cupid unavoidably absent.’ She had most enjoyed talking to her great-uncle, Thomas Ashton, who reminded her of Grandmother Leech.2 Notwithstanding her own verdict that she had acquitted herself surprisingly well (considering her gaucherie and farouche dislike of company), it was an evening on which the Potters’ likely exasperation seems forgiveable. Parties are not subsequently a feature of Beatrix’s journal and it may be that her parents simply gave up.

  If this were the case, Rupert and Helen replaced one conventional aspiration with another. Like other unmarried daughters, Beatrix was expected to take her place at her mother’s side running 2 Bolton Gardens and overseeing the Potters’ frequent travel arrangements. It was a shackle of sorts and she would refer to ‘muddles here with servants which make me rather tied’.3 Beatrix’s journal gives ample evidence of her unsuitedness to this role of ‘angel in the house’, the mid-Victorian stereotype of women as docile domestic paragons revelling in their own submission. Neither Rupert nor Helen was privy to Beatrix’s journal ; neither fully conceived her strength of will, the extent of her determination to ‘do something’ or achieve some measure of independence. Both were aims contrary to the self-effacement and humility expected of the stay-at-home daughter.

  Beatrix accepted domestic incarceration with an ill will but few overt signs of protest. During an illness of her mother’s in 1895, she snapped, ‘There is supposed to be some angelic sentiment in tending the sick, but personally I should not associate angels with castor oil and emptying slops’, a statement convincingly out of kilter with the Victorian paradigm.4 She did her duty nevertheless. Beatrix’s misfortune lay in her parents’ lack of imagination and the prescriptiveness of contemporary practice. Having ‘failed’ to get married, she found herself lacking any third option. Her choices were circumscribed by parental expectation and by powerful social pressures in favour of conformity. Like others of her generation, she had never known anything else. In the main her parents’ behaviour was conditioned by habit rather than malignity. Beatrix did not challenge the legitimacy of these assumptions, only their implications. And perhaps what chiefly motivated Rupert and Helen Potter was a determination to control. Key to maintaining the uneventfulness of their prosperous lives was an exaggerated focus on orderliness.

  At the age of nineteen, Beatrix was unfamiliar even with the topography of London, as wholly a stranger to much of the capital as Timmy Willie, ‘who had lived all his life in a garden’. Of a trip to the theatre with her parents and cousin Emily Potter in March 1885, Beatrix concluded, after a traffic jam in Buckingham Palace Road, that ‘the drive there was the most interesting part of the affair’ : she admired the ‘grand carriages’ lined up outside Buckingham Palace and, at the end of the evening, Beefeaters marching. Although she had been born in London, ‘extraordinary to state, it was the first time in my life that I had been past the Horse Guards, Admiralty, and Whitehall, or seen the Strand and the Monument’.5

  When her black moods lifted, domestic adversity provided grist for Beatrix’s humour. In the summer of 1894, she went to stay in the Cotswolds with her cousin Caroline Hutton. Beatrix was almost twenty-eight : she reported that she ‘had not been away independently for five years’. With a degree of wryness she referred to the trip as ‘an event’.6 She indicated the stratagems attempted by her parents to dissuade her – ‘It was so much of an event in the eyes of my relations that they made it appear an und
ertaking to me’ – hinting at both cynicism and calculation in their arguments. ‘I began to think I would rather not go. I had a sick headache most inopportunely, though whether cause or effect I could not say.’7 Only the intervention of forceful cousin Caroline, five years Beatrix’s junior, carried the day. Together – and without mishap – the young women made the journey by rail from Paddington to Stroud.

  There were to be lasting effects of Beatrix’s visit to the Huttons. Caroline Hutton appeared to Beatrix as a revelation. Beatrix described her as ‘a pickle’, always for her a term of fondness, and likened her to Jane Austen’s Emma ; she marvelled at her physical prowess – her ‘longish firm steps’ as she strode across the country ‘like a soldier who has been drilled’ – and an unabashed quality in her character : her self-possession, fearlessness, decision. Both physical and mental attributes distinguished the young women. Weeks after this visit, Beatrix mistook her twenty-eighth birthday for her twenty-ninth : the confusion indicates more than absentmindedness. ‘A good deal of geology and Shakespeare might be stuffed into the extra year,’ she reassured herself limply.8 It does not suggest a high value placed on her vanishing youth or self-possession.

  By contrast Beatrix wrote of Caroline, ‘the prevailing impression was of freshness and extreme amusement’.9 Alert to her cousin’s shortcomings, and with no desire to emulate what she considered her ‘complete absence of imagination’, nonetheless Beatrix recognised in Caroline Hutton a kindred spirit and a wake-up call : her impressions of her would act as a stiffener to Beatrix’s own resolve. She considered her ‘clever, brilliantly attractive and perfectly well principled, although knowing her own mind’, a description which, barring physical appearances, applied equally to herself.10 The regime at Bolton Gardens sought to deny scope for Beatrix’s cleverness and principles ; neither Rupert nor Helen encouraged their daughter to know her own mind. Her role as prop and amanuensis did not require self-knowledge, much less self-will.

  This was not a revelation in the summer of 1894. In essentials Beatrix’s life had changed little since 1883, the replacement of Miss Hammond by Miss Carter and the latter’s subsequent departure. As a grown-up daughter Beatrix lived a double life : her parents’ child, attentive against a backdrop of aspidistras and querulous respectability ; and an independent-minded young woman of singular talents but few outlets. Her visit to the Huttons ahead of the family holiday to Berwickshire highlighted the absences and inconsistencies in Beatrix’s life. Caroline’s ‘old-fashioned wisdom and… unreasoning fearlessness’ upbraided Beatrix’s own timidity. The cousins sat up into the night. In her dressing gown, with hair tumbled about her ears and ‘her honest grey eyes round in the candle light’, Caroline became ‘all in a splutter’, happily disputatious about religion, metaphysics and the insanitary living conditions of agricultural labourers. The women talked about love : Beatrix referred to ‘an analytical discussion of the passions’ ; Caroline was vigorous in disclaiming any desire to be married.11 It was the sort of cosy, affectionate, exploratory chatter from which her parents had largely barred Beatrix ; it also points to an emotional curiosity on Beatrix’s part of which her parents may have been unaware. Little wonder that she remembered aspects of her visit as ‘like a most pleasant dream’.12 It differed substantially from the ‘prosperous uneventful’ routines of Bolton Gardens.

  In Beatrix’s tales, examples of supportive female friendships are few. Ribby patronises Tabitha Twitchit in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. In The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, Duchess mistrusts Ribby. The prospect of a party for her ‘friends’, in The Tale of Tom Kitten, throws Tabitha Twitchit into confusion. In The Tale of Two Bad Mice, the dolls Lucinda and Jane are separated by class, as well as being physically unable to speak to one another. Rebeccah Puddle-duck takes no interest in her sister-in-law Jemima’s longing for ducklings in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck : at best her attitude is dismissive. Instead, it is children – not adults or parents – who, in Beatrix’s fictional world, are more often capable of companionship : Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny ; Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail ; Tom Kitten, Moppet and Mittens ; Pigling Bland and Pigwig. None resorts to dissembling ; all appear impervious to hierarchy. The emphasis, as in much of Beatrix’s life, is on siblings and cousins.

  *

  Beatrix’s visit to the Huttons at Harescombe Grange took place nine months after her Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher letters to the Moores. Beatrix does not record whether she discussed with her cousin the embryonic stories she had written the previous autumn and there is no reason to assume she did. In the early summer of 1894, she had yet to settle on children’s books as her chief creative outlet ; her interests in fungi and fossils were every bit as strong. So was her absorption in illustrating favourite stories and books, each of them more painstaking and time-­consuming than the rapid pen-and-ink sketches of Noel and Eric’s letters. Beatrix and Caroline had soon arrived at a state of rewarding intimacy. Beatrix’s dismissal of her cousin as unimaginative may point to a lack of interest on Caroline’s part in Beatrix’s anthropomorphic fantasies or simply an assumption by Beatrix about Caroline’s likely response. In Beatrix’s account, there is an unliterary bent to Caroline’s conversation.

  Nevertheless, lack of imagination did not prevent Caroline Hutton from sharing with Beatrix a story the latter chose to regard in the light of a real-life fairy tale. It concerned a tailor in nearby Gloucester. John Prichard had left a suit of clothes unfinished at the end of the week. After a weekend’s absence, he found it completed bar a single buttonhole – inexplicably and as if by magic, even down to a note : ‘No more twist’. Cannily he exploited the story for promotional purposes. It acquired the status of local legend : Caroline heard it ‘from Miss Lucy of Gloucester, who had it of the tailor’.13 From first telling it made a powerful impression on Beatrix. Transformed into The Tailor of Gloucester, it became her favourite of her books. She asked the Huttons to show her the tailor’s shop and she sketched the city’s old uneven streets.

  Beatrix’s rewriting of Prichard’s story was of long gestation. She did not begin work on it until 1901, seven years after she first heard it, by which time plans for private publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit were well advanced, and Beatrix’s negotiations with Frederick Warne & Co. for commercial publication the following year were also nearing completion. Like her Peter Rabbit story, Beatrix first addressed The Tailor of Gloucester to a child – a Christmas present, in December 1901, for Winifred Moore, known as Freda, the second of Noel and Eric’s six sisters.

  On this occasion, Beatrix did not choose a letter as the medium for her storytelling. In a stiff-covered exercise book, complete with watercolour illustrations and tied with pink ribbons, she unravelled a wholly personal interpretation of Caroline’s quaint tale. Mice, Beatrix’s favourite animals, became the magic agents ; a cat called Simpkin suggested a malign Puss-in-Boots. As in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in the finished story ‘all the beasts can talk’, though, as Beatrix explained, ‘there are very few folk that can hear them, or know what it is that they say.’ As in all her books, her own role was that of intermediary between beasts and folk. Skilfully she managed the anthropomorphic aspect of her tale : Beatrix’s singing, sewing mice are mostly unclothed and Simpkin wears a greatcoat and boots only for his shopping expedition in the snow.

  From first draft The Tailor of Gloucester resembled a book – a fairy tale written by a soon-to-be-published author. That Beatrix presented her story in this way reflected the newfound confidence of her thirties : growing resolution underlined that confidence. Her altered state of mind had several causes : Warne’s interest in Peter Rabbit ; the support of Annie Moore and Hardwicke Rawnsley ; Beatrix’s friendship with Caroline Hutton ; her collaboration with Charles McIntosh ; even, despite its unsatisfactory outcome, Sir Henry Roscoe’s partisanship over her fungus theories. Her thirties were to become for Beatrix a decade of attainment : even her health appeared improved. In her journal on 28 July 1896, Beatrix insisted, ‘
I feel much stronger at thirty than I did at twenty ; firmer and stronger both in mind and body.’14 Events appeared to corroborate that assessment.

  From now on her journal dwelt less minutely on frustrations. There are suggestions that Beatrix had developed means of addressing her parents’ fractiousness ; and her world expanded physically to accommodate solo visits to family, interviews at Kew Gardens, careful arrangements with London printers over self-publishing. By the time of Freda’s letter, with the schoolroom now her studio, Miss Cameron and Mrs A. consigned to memory, designs for Christmas cards and A Frog he would a-fishing go issued by commercial publishers and the imminence of Frederick Warne & Co.’s full-colour version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, at last Beatrix could lay claim to an identity of her own inventing and first approaches to independence. Importantly, she had achieved it without compromising outward deference to her parents.

  *

  Beatrix Potter fell in love with Norman Warne in the manner of the times : she addressed him first as ‘Sir’, afterwards as ‘Mr Warne’. He became her ‘Johnny Crow’, named after the active, busy little bird at the heart of Leslie Brooke’s illustrated rhyme book, Johnny Crow’s Garden, which Warne’s published in 1903. Beatrix borrowed the nickname from Norman’s nieces and nephews. Theirs began as a business correspondence and ended in an engagement. Love was not necessary to the business in hand.

  Norman Warne was the youngest of the three surviving sons of Frederick Warne. Three other brothers – Frederick, Alfred and Edwin – had died young. His junior status accounts for his role overseeing The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which elder brothers Harold and Fruing labelled slightingly Beatrix’s ‘bunny book’. In 1901 he was thirty-three, two years younger than Beatrix. Like Beatrix he was unmarried, the darling of his widowed mother, a doting uncle. Thoughtful and diligent, a keen tennis player and bicyclist, he collected moths. In a basement workshop he essayed small-scale carpentry projects : boxes and cases, eventually a doll’s house for his niece Winifred. He was generous-spirited, kind, sometimes self-conscious ; in January 1904 he took a family party of ten to the pantomime – Humpty Dumpty, at the Drury Lane Theatre, with Dan Leno as Queen Spritely.