Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  To Dalguise the Potters duly went, arriving on 27 May. Inevitably Beatrix lamented its changed aspect – ‘a horrid telegraph wire up to the house through the avenue, a Saw-Mill opposite the house’77 – though the changes lay as much within herself. She was susceptible to landscape. Once Dalguise had made her spirits soar ; now there were signs it might drag her down. Although there would be further Scottish holidays, she would discover that her consolation lay in the Lake District.

  • 4 •

  ‘Matters of complaint’

  Beatrix was fourteen when her father photographed her with Spot the spaniel on holiday in Scotland at Dalguise House.

  ‘Tom Kitten did not want to be shut up in a cupboard’

  The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, 1908

  ‘I HAVE PERSEVERED in nothing for more than a week at a time except toothache,’ Beatrix wrote at the end of 1886.1 Much of the year had passed her by, hostage to illness. She felt weak, ‘unsettled’, ‘demoralised’. For six months she had been unable to write her journal. There had been bouts of sickness ; she felt tired continually.

  The following spring, away again in the Lake District, a swollen ankle turned out to be rheumatic fever. The holiday was cut short and, for three weeks in London, Beatrix was confined to bed. ‘Could not be turned… without screaming out,’ she remembered. The pain settled in her legs. Maddeningly it moved ‘backwards and forwards, up and down each leg, never in more than one place at a time.’ After a fortnight, she was still only well enough to be lifted onto a sofa for two hours each afternoon. She was treated with hot flannels, camphor and quinine.2

  The atmosphere in Bolton Gardens became frazzled. Helen reached ‘her wits end’, a response that may or may not suggest sympathy for her daughter. For his part, Rupert was worrying about Bertram, who had taken a violent dislike to his public school, Charterhouse, from his first term, in the autumn of 1886. He had since contracted pleurisy. Bertram’s pleurisy, added to an outbreak of diphtheria which killed the school matron, forced Rupert reluctantly to withdraw his son, who returned instead to The Grange. Millais sent Beatrix ‘a little note when I was in bed with the rheumatics, take the world as we find it’.3 Even at this stage she needed few lessons in stoicism.

  Beatrix was accustomed to feeling unwell. Colds and headaches had dogged her childhood. Like Miss Matilda Pussycat in The Fairy Caravan, she was prone to neuralgia, with its stabbing pains in the head and the neck ; like Chippy Hackee in The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes, she suffered from head colds. On 22 February 1883, she had noted in her journal, ‘Have had a cold most of the time since Christmas… Think it’s going to stop till Easter’ ;4 the year ended as it had begun with bad colds again.5 Before then, an unexplained lump on her right wrist provoked a mixed response of anxiety and irritation. In November the doctor pricked and drained it, leaving her temporarily without the use of her right hand.6 She described her head as ‘uncertain’7 – dizzy and painful : she was no stranger to the sensation. Her mother would describe her as ‘apt to be sick and to faint’.8

  Unable to understand or control her debilitation, Beatrix marvelled at those more fortunate than herself. Fashionable society women – corseted, primped but busy – became objects of her fascination. In her journal she asked, ‘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 ?’9 Her attitude was one of puzzled envy rather than admiration and the feelings of exhaustion that overwhelmed her were real enough.

  In March 1885, when Beatrix was nineteen, her hair was cut off. Previously it had reached to within inches of her knees. ‘I may say without pride that I have seldom seen a more beautiful head of hair than mine,’ she commented wistfully after it was gone ; she described herself as having ‘a red nose and a shorn head’.10 Over preceding months illness had caused much of her hair to fall out : the hairdresser’s task was simply one of tidying up.11 Like Timmy Willie’s ‘insignificant’ tail in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, her cropped head, so at odds with current hairdressing fashions, was an indignity to Beatrix and, Samson-like, she experienced a sense of diminishment. As a curiosity, Rupert photographed his daughter with her ‘shorn head’. Neither Beatrix nor her parents understood that her hair would never grow back completely.

  Two months later, Rupert was unamused by an incident at the International Inventions Exhibition. ‘Since my hair is cut my hats won’t stick on,’ Beatrix explained. A gust swept her hat clean off her head into a fountain, causing ‘immense amusement’ to bystanders but ‘consternation’ to Rupert. Clearly his response did not spare Beatrix’s feelings. ‘I always thought I was born to be a discredit to my parents, but it was exhibited in a marked manner today,’ she stated baldly. The breezy matter-of-factness of her tone failed her : ‘he does not often take me out, and I doubt he will do it again for a long time.’12 Aside from illness, Beatrix was plagued by a lack of confidence.

  *

  In Beatrix’s books incomplete families and poor parenting are the norm. Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten and Pigling Bland are fatherless. Jemima Puddle-duck is on course to prove herself an inadequate mother and Tabitha Twitchit is an ‘anxious parent’, who oscillates between affronted firmness and complete lack of control. Despite affectionate natures, Benjamin Bunny and Flopsy suggest a degree of irresponsibility. Pig Robinson lives with his aunts Dorcas and Porcas, whose surrogacy wants vigilance. In the absence both of mother and father, Squirrel Nutkin and Twinkleberry embody stereotypes of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sibling ; Nutkin lacks discipline and craves attention. Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca seem unlikely to impress upon their offspring clear notions of right and wrong.

  Insofar as they acknowledge that animals do not typically live in nuclear families, the tales reflect truth to nature. Added to this, parentlessness is a conceit of children’s literature : in many stories, lack of parental supervision is essential to the plot. In Beatrix’s carefully crafted fictions, her focus on flawed parenting indicates more than a desire for realism. From a reasonably young age, her attitude to her own parents included ambivalence and, often, exasperation.

  By the time she was fourteen, she had begun a secret diary. Late in life, in her only known reference to the journal, she explained her motives as ‘a united admiration of Boswell and Pepys’ and ‘the itch to write, without having any material to write about’.13 Within the journal itself, her only reference to ‘common’ Pepys is disparaging ; it seems more likely that Beatrix was inspired by Pepys’s use of private cipher than the substance of his diary.

  From her first entry, she devised a code of her own to protect her journal from prying eyes . This clandestine quality added to the enjoyment of the undertaking, which she maintained, in a series of ordinary lined exercise books, on and off for sixteen years. ‘I used to write long-winded descriptions, hymns (!) and records of conversations,’ Beatrix explained in old age. She chronicled current affairs, faithfully reproducing Rupert’s commentary ; and she noted down humorous anecdotes gleaned from magazines and newspapers, like the story of the servant in a Continental hotel, who ‘copied down [a] gentleman’s name from his portmanteau’ : ‘Mr Warranted Solid Matter’.14 The journal records holidays, scenery, natural history. There are apparently verbatim reports of conversations and painstaking transcriptions of her grandmother and great-aunts’ reminiscences. The business of memory itself recurs, Beatrix asserting the crispness of her own recall, which included memories of learning to walk and learning to read. She lingered over memories of her childhood, insisting on happiness past. Recording memory – confining it within words and giving it concrete shape on the page – was one way Beatrix sought to control her self-identity.

  Throughout the journal self-assessment is intermittent. Beatrix deals briskly with references to her state of mind ; her pauses for reflection are relatively few. At times her meaning is el
usive, as if she struggles to make sense of her shifting moods. Her description of 1884, for example, is clogged with contradictions : ‘So cold and stormy, and yet such gleams of peace and light making the darkness stranger and more dreary.’15 Instead, the journal impresses upon the reader, in details that are more often implied than explicit, striking portraits of Rupert and Helen Potter and intimations of a gulf between parents and child. Of the Potters’ twentieth wedding anniversary in 1883, for example, Beatrix comments laconically : ‘They have been married twenty years today.’16 There is an unaffectionate quality to that starkly unadorned pronoun, ‘they’. Equally marked are the journal’s indications of Beatrix’s own strength of character. She emerges as a young woman engaged in a struggle for self-determinism. Her desire to decide the course of her life is stubborn and her wish to dedicate herself entirely to her painting an unorthodox aspiration within the Potters’ studiedly conformist milieu. It seems unlikely that Beatrix confided these hopes fully to her parents, particularly her mother, whose behaviour points to a conventional approach to sexual politics, or that she failed to understand the circumscribed nature of female independence in a conservative household of the 1880s. And her ideas remained unresolved. She longed for the freedom to decide her own course : she was sufficiently her parents’ daughter to ‘hold an old-fashioned notion that a happy marriage is the crown of a woman’s life’, although almost certain to involve at least partial surrender of the free choice she craved.17 Even as she clamoured for independence and control in the matter of her painting, the Beatrix of her twenties was, like her parents, instinctively conservative.

  Her reaction to a portrait betrays something of her state of mind. In 1882, Beatrix’s cousin Kate, the eldest of the three daughters of Rupert’s eldest brother, Crompton Potter, sat for Briton Rivière. Beatrix was sixteen, her near contemporary Kate acknowledged as the beauty of the family. Rivière’s hefty fee of £1,000 reflected his status, according to Beatrix, as ‘one of the foremost living artists’ – and presumably the esteem in which Kate’s father, who collected paintings by Rivière, held his pretty daughter.18

  His portrait of Kate Potter includes her black poodle Figaro and a lively pug. Handsomely dressed in red and black, she stands in front of an old oak court cupboard. With one hand she makes to open the upper door, while the dogs wait in lively expectation. Beatrix took exception to the pug. She considered the figure of Kate poorly painted.

  For once Beatrix was in full agreement with her parents. Exhibited at the Royal Academy that summer, Cupboard Love provoked in this prickly and socially ambitious couple a degree of chagrin. ‘After all one has heard, it is not as bad as I expected,’ Beatrix reflected in her journal. Then the twist of the knife : ‘Should not have known Kate, but it is rather a pretty picture. The chief part of it, however, is taken up by the cupboard.’19 She returned to the fray two years later when, following Crompton Potter’s death, his paintings were sold at auction : ‘Rivière certainly does not draw figures well. He took a great deal of trouble over Kate, and was very well satisfied with it, but it certainly is not good.’20 With faintest possible praise, she described it as ‘a smooth neat picture’.21 Her reaction was acidulated in its contempt.

  The cause of Beatrix’s irritation, however, differed from that of her parents. She understood Kate’s portrait as a rite of passage, a public acknowledgement of adulthood. Three years later, to Beatrix’s consternation and Rupert’s horror, Kate became engaged to a Captain Cruikshank, without fortune or family and not a Unitarian. ‘I can’t understand the girl not having more self-pride or ambition… Love in a cottage is sentimental, but the parties must be very pleasing to each other to make it tolerable,’ Beatrix commented tellingly in her journal ; for his part, Rupert was ‘grieved and exasperated to tears’.22 The same autumn, Kate’s sister Blanche and another Potter cousin, Emily, also accepted proposals of marriage, both more ‘suitable’ than Kate’s. But Beatrix remained on the third floor at Bolton Gardens, temporarily at loggerheads with her parents over her future. So far was she from matrimony that wearily she described her mother’s warnings against marrying a cousin – Emily Potter’s case – as ‘an unnecessary precaution’.23 ‘I may be lonely, but better that than an unhappy marriage,’ she consoled herself without conviction.24 By her mid-twenties Beatrix was so lonely that she invented an imaginary friend, Esther, to whom she addressed lengthy disquisitions in her journal, influenced by her reading of eighteenth-century novelist and diarist Fanny Burney. Her riposte came later, in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan, when Duchess searches Ribby’s cupboards. In an illustration entitled ‘Where is the pie made of mouse ?’, Beatrix revisited Rivière’s painting. Like Kate, Duchess is presented to the viewer in profile.

  *

  The period following Bertram’s departure for boarding school in April 1883 had proved unusually challenging for Beatrix. Within a week of his absence, she was using her journal as a repository for fluctuating emotions. ‘I am up one day and down another. Have been a long way down today, and now my head feels empty and I am nothing particular.’25 She was months short of her seventeenth birthday. Miss Hammond’s tenure in the schoolroom was over : she had no more to impart. Beatrix interpreted her removal as a sign that her formal education was at an end. From now on, she would be free to pursue her own course of study, centred on her art : ‘I thought to have set in view German, English Reading, and General Knowledge, cutting off more and more time for painting.’26 She did not anticipate the extent to which she would miss the governess who, for eleven years, had been her constant companion. Nor did she regret unduly her parting from her first art teacher, Miss Cameron, in May.

  But Helen had other ideas. Without consulting her daughter, she had appointed Annie Carter as Beatrix’s new governess ; Miss Hammond would remain in touch with the household at 2 Bolton Gardens. Beatrix was disappointed. Like Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca thwarted by the plaster ham on the doll’s house dining table – the pudding, the lobster, the pears and the oranges – her disappointment led to anger. ‘If they said I must, I’d do it willingly enough, only my temper’d be very nasty,’ she wrote.27 She concluded that Rupert would not force her to remain in the schoolroom, and blamed her mother. Helen may have attempted to placate Beatrix. The new arrangement, she reassured her, was for a year only. Miss Carter stayed till July 1885, when, unexpectedly, she left to get married.

  In the event, any placating was done by Miss Carter herself. Beatrix came to regard her last governess as her best, and the women remained friends following Annie Carter’s marriage to Edwin Moore and removal to married homes in Bayswater then Wandsworth Common. And schoolroom lessons were only part of the problem. Bertram was Beatrix’s junior by six years. His companionship had prolonged the illusion of childhood. With Bertram gone, that illusion vanished as completely as visits to sail his model boats on the Round Pond or in the gardens of the Horticultural Society ; like holidays at Dalguise, a chapter of Beatrix’s life was over. Yet she remained in the schoolroom : Miss Carter’s presence was proof of that. Was she a child, then, or an adult ? ‘Is this being a grown-up ?’ she asked in her journal.28

  Her uncertainty was genuine. She was struggling with a series of losses : Bertram, Miss Hammond, her own private Eden at Dalguise, and the deaths of two of her grandparents, Edmund Potter, in October 1883, and Jane Leech the following year. The combined effect was to detach Beatrix from her childhood, without offering her any compensations of adulthood. Hers remained an existence without autonomy : a sense of her own powerlessness contributed to her anxiety. She mistrusted her mother. Sporadically she felt at odds with her ‘fidgetty’ father, who was ‘sometimes a little difficult’.29 Left behind by Bertram, she found herself friendless – unsupported and painfully outnumbered. The only outlets for her emotions were of her own devising : her painting, her journal and her pets. But Miss Carter’s timetable prevented wholesale absorption in her art ; the consolations of the journal were middling. Previously Bertram’s presence ha
d provided Beatrix with a degree of self-affirmation – what she described later as ‘a mutual admiration society’ :30 their shared enthusiasms were their joint bulwark against their parents. In his absence home life unbalanced. There were disagreements, tension, discord. Discussing earthquakes the following spring, she commented in her journal ‘domestic ones are only too frequent’.31 And her health continued to fluctuate, as it always would. She succumbed to mumps. A gumboil kept her in bed for a week.32 Bilious attacks left her too weak to travel across London by Underground.33 ‘Seven sorts of medicine, including calomel, and no solid[s]’ were used to treat an autumn chill.34 She began to think of herself, with partial justification, as an invalid. As late as June 1897, she decided to avoid Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession : ‘It is too hot. I shall stop at home and hang a large flag out of the window.’35 Whether her parents were responsible for this attitude, or simply sought to manipulate it, is unclear. ‘Her mother tried to keep her as a semi-invalid far too much,’ remembered one of Beatrix’s cousins.36