Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  Her attitude to nature lacked squeamishness. Animals that died were boiled, stripped of fur and flesh and reassembled as skeletons ; she inserted glass eyes into cleaned skulls. At Dalguise, aged thirteen, she drew a dead siskin ; she made a series of watercolour studies of a thrush ‘picked up dead in the snow’. Beatrix referred to what she called ‘our little bone-cupboards’, where skeletons were safely stored. On one occasion careless dusting resulted in a shower of mouse bones landing on her head. ‘I caught the skeleton of a favourite dormouse,’ she wrote, ‘but six others were broken and mixed. I mended them all up. I thought it a curious instance of the beautifully minute differences and fittings together of the bones.’30 As a child at Camfield, she helped prepare a favourite farm animal for the table : ‘scrap[ing] the smiling countenance of my own grandmother’s deceased pig, with scalding water and the sharp-edged bottom of a brass candle-stick.’31 Remembering that experience in 1911, she felt moved to protest against the Protection of Animals Act, which proposed preventing children under sixteen from gaining access to slaughterhouses. Her attitude was that of the scientist or countrywoman ; she mostly lacked sentiment. The ‘matter of fact’ quality she admired in her stories was a workaday briskness. There is no elaboration, for example, to Mrs Rabbit’s statement that Peter’s father ended his life in a pie, and we are intended to laugh at the admission of Ginger the tom cat, in The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, that serving mice ‘made his mouth water’.

  Housed in the Potter nursery at one time or another were a pair of lizards, Toby and Judy, bought at the seaside at Ilfracombe, salamanders and ‘a little ring-snake only fourteen inches long… [that] hissed like fun and tied itself into knots’, which the children called Sally.32 There was a green budgerigar, a canary, an owl that bit the heads off dead mice and hooted all night and, improbably, a kestrel and a jay belonging to Bertram. The last two were of doubtful domesticity and Beatrix reported the jay killing one of Bertram’s bats ‘in a disgusting fashion’.33 Judy was Beatrix’s model on at least three occasions, including in an illustration she made for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland : surrounded by ministering guinea pigs, Judy lies on her back, limbs cruciform, as ‘The little Lizard, Bill’.34 Sally’s sojourn in the schoolroom proved brief : along with four black newts she escaped after only two nights. Two of the newts were recovered, but Sally’s disappearance proved final.

  By contrast, a green frog called Punch, acquired when Beatrix was about twelve, remained with the siblings for more than five years. In 1882, Beatrix found a snail she called Old Bill. For a year she collected snails, housing them in a single plant pot. All were given names by the sixteen-year-old : Lord and Lady Salisbury, Mars and Venus, Mr and Mrs Camfield. When all died, in December 1883, after Beatrix failed to provide them with water, she described her loss without irony as ‘an awful tragedy’.35

  Unsurprisingly she grew adept and fearless at handling animals ; she had none of the diffidence or anxiety little Lucie exhibits in Mrs Tiggy-winkle’s kitchen. ‘I seem to be able to tame any sort of animal,’ she wrote.36 Among her conquests were the female hedgehog who inspired her fictional namesake, Mrs Tiggy, ‘just like a very fat, rather stupid little dog’, who ‘lived in the house a long time’.37 ‘She was not a bit prickly with me, she used to lay her prickles flat back to be stroked.’38 Again Beatrix made detailed notes on the hedgehog’s habits, including the onset of hibernation. Having watched ‘the somewhat ghastly process’ by which Mrs Tiggy achieved the necessary catalepsis, Beatrix concluded ‘the hibernating trance is entirely under the animal’s own control, and only in a secondary degree dependent on the weather’.39

  Beatrix loved mice. She reported that she was ‘always catching & taming’ them : ‘the common wild ones are far more intelligent & amusing than the fancy variety’.40 A mouse called Hunca Munca – as dauntless as Tom Thumb’s wife in The Tale of Two Bad Mice – disgraced itself by nibbling a circular hole through one of Beatrix’s sheets, but otherwise displayed all the adroitness of a well-trained circus animal. ‘I used to let it run about in the evenings & when I wanted to catch it I flapped a pocket handkcf in the middle of the room – or rooms – when it would come out and fight, leaping at the hdcf.’41 Another mouse trapped itself inside the hollow brass curtain pole of Beatrix’s bedroom at Camfield. Later, a less adventurous ‘little brown mouse’ called Dusty ran about on Beatrix’s table as she wrote letters.42

  On account of her sleepiness, Beatrix’s favourite mouse was named Xarifa after the ‘Zegri lady’, or Muslim maiden, of a popular poem by Walter Scott’s son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart, The Bridal of Andalla. (In the poem, Xarifa is repeatedly implored to ‘rise up’, a suitable command for a sleepy dormouse, though Beatrix substituted ‘wake up’ for ‘rise up’.) Xarifa the dormouse died of asthma and old age in the autumn of 1886. Her eyebrows and nose were white ; she was completely blind. Beatrix described her as ‘the sweetest little animal I ever knew’.43 Rupert had photographed her sitting on Beatrix’s outstretched palm. More than forty years later, Beatrix remembered Xarifa in The Fairy Caravan : ‘Her nose and eyebrows were turning grey ; she was a most sweet person, but slumberous.’44

  She felt a similar affection for a white rat called Sammy, acquired when he was already old and very fat ; like Xarifa, he too proved a sleepy pet. But he was not above mischief : ‘he was a bit of a thief… I used to find all sorts of things hidden in his box.’45 Sammy had a trick of rolling a hard-boiled egg along the floor of the third-floor passages that Beatrix remembered in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. She replaced the egg then with a rolling pin.

  Beatrix’s first experience of rabbits was in the wild at Dalguise and Camfield. An early rabbit, Tommy, may have been caught wild and tamed ; ditto a ‘painfully nervous’ female called Mopsy,46 the rabbit she painted at thirteen – a slightly stiff study, with very dry paint used to suggest the texture of fur – and Josephine, called ‘Josey’, whom she drew stealing oatcakes from a tin in a letter to Angela, Denis and Clare Mackail in January 1903.

  In 1890 she bought a rabbit from a pet shop ; she smuggled him home in a paper bag and christened him Benjamin H. Bouncer. She set to work drawing ‘noisy cheerful’ Benjamin and covered a sheet of paper with studies of his head, viewed from every angle. He proved a capricious animal : fond of peppermints, cabbage and gooseberries and with ‘an appetite for certain sorts of paint’,47 ‘at one moment amiably sentimental to the verge of silliness’, equally capable of the opposite. ‘He used to bang his hind-legs & rump against the wire fender in the school room as “he frisked around”.’48 He became the model for Peter Rabbit, whom Beatrix remembered later as ‘drawn from a very intelligent Belgian hare called Bounce’.49

  Benjamin was succeeded by Peter, ‘bought at a very tender age, in the Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush [sic], for the exorbitant sum of 4/6’ ;50 afterwards she could not remember why she called him Peter.51 Like the Peter Rabbit of her tales, the real Peter was more timorous than Benjamin ; he was calmer, biddable, ‘generally asleep before the fire’.52 ‘His disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet.’53 Beatrix sketched him awake and asleep ; in August 1899 she painted him ‘on an old quilt made of scraps of flannel and blue cloth which he always lay on’ in front of the nursery hearth.54 In a drawing called The Rabbit’s Dream, Peter dreams of sleeping in the half-tester bed in Bedroom 4 at Camfield Place, which had once been Beatrix’s room. The dreaming Peter forms the picture’s central vignette : around it is a border of smaller drawings of sleeping rabbits. Beatrix may have been inspired by Robert Buss’s popular painting of 1875, Dickens’ Dream, in which a sleeping Dickens is surrounded by characters from his novels. In time the success of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and the pressure she felt from her publishers to produce sequels, changed Beatrix’s attitude towards rabbits. Before that, indulgent of their shortcomings, she described them as ‘creatures of warm volatile temperament but shallow and absurdly transparent’, and their warmth, as well as their shallowness, enter
tained her through periods alone in the nursery after Bertram’s departure.55 Following Peter’s death on 26 January 1901, Beatrix described him simply as ‘an affectionate companion and a quiet friend’.56

  More than any of Beatrix’s pets, rabbits proved receptive to simple training, albeit inconsistently so. When hungry, Peter was adept at tricks : ‘jumping (stick, hands, hoop, back and forward), ringing a little bell and drumming on a tambourine.’57 Benjamin consented to be walked on a leather dog lead. Like Pig Robinson walking hand in hand with a sailor, this spectacle, Beatrix reported, ‘seemed to cause unbounded amusement’ to all who witnessed it.58

  Few of Beatrix’s schoolroom menagerie were formally sanctioned by her parents. With something approaching triumph, the twenty-three-year-old recorded that, following his purchase, Benjamin’s existence ‘was not observed by the nursery authorities for a week’.59 Nevertheless the Potters cannot have failed to be aware of the ‘secret’ denizens of the third floor, regularly smuggled up- and downstairs for more or less successful airings in the garden. In Benjamin’s case, there were no repercussions and he later acquired an outdoor hutch. Photographs indicate that, probably as a result, either Rupert or Helen decided to protect their flowerbeds with wire netting. Other animals met with less favourable responses. Helen Potter was vocal in her dislike of Bertram’s jay : ‘Mamma expressed her uncharitable hope that we might have seen the last of it,’ Beatrix wrote, after a journey in which the bird kicked at its travelling case and ‘swore’.60

  Despite their failure to recognise their children’s need for friends, Rupert and Helen Potter understood the companionship Beatrix and Bertram derived from their pets, an emotional outlet they otherwise lacked. Beatrix’s journal records time spent with her cousins, like her visit to the National Gallery with sisters Kate and Jessy Potter in the spring of 1882, but no time spent alone with her immediate contemporaries outside the family. Instead, of the company of Judy the lizard, she wrote, ‘I have had a great deal of pleasure from that little Creature.’61 She was eighteen, an age when the thoughts of other girls of her class could reasonably have been expected to be directed towards marriage. Significant among Beatrix’s impressions of her last governess, Annie Carter, who replaced Miss Hammond when Beatrix was seventeen and Miss Carter herself only twenty, is her statement that Annie Carter ‘was one of the youngest people I have ever seen’.62

  Until that point Beatrix’s life had been lived among her parents’ and grandparents’ contemporaries. She had not had opportunities for disputing and rejecting inherited views in company with her peers (although her journal offers many examples of her refusal to accept parental shibboleths unchallenged). Little wonder she set stories in the past : the Tailor of Gloucester struggles to make a living ‘in the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets’ ; Jeremy Fisher wears knee breeches and the cutaway coats of a Regency buck. The recent past was every bit as alive to Beatrix as her collection of tamed wildlife – in her grandmother’s tales of Crompton family history, overheard beneath the library table at Camfield ; in John Bright’s reminiscences of prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, whom he had known well ; in Nurse McKenzie’s folklore, The Lady of the Lake and the ‘Waverley’ novels ; in Millais’s reinvention of history in a succession of winsomely populist paintings ; and especially at Dalguise, where ‘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.’63 The past was a default setting for Beatrix’s imagination : she was reassured by its familiarity and seduced by its narrative possibilities.

  The significance of Beatrix Potter’s schoolroom menagerie extends beyond the self-proclaimed ‘thoroughness’ of her nature study. In her stories, characters are simultaneously animal and human, like Ginger and Pickles : ‘the people who kept the shop. Ginger was a yellow tom-cat, and Pickles was a terrier.’ Distinctions are fluid : double identity is both asserted and denied. Jemima Puddle-duck finds ‘mighty civil and handsome’ the ‘elegantly dressed gentleman… with black prick ears and sandy coloured whiskers’, and the reader does not challenge the incompatibility of the human traits of civility and elegant dressing with an animal’s black prick ears. Older readers recognise Mrs Tiggy-winkle as a hedgehog ; for younger readers, like Lucie in the story, the washerwoman’s identity is less certain, confused by human clothes, speech, occupation.

  This attitude to her imaginary animals was one Beatrix developed in her nursery dealings with her pets once she was left alone in the schoolroom after Bertram’s departure. Then her interest ceased to be either fully artistic or scientific. Rabbits, mice, hedgehogs filled a void. Beatrix looked for, and found in them, human quirks and habits, even training Mrs Tiggy to drink milk from a miniature teacup. Unselfconsciously she introduced Xarifa the dormouse to Potter family friends, including Millais and Bright. And afterwards Benjamin Bouncer featured in her dreams. Of a restless night in May 1890, she wrote that she ‘had an impression [in the small hours of the night] that Bunny came to my bedside in a white cotton nightcap and tickled me with his whiskers.’64

  Forced into protracted girlhood by her parents’ refusal to condone any measure of independence for their adult daughter, and cut off from friends of her own age, Beatrix played games on her hands and knees with the mouse she called Hunca Munca ; with a pair of garden scissors, she clipped Peter’s toenails ;65 she dreamt of being tickled by Benjamin’s whiskers in her bed. Her pets became the inseparable companions of her twenties and recipients of unfocused emotions. Benjamin and Hunca Munca travelled with her by train, contained within ‘a covered basket’ and a ‘small old box’ ; she travelled with Mrs Tiggy the hedgehog and, on different occasions, two birds’ skeletons and a container filled with eleven minnows.66 Of visits to her married cousin Edith at Melford Hall in Suffolk, Edith’s son Willie remembered his excitement at Beatrix’s arrival, ‘for she always brought a cage with mice, another with a hamster or a porcupine, and a third with something else in it’.67 At moments of need, ‘the rabbit hutch [was] a great resource’, serviceable as an additional trunk.68 Beatrix’s actions had ceased to be dictated by a naturalist’s curiosity – and the paintings of her pets she went on to produce rejected the would-be scientific aspect of her microscope studies of insect life. Anthropomorphism is the hallmark of Beatrix’s published work : animals with human characteristics. It was a habit of mind formed of necessity, the creative legacy of her isolation.

  ‘I have had so much pleasure from that box,’ Beatrix wrote in February 1904 to her publisher Norman Warne, whom she thanked for making ‘a little house’ for her mice. ‘I am never tired of watching them run up & down.’69 Even as she approached her thirty-eighth birthday, Beatrix remained absorbed by her mice.

  *

  On the western shore of Lake Windermere, high above the water close to the lake’s northernmost tip, Rupert and Helen Potter, with Beatrix, Bertram and Spot, arrived in the summer of 1882. Their destination was a crenelated grey-stone house, Wray Castle ; they stayed from the second week in July until the end of October. Miss Hammond arrived later.

  Built in the 1840s by a Liverpool doctor whose wife, Margaret Preston, had inherited a distilling fortune, this cumbersome structure of towers and mock arrow slits was Rupert’s solution to the prohibitive increase that year in the rental cost of Dalguise. Like Dalguise, Wray Castle offered fishing ; there was boating on the lake and, for Beatrix and Bertram, at sixteen and ten, unexplored walks and natural specimens that included a Douglas pine Beatrix labelled ‘one of the finest in England’.70 Timber felling by previous owners had left parts of the park sparsely planted ; close by there were damson, plum and walnut trees, elder thickets, a handful of towering beeches and a mulberry bush planted by Wordsworth. Long views stretched across the hills and the water. By the time the Potters returned to London, autumn cast across the country the rusty amber glow that Beatrix later captured in the Derwentwater setting of her illustrations to T
he Tale of Squirrel Nutkin : ‘the nuts were ripe, and the leaves on the hazel bushes were golden and green’. She always preferred the autumn. The holiday at Wray convinced her it was ‘far away the best time at the Lakes’.71

  Her journal is silent about her response to the heavyweight architectural fantasy that is Wray Castle, though later she would claim that ‘Victorian architects… did more mischief than Hitler’.72 Building costs, she noted, were rumoured at £60,000 ; the architect drank himself to death before completion. Beatrix’s painting of the library – red walls and timbered ceiling – shows a room of earnest decorative historicism. Rooms contained their fill of the old oak furniture Beatrix always loved : two years later, in an antiques shop in Oxford, she coveted an oak cupboard priced at six pounds that reminded her of one at Wray.73 Exposed to changeable weather, the Potters explored the vicinity on foot and by carriage ; they visited Hawkshead and Coniston, village churches, local beauty spots. Inevitably Rupert took photographs – the slow, precise preserving of memories. Beatrix missed Dalguise. After eleven summers, the change of holiday destination felt like a severance from the past. Yet there were unexpected intimations that her fledgling connection to the Lake District ran as deep as her passion for the Highlands. ‘Papa found a lock of hair in an old album here on a bit of paper,’ she wrote on 21 July. The paper dated from the school days of Margaret Preston. It stated ‘that the lock of hair was cut from the head of Fanny, 4th daughter of Abraham Crompton of Chorley Hall,’ Beatrix’s maternal great-grandfather.74

  The Potters returned to the Lake District throughout the next decade. Five times they based themselves at Lingholm, Colonel Kemp’s house on the banks of Derwentwater near Keswick ; on other occasions Rupert took a house in Near Sawrey called Lakefield. In May 1884, Rupert suggested a return to Dalguise. Beatrix’s response surprised her. ‘I feel an extraordinary dislike to this idea, a childish dislike, but the memory of that home is the only bit of childhood I have left.’75 With the parting from Scotland she had forcibly – and painfully – let go a part of herself. The break with childhood holiday routine and its memories of intense happiness discomfited Beatrix and she had no desire to unsettle cherished memories with an altered reality. Ten days later, she returned to the fray : ‘I cannot bear to see it again. How times and I have changed  !’76 She referred to Dalguise as ‘home’ and dreaded the spell breaking. Homecoming, she knew, was beyond her adult self.