Over the Hills and Far Away

by Matthew Dennison

  Her birthday in July inspired no surge of happy feelings, although brother and sister were reunited for the summer holidays. ‘I have heard it called “sweet seventeen”, no indeed, what a time we are, have been having, and shall have’.37 Without descending to details, Beatrix makes her feelings clear enough. Past, present, future : all inspire the same despondency. And that ‘we’ surely suggests unhappiness ingrained at the very heart of the family. She had begun thinking about the story that became The Tale of Little Pig Robinson ; unsurprisingly, she failed to complete it. As finished in 1930, ‘the most peculiar adventures that ever happened to a pig’ include escape from predictable domesticity to an island of abundance. Provided with everything he could possibly want to eat – Beatrix’s version of porcine fulfilment – Robinson is ‘not at all inclined to return to Stymouth’. It sounds like wishful thinking.

  Bertram would describe his mother as ‘the sort of woman who would have you pushed in a perambulator until you got out and said you would rather walk’.38 Rupert and Helen Potter lacked purpose and, apparently, ambition beyond the most run-of-the-mill social aspirations, but they wanted neither force of will nor the instinct to control. At seventeen, Beatrix remained in her mother’s eyes a child. Beatrix’s protest was largely confined to the silent mutterings of her journal. It was only her sense of vocation – untested and unproven – that encouraged her to dispute her mother’s view.

  Her unhappiness came and went, powerful while it lasted. In its grip she described her life as a ‘dark journey’. ‘Odious fits of low spirits’ spoilt everything ; she had begun to dread the future.39 She did not propose a solution, though always at the back of her mind was the prospect of extra time to devote to her painting. In the meantime she ricocheted between more or less serious ailments. Nervous strain contributed to her affliction, which emerges from her journal as neurasthenic – painful headaches, unusual tiredness, lassitude, irritability, and all with no identifiable cause beyond an ongoing emotional uncertainty. For the most part the journal does not attribute blame directly and, in fact, culpability was not straightforward. If Helen Potter erred in not involving Beatrix in decisions about her continuing education, Beatrix was equally immoveable in her idée fixe that her future was only concerned with painting. As her rigorous self-imposed apprenticeship as a naturalist proved, Beatrix was every bit as determined as either of her parents. She admitted that the cause of ‘so many scrapes’ at home was her ‘self-will’.40 Emotionally she was out of kilter with both Helen and Rupert. Distant from her mother’s world of social niceties and unable to impersonate with any conviction her father’s ideas of finesse, she imagined herself cumbrous and ungainly ; ‘I feel like a cow in a drawing room,’ she wrote on 29 April 1884.41 Racked by shyness, Beatrix lacked self-assurance. Like Mr Jackson the toad, in the pristine house belonging to Mrs Tittlemouse in the bank under the hedge, she struggled to make herself ‘fit’.

  Among her resources were the paintings she saw in the many exhibitions she visited with Rupert. At the Winter Exhibition of Old Masters, held in January 1883 at the Royal Academy, Beatrix had been struck by an allegorical figure of Faith by Reynolds. The painting of the figure’s face impressed her powerfully : fixed in her memory, she held fast to it like a totem. Faith was proof of art’s potency ; it was also her incentive. By aspiring to Faith’s distinctive qualities, Beatrix would achieve her ambition to ‘do something’. In the short term, the single-mindedness of her focus challenged her parents’ plans. The fixity with which she clung to her pipe dream contributed little to Beatrix’s sense of wellbeing.

  Once art had been an emollient aspect of Potter family life : Beatrix appears to have found it increasingly contentious. Her journal documents Rupert’s critical response to the paintings he saw, including, in June 1884, those in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. ‘They were dreadful, certainly some of them, but I am sure he has not the least idea of the difficulty of painting a picture. He can draw very well, but he has hardly attempted water-colour, and never oil. A person in this state, with a correct eye, and good taste, and great experience of different painters, sees all the failures and not the difficulties.’42 In November Rupert’s disdain targeted Millet and Corot.43 Unsure of herself, and perhaps on the lookout for grounds for dissent, Beatrix assumed unfairly that her father’s criticism would be redoubled in assessing her own efforts. She had begun to withhold her opinions when they were together : ‘when I go to a gallery, I always avoid mentioning defects out loud (to myself I say what I like), however plainly I see them’. Regretfully she was afraid of ‘showing much of my attempts to him’.

  Rupert does not appear to have equated Beatrix’s desire to paint with his own passion for photography ; he did not act as any sort of intermediary with Helen on Beatrix’s behalf or show Beatrix particular understanding. Beatrix acknowledged that hers was an obsession : like all obsessions, it had its irrational side. ‘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.’44 Arguably the very ‘irresistibility’ of Beatrix’s desire proved the legitimacy of her feelings, but there was no one to support this view. Disorientated and lonely, she found herself relying on art to hold at bay her demons. ‘When I have had a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever,’ she noted.45 And so her dissatisfaction set her on a downward spiral. The inability to paint as much as she wished made for ‘bad times’, which in turn demanded painting as respite. Even ‘the sight of… wonderful pictures’ in London galleries had begun to cast her down.46

  Having encouraged her taste for drawing and painting since infancy, the Potters did not deny their daughter’s claim to a vocation. They arranged a costly course of twelve lessons in oil painting with a Mrs A., recommended by the widow of former president of the Royal Academy, Sir Charles Eastlake. These supplemented the lessons in drawing and watercolour that Beatrix had received from Miss Cameron since 1878. In both cases, Beatrix was quick to find herself out of sympathy with her teacher. Her response was to regard the lessons as a means of increasing her technical proficiency. Beatrix admitted that ‘technical difficulties can be taught’ ; the ability to see must be innate.47 She held as tightly as possible to her own way of doing things. After two lessons with Mrs A., she was already fretful in her journal : ‘It is a risky thing to copy, shall I catch it ?’ So acute was her anxiety that it kept her awake at night.

  She cannot have been an easy pupil. She complained that ‘it is tiresome, when you do get some lessons, to be taught in a way you dislike and to have to swallow your feelings out of considerations at home and there.’48 By the end of 1884 her conviction was stronger than ever that practice, not lessons, would improve her painting. With fine equivocation, she wrote in her journal ‘I hope it is not pride that makes me so stiff against teaching, but a bad or indifferent teacher is worse than none. It cannot be taught, nothing after perspective, anatomy and the mixing of paints with medium.’49 She clung to a statement by Millais : ‘It is surprising how much is to be learnt alone.’50 She does not record how much of this she communicated to her parents, but the reader’s sympathies are divided between parents and child. What cannot be doubted is Beatrix’s confidence in her own vision.

  It was not enough to make her happy. As Beatrix concluded of her lessons with Miss Cameron, ‘If you and your master are determined to look at nature and art in two different directions you are sure to stick’, and determination undoubtedly played its part in Beatrix’s reaction to both her teachers.51 Her overwhelming desire to paint and pursue her own course made her frequently disaffected ; it impacted on the solid regularity of life at 2 Bolton Gardens. Looking back over the course of 1885 in her journal, Beatrix described it as comprised of ‘much bitterness and a few peaceful summer days. Oh life, wearisome, disappointing, and yet in many shades so sweet’,52 a self-conscious assessment that nevertheless accurately c
aptures facets of her experience in her late teens and early twenties. She added that she was ‘terribly afraid of the future. Some fears will inevitably be fulfilled, and the rest is dark.’

  Alone in the nursery, mostly without Bertram, and yet to achieve any measure of independence through painting, writing – or marriage – she anticipated only darkness. She would describe herself as living ‘so much asleep and out of life that the old world of books is almost as tangible as the new world of the times’.53 Within that lament were seeds of her escape. The Beatrix of her late teens did not yet aspire to become a children’s author, but in ‘the old world of books’ her salvation lay.

  *

  In the end it was ‘a five minutes wonder’ that propelled Beatrix into print at the age of twenty-four and offered her, relatively young, grounds for hope despite her unconventional ambitions. Short-term exigency also played a part : in her own words ‘a desire for coin to the amount of £6’.54

  She and Bertram wanted to buy a printing machine : at sixteen pounds, it was six pounds too expensive. Their joint expedient of Beatrix creating a series of designs for Christmas and New Year cards was trialled on members of their family over Christmas 1889. After fleeting initial approbation all round (the ‘five minutes wonder’), it was Rupert’s brother-in-law, Sir Henry Roscoe, married to his sister Lucy, who suggested a publisher ‘would snap at’ Beatrix’s hand-drawn designs. No practical advice, or any offer of help, bolstered kind words.

  More than a month elapsed, then Beatrix set to work ‘privately to prepare Six Designs’, the undertaking a secret from her parents. Benjamin Bouncer was her model ; her best ideas, she claimed, came to her in chapel. As in her later work, the watercolours purchased for six pounds by Hildesheimer & Faulkner by return of post on 14 May 1890 included upright rabbit figures dressed in human clothes. Their hybrid costumes nodded to the eighteenth century : greatcoats, ribbons and dainty reticules. Hildesheimer & Faulkner afterwards issued Beatrix’s designs as illustrations to a booklet of doggerel, A Happy Pair, by Frederick E. Weatherly, author of the popular song ‘Roses of Picardy’. Her name did not appear in the booklet – only her initials, H. B. P.

  Neither Miss Cameron nor Mrs A. had altered Beatrix’s estimation of her own work. Nor did her meeting with Mr Faulkner, in his offices in the City, encourage Beatrix to reappraise the work she meant to undertake. ‘He did not strike me as being a person with much taste,’ she commented drily. She was happy with the deal she had struck : nothing in her own account suggests a temptation to compromise in order to perpetuate the association of Hildesheimer & Faulkner and H. B. P. The former wanted humour, anthropomorphism close to caricature. As time would show, Beatrix’s own humour was subtler and more subversive. Her sole concession was the pair of drawings she offered Mr Faulkner of guinea pigs wearing trousers.55

  Instead, over the course of the following year, she sent watercolours to Frederick Warne & Co. Founded in 1865, the company had already published illustrated books by Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway ; in 1871 it issued Edward Lear’s Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, which included Beatrix’s favourite ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’. Warne returned Beatrix sketches. On 12 November 1891, the company indicated that, in place of booklets, it would be happy to consider ‘ideas & drawings in book form’.56 A decade would pass before Beatrix rose to the challenge.

  • 5 •

  ‘I shall tell you a story’

  Beatrix with Benjamin H. Bouncer on a lead, September 1891. Known as Bounce, this rabbit was Beatrix’s model for the first paintings she sold – to a greetings card publisher, Hildesheimer & Faulkner.

  ‘I wish to hatch my own eggs; I will hatch them all by myself ’

  The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, 1908

  IT BEGAN with an illness and a letter.

  ‘I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter,’ Beatrix wrote on 4 September 1893. She was in Perthshire with her parents. As she wrote, she illustrated each of the eight pages. On the following day she wrote again. ‘Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank of a river.’

  The first letter’s recipient was Noel Moore, the eldest of the children of Beatrix’s former governess Annie Carter ; Beatrix addressed the second letter to Noel’s brother Eric. Like Beatrix as a child, Noel was often unwell. He was ill in bed as she wrote, though not, as Beatrix explained of Peter in her letter, ‘in consequence of overeating himself’.1 Beatrix described him later as ‘the lame boy’, on account of polio.2 Fair-mindedness prompted the dispatch of Eric’s letter, which she also illustrated.

  Beatrix was a regular visitor to the Moores ; she wrote to both boys over the course of the next decade. The habit had begun the previous spring, when she sent four-year-old Noel a letter from Falmouth : she illustrated her descriptions with doodles of palm trees and fishermen, chickens, ducks and a tabby cat on the harbour steps. On another occasion she was moved to write ‘picture letters to the little Moores’ from Scotland, watching ‘a squirrel in the laburnum under the window mobbed by about thirty sparrows and some chaffinches’. ‘Its fierce excited little movements,’ she commented, ‘reminded me of a monkey.’3 With her on her visits to south London at one time and another she had taken Benjamin Bouncer and a succession of mice in their travelling boxes. These and other animals populated the letters Beatrix sent Noel, Eric and, in time, their sisters Freda, Marjorie, Norah, Joan and Hilda ; Beatrix sent no picture letters to the youngest Moore daughter, her goddaughter and namesake Beatrix. Without news to share, she took refuge in storytelling – in addition to Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher, ideas that would become the tales of Pig Robinson and Squirrel Nutkin and chapters of The Fairy Caravan.

  Beatrix was twenty-seven, unmarried and childless when she described to Noel those ‘four little rabbits’. At the end of her life, she would assert that ‘the secret of good writing is to have something to say – and write with an end in view’ ;4 she advised an aspiring writer to write as if for her own children, as she had directed her story purposefully at a particular child. In September 1893, Beatrix’s end in writing to Noel Moore her first version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was Noel’s distraction : as she commented afterwards, ‘Peter never aspired to be high art.’5 Nor, with the letter posted, did her own thoughts dwell on her story. Unsurprisingly, she set Peter’s tale in ‘that pleasant unchanging world of realism and romance’ which meant for Beatrix the countryside, a region where fact and fancy could profitably overlap.6 Her journal is unrevealing about the Scottish holiday that year or her state of mind : there is nothing to suggest that Beatrix intended more for either Noel or Eric’s stories than the boys’ immediate entertainment.

  Yet she approached each letter as she would her finished tales. She wrote with economy and humour, closely matching her pen-and-ink illustrations to events described. Several of Beatrix’s pictures in Noel’s letter were recycled virtually unaltered in the published tale : Mrs Rabbit dosing Peter with camomile tea, Peter encountering Mr McGregor round the end of the cucumber frame. Beatrix used Benjamin for her model ; her drawings are without backgrounds and all botanical details are simplified, but there is evidence of that ‘thoroughness’ on which she prided herself – in the sureness of her draughtsmanship and Peter’s tangible emotions so simply conveyed. ‘Children take things seriously,’ Beatrix wrote.7 Her own seriousness of purpose matched childish earnestness. Noel Moore’s story represents the epistolary equivalent of a dress rehearsal – albeit the interval between Beatrix’s letter and publication in book form was lengthy.

  Aged nineteen, Beatrix had been critical in her appraisal of a drawing by John Flaxman, whom she otherwise admired. Flaxman’s subject in this instance was a Cyclops, one of the mythical race of one-eyed giants. Beatrix considered it a failure. Searching for an explanation, she told herself that drawing that was wholly imaginary could never succeed. ‘Th
ere is no such thing as imagination, in the vulgar sense of forming what never has been seen, it is all patchwork and imitation. Having seen eyes, it is easy enough to say “having one eye instead of two”, but it is impossible to tell what the creature would look like.’8 It was not a trap into which she meant to fall. From childhood her drawing had focused on accurate observation. Once she began writing for children, the same impulse – towards ‘patchwork and imitation’ – marked her illustrations, starting with her letter to Noel Moore : Peter is a real rabbit ; the setting for his adventure is an amalgam of gardens Beatrix knew ; within this garden the reader recognises broad beans, lettuces and cabbage, a gooseberry net and a basket exactly large enough to trap a wild rabbit (this will eventually become a circular sieve). When Beatrix came to draw Jeremy Fisher the next day, she was able to take inspiration from her memories of her own frog, Punch, supplemented by black-and-white illustrations to A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go by Randolph Caldecott : four of Caldecott’s frog sketches, bought by Rupert, hung in Bolton Gardens, visible whenever Beatrix was at home. She had no need to rely on ‘imagination in the vulgar sense’.

  In her sketchbooks she had practised accurately recording nature ; in the nursery, training a mouse with a handkerchief or teaching her hedgehog to drink milk from a cup, she had imbued nature with human personality, blurring distinctions between animal and human in the fashion of writers from Aesop to Joel Chandler Harris, author of the ‘Brer Rabbit’ stories, both of whom she read and enjoyed. She read fairy tales, nursery rhymes and old collections of children’s verse ; in Scotland the following year she spent a hot afternoon reading Rhymes and Fairy Tales by Robert Chambers, author of Popular Rhymes of Scotland and Poems for Young People.9 Hand in hand with her inclination towards anthropomorphism was a narrative dimension to Beatrix’s pictures – the reason Hildesheimer & Faulkner were able to reuse her designs for Christmas cards to illustrate Weatherly’s doggerel. Truncated and uncoloured, the version of the Peter Rabbit story Beatrix sent Noel Moore was still capable of capturing a child’s imagination. Intrinsic to its success was the deftness of her sketches, described by Beatrix as ‘scribbled pen and ink’, and the sharpness of her focus : stories written for ‘real children’.10