by Linda Lear
Perhaps because there was a new baby at the Moores’ household that July and because Beatrix did not want little Eric, who was now nearly five, to feel left out, she wrote a picture letter to him the following day. It too took its adventure from her specific observations of the natural world around her at Eastwood on the River Tay. ‘My dear Eric,’ she wrote, ‘Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank [drawing of frog in a little den under three broad leaves] of a river. You can see what a little house it is because there is a dock leaf hanging over the roof. One morning Mr Fisher looked out & saw drops of rain…’ Poor Jeremy catches a prickly stickleback instead of the tasty minnow that he hoped for, and ends up eating ‘roasted grass-hopper with lady-bird sauce’. Beatrix conspiratorially tells little Eric that frogs consider this ‘very good indeed, but I think it must have been nasty’.32
The ironic coincidence of Beatrix’s activities at Eastwood in September 1893 would not be recognized for nearly a century. But in the space of two days she had found and painted a rare and important mycological specimen and created two fictional characters that one day would be world-famous. Both were products of her skill as a naturalist, her acute observation of people and places, her creative imagination, and her sure sense of audience.
During the winter of 1893 McIntosh and Beatrix continued their mycological collaboration. She now had her own set of the Stevenson volumes, which she was studying assiduously. ‘I wish I had had the book sooner,’ she told him, ‘for most of my drawings might have been made more accurate, without extra trouble, if I had understood anything about the distinctions. Dr Stevenson’s book is rather stiff reading but I understand it sufficiently to find it extremely interesting.’ Although she lacked confidence that she would ever master fungi classification, she was pleased that she had learned how to correct her drawings when necessary by washing them out. A good judge of her own work, Beatrix confessed to McIntosh that her weakest point was drawing the gills.33
Beatrix’s self-critique gave McIntosh an opportunity to offer specific advice on how to improve her illustrations without offending her. His very formal reply of 10 January 1894, addressing her as ‘Miss Potter, Madam’, indicates that McIntosh took the role of mentor seriously. ‘Since you have begun to study the physiology of the funguses,’ he writes, ‘you seem to see your drawings of them defective in regard to the gills, but you can make them more perfect as botanical drawings by making separate sketches of sections showing the attachment of the gills; the stem if it be hollow or otherways, or any other details that would show the characteristics of the plant more distinctly.’34
This was precisely the sort of advice Beatrix needed. Her next drawings show details of the gill attachment. Longitudinal sections of stem are sketched off to the side or a step behind the main illustration. In some drawings there are also notations of both young and developing fructification. These illustrations lose nothing as aesthetically pleasing pictures. Her colours are translucent, yet uncannily true to nature, and her fine brushwork gives the individual fungus both texture and weight. The spatial arrangements of the fungi, whether painted with substrata or as pure botanical objects on the page, are somehow lively illustrations of nature’s handiwork, rather than cold objects of natural history.35
Charles McIntosh not only provided just the right level of expertise and objectivity to allow Beatrix to advance in her skills, but he also gave her the professional validation she longed for. Over the next two years her interest in fungi grew to a passion. Between 1894 and 1895 Beatrix made seventy-three fungi drawings.36 After incorporating McIntosh’s suggestions she drew numerous sectional views under magnification. In the process she became more observant of the fructification and curious about the role of spores in reproduction.
Her growing self-confidence is evident in a letter she wrote from the Scottish Borders in the early autumn of 1894 after receiving another parcel of specimens. ‘If Dr Stevenson were not infallible,’ Beatrix writes, ‘one would say [A. paedidus] was more like the description of decastes. I have made some very bad guesses but had chosen the right names for Hygrophorus.’ Stevenson was indeed fallible. Potter’s painting of this fungus, done in September 1894, has recently been identified as an example of the species decastes as she supposed. Reflecting on her activities that summer she noted in her journal: ‘My photography was not very satisfactory, but I made about forty careful drawings of funguses, and collected some interesting fossils, one of which I find labelled at the Museum, Auraucarioxylon from Lennel Braes, a lucky find since I know nothing about it.’37
For the next two years geology and palaeontology nearly rivalled Beatrix’s interest in fungi. It is safe to say that her interest in natural history was such that nothing on the ground escaped her notice. Although the public enthusiasm for natural history created a congenial climate for her activities and discoveries, it was her observant eye and her desire to know a thing by drawing it that set her apart and marked her as an exceptional student and illustrator of nature. But even Beatrix’s enthusiasm had limits. Staying at the Osborne Hotel in the south coast town of Torquay in the spring of 1893, she discovered her bed infested with bugs. After an uncomfortable night sleeping with Keating’s powder in her hair, she was of the opinion that ‘it is possible to have too much Natural History in a bed’. She also found that it was ‘possible to see too much of Ada Smallfield’, her mother’s loquacious friend, whose social airs Beatrix found irritating. After a day of Miss Smallfield, Beatrix conspired with her father to take a ‘reviver’ from Miss Smallfield’s company in order to explore Kent’s Hole, a cavern near the shore just outside Torquay. Beatrix records the furtive scene in her journal: ‘We slunk out after breakfast, Miss Smallfield who was not an early bird was seen to throw open a window on the third floor, but we got away through the bushes. We afterwards lost our way which was a judgement… Papa who had been in the Peak Cavern was not much impressed, but I who had never been in a cave was extremely interested.’38
In June 1894 Beatrix was allowed a holiday that widened her social horizons and brought her real happiness. She was invited to visit her younger Hutton cousins, Caroline and Mary, at their home at Harescombe Grange, Stroud, in Gloucestershire. Their father, Judge Crompton Hutton, was related to Beatrix’s grandmother Jessy Potter. Like the Potters, Crompton and his wife Sophia Holland were Unitarians from the north. Crompton was a County Court Judge in the Manchester area, but he preferred to live closer to London, travelling north to hold court for a period of weeks each month.39
Now approaching her twenty-eighth birthday, Beatrix records the astonishing fact that she ‘had not been away independently for five years’. Even so, she was nearly denied the opportunity by her mother, who worried that she did not have the physical stamina for the journey. Thankfully, cousin Caroline, three years younger and very decisive, prevailed and gathered Beatrix onto the train. By the time the two cousins reached Stroud they had talked themselves out about the universal and the particular. Caroline, fiercely independent and every bit as opinionated as Beatrix, was also beautiful and as full of energy as idealism. Beatrix had not met anyone quite like her and admired her enormously, even if they did not always agree.40
Beatrix was at Stroud little more than a week, but the adventure was, as she reflected afterwards, ‘like a most pleasant dream’. Caroline, whom Beatrix described as ‘a pickle’, turned out to be excellent company, once they had resolved their various political, religious and social differences. As a young woman in love with ideas, Caroline was more intellectually fearless and uncompromising, while Beatrix was more analytical, and as a consequence, less ideological. Caroline was an outspoken Darwinian and Beatrix remonstrated with her about the unintended consequences of her views. Beatrix suggested that Darwinism was cold comfort for those less able to deal with uncertainty, but admitted, ‘truth is truth’. Imagination and empirical observation provided a more interesting reality for her than either theory or dogma.41
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Beatrix and Caroline explored the Gloucestershire countryside nearby, tracked the badgers’ marks and claw-walks and collected fossils in the quarries. But far more intriguing than any of these activities was the opportunity the visit afforded Beatrix to observe relationships among the Hutton family. Beatrix had rarely seen a married couple so outwardly devoted to each other and so easy together. She liked Mrs Hutton immensely, writing with unusual warmth, ‘I don’t think I ever became so completely fond of any one in so short at time… I cannot imagine a disposition more sweet.’ Beatrix proved herself good company. Judge Hutton, who was older than her own father, soon dubbed her ‘Busy Bee’. In spite of his intense questioning about her family’s domestic arrangements, Beatrix found she liked him. She was, however, nearly undone when Hutton asked her if her mother brushed her own hair or if the Lancashire servants did it. ‘Now fortunately I did not say so,’ Beatrix wrote later, ‘but my mother’s hair takes off.’42
Beatrix found her cousin’s ‘only flaw’ was her energetic expression of pseudo-feminism. She thought it ‘unwise on the part of a nice-looking young lady to proclaim a pronounced dislike of babies and all child cousins’, as Caroline boldly did. Later, Beatrix wrote presciently: ‘Latter day fate ordains that many women shall be unmarried and self-contained, nor should I personally dream to complain, but I hold an old-fashioned notion that a happy marriage is the crown of a woman’s life.’ The visit to Stroud provided Beatrix the rare opportunity of sharing beliefs and even feelings about life and the world with a woman of her own age and class. She was exhilarated by it and looked forward to seeing Caroline again. It was, as she hoped, the beginning of a lifelong friendship.43
Beatrix’s visit to the Huttons also had the effect of deepening her interest in geology, especially in fossils. Mrs Hutton, Caroline’s mother, was a renowned collector of Liassic period fossils, especially insects and fish. Mary Hutton, Caroline’s younger sister, was already a serious collector. The three young women enjoyed several forays to the well-known quarries around Harescombe Grange. The fossils Beatrix found and painted were of sufficient interest that she went to some lengths to identify them.44
By the summer of 1894 Beatrix had acquired copies of James Geikie’s Outlines of Geology as well as Andrew Ramsay’s basic manual The Physical Geology and Geography of Great Britain. Geology and palaeontology were enormously popular pastimes, and since the Potters took their spring holidays at seaside towns in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall for three consecutive years from 1892, fossil hunting along the coast was something they enjoyed as a family. Bertram, too, was interested in geology, especially rock formations, and brother and sister enjoyed collecting at Pendennis Point near Falmouth on the Cornish coast, where they stayed in 1894.45
Although Bertram was often part of these spring holidays, his activities are rarely recorded by his sister. After being admitted to university, Bertram was proposed for membership in the Athenaeum, an appropriate choice for an aspiring artist. He matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford in the autumn of 1890, to read classics with Alfred Denis Godley. He took a Third in Classical Moderations in 1892, and read only for a pass degree in the summer of 1893. As a self-described landscape painter and etcher, Bertram clearly preferred the social life at Oxford to that at Bolton Gardens: he stayed for another year, and then went abroad.46
In 1894 Bertram joined the family during their summer holiday near Coldstream, the last holiday the Potters would spend in Scotland. Beatrix found the Scottish Border country a place of unexpected beauty. From Coldstream south the River Tweed marks the boundary between Scotland and England, and the wooded valley along the Tweed provided matchless vistas of the green Eildon Hills nearby and the ominous Cheviot Hills beyond. Their house at Lennel was just beyond the bridge and village of Coldstream, not far from the little crossroads of Branxton where the climactic battle of Flodden Field had decided the fate of James IV and Scottish nationalism in the sixteenth century. In such a place, full of wild natural beauty and history, Beatrix celebrated her twenty-eighth birthday, though for a day she thought she was a year older than she really was.47
Coldstream was a fisherman’s haven and the reason Rupert had chosen to rent Lennel, a large but somewhat dilapidated brick house, from the Hamilton family. There was an overgrown garden, which Beatrix persisted in weeding, though it was invaded by rats and piebald rabbits and full of broken bottles. There were also three cows, a calf, a donkey, two rather headstrong collie dogs, and assorted poultry overseen by a peripatetic gardener whom Beatrix termed ‘a curiosity’. ‘I like this place very much, there are so many places to drive to see; several old castles,’ Beatrix told Eric Moore in a picture letter, ‘but my Mamma does not like this house, because it is very dirty.’48
At the start of their Lennel holiday, when fungi were less abundant, Beatrix was absorbed by geology. She was rewarded by finding fossilized fish teeth straight away. Having spoken to a local antiquary, she went out several times to examine a stone-pit, noting the marks left by the glacier which had pressed the boulders on either side into hard homogeneous strata. Fascinated by the formations, she made several efforts to photograph the stone-pit, determined to prove that the kame, the ring of stones surrounding the top of the pit, had been thrown up by ice and not water. Intrigued by all the evidence of glacial activity, she remarked: ‘Whether it is that one has not previously considered geology, or that there is a sense of the awful power in the track of the ice, I don’t know, but I think the view looking from the spurs of the Cheviots across the wide strath to the Lammermoors [sic] is magnificent.’49
She found a fine fossil specimen at Burnmouth on a cinder-walk just below the railway station and, employing McIntosh’s suggestions on scientific illustration, made a painting of it showing the stone from various angles, how it looked both split and whole, indicating the different planes of the stone. Close to the end of their stay at Lennel, Beatrix looked for fossils on the river’s edge while Bertram fished. ‘I have found out which stones to split,’ she wrote, ‘and how to use a cold chisel.’ She also spent time trying to find the exact location of the Battle of Flodden Field and was rewarded for her efforts by the discovery of an archaeological fragment while walking in a grassy field near Piper’s Hill, where she believed the King had been killed. ‘To my great pleasure I picked up a very thin, rusted strip of iron about the size of the palm of my hand… It might indifferently be an old kettle or a fragment of armour, but I was quite satisfied.’50
Happily, by mid-August, with rain and hot weather, the countryside around Coldstream became ‘a ideal heavenly dream of the toadstool eaters’. Beatrix had been waiting for such a moment. She discovered a grassy area deep within the nearby Hatchednize Woods where ‘the fungus starred the ground apparently in thousands, a dozen sorts in sight at once’. There she found more than twenty different varieties in a few minutes and ‘joy of joys, the spiky Gomphidius glutinosus, a round, slimy, purple head among the moss’. She took it up using her old cheese knife and saw its distinctive veil. ‘There is extreme complacency in finding a totally new species for the first time,’ she wrote, fresh with the pleasure of discovery. Beatrix visited Hatchednize Woods several more times and was always rewarded with ‘a quantity of funguses’. Her fungus hunting took her and pony Nelly deep into the countryside. Noting the quality of the light, especially at sunset, she found the landscape unexpectedly beautiful. Without anyone knowing, she bravely explored new roads, and although she was once quite lost, she found her way back before being discovered. ‘I never was in such a delightful country for driving with a pony, I know fifteen [roads] besides crossroads.’51
On a hot day in late September Beatrix and her father took the train to the town of Kelso and from there a carriage to Smailholm Tower, a barren, rocky, sixteenth-century fortification where Sir Walter Scott had explored as a sickly child. His imagination had been set afire by the ballads and stories he had heard while living at the nearby farm of Sandyknowe. Coming as a pilgrim in homage to one of he
r literary heroes, Beatrix was rewarded with discoveries of her own: a white and a gigantic red Hygrophorus. While her father was ‘photographing every view but the right one’ from inside the Tower, Beatrix busied herself sketching a Cortinarius growing on bleached horse dung in the bog near the farmhouse.52
More warm, rainy weather at the end of the month brought out even more fungi. In all, she made at least forty paintings. On 30 September she wrote: ‘Was overtaken with funguses, especially Hygrophorus. Found a lovely pink one. They begin to come in crowds, exasperating to leave.’ And a day later: ‘I got over a hedge in to Birgham wood, a paradise of funguses’, including a large group of ‘crisp yellow Peziza… and a troop of gigantic Cortinarius’. She sent one nearly eight inches wide and weighing almost a pound to McIntosh along with several paintings.53