Beatrix Potter

by Linda Lear

  Beatrix Potter’s ‘odious fits of low spirits’ were not unusual in a young woman enduring an unsettled time in her life. There was a degree of neurasthenia endemic to growing up in a socially insecure Victorian household where the spectre of uselessness was all too real. But the loss of Dalguise, her brother’s companionship, her old governess, her beloved grandparents, and her enforced companionship with two hypercritical parents were cause enough for depression. Beatrix’s situation was further compounded by unspoken disappointment at having her own needs unacknowledged and worse, ignored.34

  Much of her despair was aggravated by her mother’s controlling behaviour, which emphasized Beatrix’s dependence and powerlessness. ‘Have been very unsettled this week, first mamma said I should go to Manchester, then that I could not, then I was to stop at home with the girls, then it was decided I should go to Camfield, but now I am to go to Manchester tomorrow.’ Beatrix usually enjoyed travelling, even in the exclusive company of her hard-to-please parents. Escaping London was pleasure enough.35

  She was delighted with her first visit to Manchester, riding the trams, seeing the good-looking Lancashire girls about the city, and touring old Potter-family places with her father. But she was virtually ignored when it came to the dispersal of her grandmother’s personal effects. Beatrix describes the scene with her mother and Aunt Harriet as ‘so ridiculous and melancholy that I shall never forget it’. Beatrix admired a cameo brooch and bracelet, and her grandmother’s silk brocade wedding dress. But Harriet claimed the Leech wedding ring and wedding dress herself. ‘I thought at first they would have given it to me…’ Beatrix wrote with deep disappointment. ‘I should not have ventured to ask for either, but that they spoke of giving it to the servants! It is extraordinary how little people value old things if they are of little intrinsic value.’ She was given an ‘old green silk dress’ which her grandmother ‘wore as a girl’ that delighted her and must have been becoming.36

  The disposition of Jane Leech’s estate became even more contentious when William Leech challenged his mother’s right to divide and pass on her marriage settlement among her two daughters. The dispute ended up in court several years later, where Rupert successfully challenged the suit, but meanwhile it caused great agitation in the family. For one thing Helen was forced to travel back and forth to Manchester, prompting Rupert to consider renting Dalguise again for the summer holiday. Beatrix wrote unhappily early in May, ‘I am afraid there is a chance of going back to Dalguise. I feel an extraordinary dislike to this idea, a childish dislike… the thoughts of that peaceful past time of childhood comes to us like soft music and a blissful vision.’ Instead they went first to Edinburgh, a city Beatrix had always longed to see, and then on to Dunkeld for a brief visit. Breatix wrote apprehensively, ‘O Home, I cannot bear to see it again. How times and I have changed!’37

  Her fear of giving up her childhood is understandable since she was then just shy of her eighteenth birthday with no prospects whatsoever of an independent adult life. Childhood was beyond her clinging, but the future was ominously void. Under these circumstances it was natural that she did not want to see Dalguise now changed or acknowledge herself an adult. In what is one of the rare confessions in her journal Beatrix wrote:

  The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is in myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.

  Half believing the picturesque superstitions of the district, seeing my own fancies so clearly that they became true to me, I lived in a separate world. Then just as childhood was beginning to shake, we had to go, my first great sorrow. I do not wish to have to repeat it, it has been a terrible time since, and the future is dark and uncertain, let me keep the past. The old plum tree is fallen, the trees are felled, the back river is an open hollow, the elfin castle is no longer hidden in the dark glades of Craig Donald Wood… I knew nothing of trouble then.38

  Dalguise was as dilapidated as she had feared and the journey bittersweet. ‘A forlorn journey… The place is the same in most ways. It is home.’ But the village of Dunkeld reaffirmed her joy at the natural beauty she remembered. ‘Man may spoil a great deal,’ she wrote, ‘but he cannot change the everlasting hills, or the mighty river, whose golden waters still flow on at the same measured pace, mysterious, irresistible.’39

  In July Beatrix celebrated her eighteenth birthday in London with Bertram, who was home for the summer. ‘What funny notions of life I used to have as a child!’ she wrote. ‘I often thought of the time when I should be eighteen — it’s a queer business.’ Bertram, now 12 years old, had acquitted himself well at Eastbourne and was at the top of his class. Beatrix, however, was privately worried about her younger brother’s character. After visiting him that spring she had written: ‘I wonder how he will turn out? Sometimes I am hopeful, sometimes I am feared. He has an absorbing interest [in natural history], which is a very great help in keeping anyone straight. The best upbringing has sometimes failed in this family, and I am afraid that Bertram has it in him. Heaven grant it is not so, but I am afraid sometimes.’ The ‘it’ was never named, and only in retrospect does it seem that Beatrix suspected a weakness in her brother’s character that eventually led him to alcoholism.40

  The family spent the rest of the summer at Bush Hall, near Camfield. The house on the River Lea provided excellent trout fishing. It was a rambling, old, red-brick affair with low rooms and long passages that Beatrix loved exploring. A little carriage and pony provided the opportunity for Beatrix to learn to drive, and she discovered an unlimited amount of white clay under the river bank that was perfect for modelling. She busied herself painting landscapes. ‘Most landscapes are in bits, stuck together with more or less skill,’ she observed, ‘a cloud, a field, a tree, which may be good separately, but are not fitted together in the least.’ Sounding like a disciple of Ruskin, she continued: ‘The way our landscape painters fail most is in failing to grasp their subjects widely enough, that was the great power of Turner… There is such complete unity in nature, nothing out of place or without a use.’41

  Turner and the Old Masters were much on her mind during these years when she was forming independent artistic judgements. Concerned at the rumoured dispersal of Old Masters from Blenheim Palace, she wrote: ‘There will be few great collections left in England soon. All the best works of Old Masters leave the Island. The Government is too stingy to buy them, and in the market they are bought cheap for foreign museums… or for rich Americans, which is much the same as far as their return is concerned.’ Her preservation instincts were also aroused when she saw some fine old oak furniture at an antiques shop in Oxford. An oak cupboard like the one at Wray Castle she ‘particularly admired (with a wish to possess)… If ever I had a house,’ she wrote, ‘I would have old furniture, oak in the dining room, and Chippendale in the drawing room. It is not as expensive as modern furniture, and incomparably handsomer and better made.’42

  But it was John Millais that Beatrix had first-hand opportunity to observe. Rupert was busy assisting Millais, photographing sitters or backgrounds. Millais had received a commission to do a second portrait of the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, a man who was increasingly the object of Rupert’s political ire. After the first sitting, Millais asked Rupert to make a photographic portrait of Gladstone for him to work from. Ironically Rupert’s photograph was of such quality that he had it published and sold it as a carte-de-visite. Beatrix went happily with her father to see Millais’s newest paintings on exhibition in November 1884, but came away more impressed by his early work.43

  Her favourite painting by Millais was Ophelia, which she pronounced ‘probably one of the most marvellous pictures in the world’. With exc
eptional insight Beatrix observed that the singular quality of the Pre-Raphaelite style was the absence of shadow. ‘Focus’, she wrote, ‘is the real essence of pre-Raphaelite art, as is practised by Millais. Everything in focus at once, which though natural… produces on the whole a different impression from that which we receive from nature.’ When another Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt’s long-awaited work The Flight into Egypt created artistic fireworks at the Fine Arts Gallery in the spring of 1885, Beatrix praised the care and attention to detail Hunt had taken, rather than just dashing something off — a veiled criticism of Millais’s current work. In a clear statement of independence from her father, who disliked the picture because he said he could not understand it, Beatrix rejoined: ‘I had rather a picture I can’t understand than one with nothing to be understood.’44

  The Potter and Millais families occasionally socialized in London. The Potters attended a society ball given by the Millais family at their palatial home, where Oscar Wilde and his wife drew much attention, and they were also invited to Carrie Millais’s fashionable wedding at St Mary Abbots church in Kensington. Beatrix’s visits to Millais’s studio at Palace Gate with her father over the years had afforded her a rare opportunity to study the painter’s evolving body of work. She used these visits to absorb all she could of his handling of light, subject and techniques of applying paint. She was flattered by Millais’s occasional remarks about her own work, but she did not deceive herself that they bestowed special distinction. Such unparalleled access to a successful painter might have induced shameless fawning in another aspiring artist, but Beatrix never lost her critical independence, liking some of his paintings while rejecting others.45

  With her own art lessons mercifully behind her, Beatrix was understandably anxious for time to practise her art by herself.

  It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye. Why cannot one be content to look at it? I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have had a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things, worse than queer sometimes. Last time… I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.46

  Although Beatrix was visited by fits of self-doubt about her painting and frustrated with obligations that diverted her from practice, she was aware that her experiential education in the galleries of London constituted an important part of her artistic apprenticeship. The galleries were a sort of collective atelier; her education limited only by her capacity to observe. As a consequence of this exposure, she was prompted to experiment with a wide variety of media: oil, watercolour, modelling, block and transfer printing and etching, and unafraid to choose a diversity of subject matter. But by 1885 Beatrix had clearly chosen watercolour and was rapidly perfecting her dry-brush technique.47

  Her father took her to the French Gallery at the Tate, and to charity art exhibitions in private homes because, as Beatrix confided, ‘he is curious to see the insides of great houses’ as well as the art collections. The watercolours of Frederick Walker which they saw at a small gallery she approved as the most beautiful she had seen and ‘exceedingly true to nature… Not but nature has more feeling and beauty than man will ever comprehend, but unfortunately when one says… of a picture that it is natural, it generally happens that the painter has picked out the commonplace.’48

  Now nearly 19, Beatrix enjoyed more social activities. She frequently walked to the newly opened Natural History Museum in South Kensington to sketch. She went to the Royal Globe Theatre to see Charles Hawtrey’s popular adaptation of The Private Secretary, but enjoyed the drive to the theatre through the Westminster area even more. It was the first time Beatrix had taken this route, passing Horse Guards, the Admiralty, Whitehall and the Strand. She went several times to the International Inventions Exhibition in South Kensington, a sort of trade show, and like her Potter grandfather approved the general scientific knowledge offered to the working classes at such exhibitions. She also enjoyed evening concerts featuring the dance music of Eduard Strauss.49

  At a time when the nation in general, and London in particular, was plagued with labour unrest, widespread unemployment and the frightening dynamite plots that accompanied the demands of Irish Home Rule, Beatrix’s approval of Mechanics Institutes and public exhibitions was a remarkably liberal position. ‘It will be a great pity if there are no more,’ she wrote, ‘they are a great resource for people of our station, and infinitely healthier than the music halls and low theatres.’ She complained of all the bawling babies and unpleasant tobacco smoke at such public gatherings, however, and for the first time she complained of her health, noting her lack of energy. ‘How is it these high-heeled ladies who dine out, paint and pinch their waists to deformity, can racket about all day long, while I who sleep o’nights, can turn in my stays, and dislike sweets and dinners, am so tired towards the end of the afternoon that I can scarcely keep my feet? It is very hard and strange, I wonder if it will always be so?’50

  Such comments suggest that Beatrix had not been well. Between 1882 and 1885 she mentions having bad colds, feeling fatigued and not sleeping well. But in the spring of 1885 she reveals she had been chronically ill the past year, once describing herself as ‘still middling and suffering from neuralgia’. In March she wrote, ‘Had my few remaining locks clipped short at Douglas’s. My hair nearly all came off since I was ill.’51

  Beatrix had suffered from a systemic infection. Headaches, fever, colds, sleeplessness and neuralgia sapped her energy and certainly contributed to her general lethargy. The customary practice for hair loss due to a febrile illness was to cut the remaining hair short. Beatrix had taken some pride in her long, thick hair, which she notes had been within four inches of her knees the previous summer. So while she writes nonchalantly, even humorously, about her hat blowing into the large fountain pool at the International Exhibition where she had gone with her father, it must have been an enormously embarrassing event. ‘I always thought I was born to be a discredit to my parents,’ she wrote, ‘…it is one of the peculiarities of my nature that when there is anything to be shy about, I don’t care in the least, and I caused a good deal of harmless amusement.’ But, she adds forlornly, ‘If only I had not been with papa, he does not often take me out, and I doubt he will do it again for some time.’ She was still frail at the year’s end, for when Bertram returned from school with a light case of measles, Beatrix was shipped off to Camfield so she would not be exposed, and only returned to London just before Christmas.52

  Her hair had not grown very long by mid-June when the Potters gave a large party, apparently in honour of Beatrix’s approaching nineteenth birthday. Even so, Beatrix was an attractive young woman, not classically beautiful, but arresting nonetheless. Her shorter, naturally wavy hair framed her face becomingly, emphasizing its pleasing oval shape and her wide-set blue eyes. She was petite, slim, and small-waisted, with erect posture. She had pretty hands with long, graceful fingers. Although not a formal ‘coming out’, the gathering was clearly meant to mark Beatrix’s entry into adulthood. Beatrix wrote of it simply as ‘The Party… first since ten years, and for my part may it suffice for ten more, when many of us will be gone.’ There were about a hundred guests and even Beatrix considered it a success. ‘I enjoyed myself,’ she reported, ‘and, contrary to my own and parents’ expectations, behaved well.’53

  The birthday party was followed by other trappings of adulthood: the end to her formal education and the departure of her governess. ‘My education finished 9th July,’ Beatrix wrote.

  Whatever moral good and general knowledge I may have got from it, I have retained no literal rules… I have liked my last governess best on the whole — Miss Carter had her faults, and was one of the youngest people I have ever seen, but she was very good-tempered and intelligent… The rules of geography and grammar are tiresome, there is no general word t
o express the feelings I have always entertained towards arithmetic.

  Miss Carter had announced that she would marry Edwin Moore, a civil engineer, the following year. The couple settled in Bayswater, and on Christmas Eve 1887, Noel Moore, the first of eight Moore children, was born. Soon after his birth the Moores moved to a house on Baskerville Road, overlooking Wandsworth Common. Beatrix visited Annie and her growing brood frequently as Mr Moore was often abroad for extended periods.54

  Other family changes followed the Potters’ summer holiday in 1885 at Lingholm, an estate near Keswick on the shore of Derwentwater. Rupert received a shocking letter from Crompton’s widow announcing the engagement of beautiful Kate Potter to a no-name former army captain, a sometime ‘stockbroker’, Fletcher Cruickshank. Beatrix’s comments about Kate’s decision reflect her parents’ social conventions and disapproval, but show how deeply ingrained these attitudes were in the family. Beatrix was also challenged by Kate’s perhaps frivolous, but nonetheless independent decision. ‘This sounds a silly business if nothing worse,’ Beatrix wrote. ‘Aunt Mary has not a particle of sense, but I can’t understand the girl not having more self-pride or ambition.’55

  Rupert Potter’s reaction to his favourite niece’s engagement was not lost on Beatrix. Rupert was appalled that his nieces were allowed to marry so far beneath themselves. ‘If he had a beautiful daughter like Kate,’ Beatrix writes of her father, ‘there is no doubt he could marry her very well, he is intimate with all the rich and respectable Unitarians’ families, or if ambitious, he could easily take her into fashionable society.’ Beatrix concluded philosophically, ‘If this is what beauty leads to, I am well content to have a red nose and a shorn head, I may be lonely, but better that than an unhappy marriage.’ Barely three weeks later, Beatrix notes the engagement of her double cousin, the orphaned Edith Potter, without comment. But Edith’s intended, William H. A. Gaddum, came from a highly respected, wealthy Manchester merchant family. Undoubtedly Rupert and Helen quietly disapproved of his connections to trade. In October came the news that Blanche Potter, Crompton’s younger daughter, was engaged to her cousin, Charlie Wrigley. Helen took the occasion to lecture Beatrix severely on her disapproval of such inter-family liaisons. ‘Mother is sorry that he is her cousin, and enlarges on that subject to me so continually that I begin to think she desires particularly that I should be acquainted with her views on it.’ She added with regret, ‘an unnecessary precaution at present’.56