The Tale of Beatrix Potter

Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast. I'm Sean Douglas, a senior producer at the National Trust. And today I'm gonna start things slightly differently by telling you a story. So sit back, make yourself comfortable. And let's begin.

Once upon a time in Victorian London, there was a remarkable young girl that lived part of her life in a world of her own making. It was an enchanting land where animals could talk and had mischievous characters. There were disobedient rabbits, disrespectful squirrels and a very determined duck. But the real world wasn't always as rosy. In her normal life she had few friends who appreciated her particular ways.

Beatrix Potter is one of the most successful children's writers of all time. In her lifetime she wrote and illustrated 28 books, including the 23 tales, which have sold more than 250 million copies. This is the author, most of us know and love, but it's just a fraction of the story that makes up the life of the remarkable Beatrix Potter.

I am, Yeah.

And you're Annemarie, you're from the V&A? That's right. Traditionally in the National Trust. The story of Beatrix Potter is hilltop.

Absolutely. It has become the setting for so many of her books and her stories. What we do by bringing these objects out of context is show their significance throughout her entire life in a brand new way that people I don't think will expect.

I'm intrigued to see what I'm going to see. So should we crack on?

The exhibition has four rooms. The first room, town and country is the backdrop, the context for the rest of the exhibition.

So as I walk in, I'm kind of noticing that there's a lot of photography. And I would think coming to a Beatrix Potter exhibition, it would all be about the water colours?

Beatrix's father was an amateur photographer. We've got images from her from when she was a baby right up until when Beatrix was in her forties.

The first image we see is this quite grainy image.

I really love this image. It's one of my favorites. It shows a really tiny young Beatrix in an extremely large drawing room window. She's surrounded by a mass of ivy. It's really evocative of this idea of her growing up in a townhouse. But really in her life, she was drawn to nature and the natural world.

Beatrix had the childhood of a Victorian young lady, which really was quite an isolated one. I'm Sarah Gristwood and I'm the author of the story of Beatrix Potter. She was home schooled. She really didn't have a huge amount of company except for her brother. And of course, for her all important pets. Beatrix was born in London in 1866 but she later wrote of it as my unloved birthplace. She told someone that her brother and she were born in London. Our roots, our hearts were in the north country.

It was during these holidays that Beatrix and her brother Bertram developed a fascination with the natural world and began to observe it with the sharpest of young eyes.

So we're going to look at one of the key objects in this section under the microscope, which is Beatrix and her brother Bertram's collector's cabinet. The contents of the drawers are filled with specimens from the natural world that are hand labelled by Beatrix. We only actually have one drawer on display in the exhibition. It's filled with rocks and fossils and geological specimens. Now, the cabinet normally lives at the Beatrix Potter Gallery which the National Trust runs and cares for.

To understand how Beatrix's travels between the city and the countryside helped shape her young mind, the next part of our story transports us to the fresh air and rolling hills of the Lake District. So I've made my way 250 miles northwest of the V&A to the picturesque village of Hawkshead. As you enter this village, you're hit by the abundance of stone and slate which pretty much all the buildings, cottages and churches are made out of.

Hi Sean, how you doing?

Hi Laura, Thank you. This place is such a contrast to the V&A. You know, you've got these perfectly designed sets and here, It's like something out of Dickensian novel or something.

Exactly, yeah, It's got loads of atmosphere and with the creaky floorboards and wonky walls, it's a totally different feel to the V&A.

Why I really wanted to come here was to see some of the other drawers from the display cabinet that I'd seen at the V&A. Can we go and have a look at some of those?

Of course, let's do that. So this is one of the drawers containing butterflies and moths caught by Beatrix Potter, all different species. Some of them probably don't exist anymore. But then there's some more common ones like Red Admirals and Tortoiseshell and Painted Ladies.

They are beautiful but it is a little bit macabre. I mean, what I'm looking at is over 50 butterflies in the drawer with pins stuck through them.

We wouldn't do it now, we much prefer to see butterflies flying around, but it was quite normal to do then. It would have been a way of keeping themselves occupied when they were on holiday.

For Beatrix and Bertram collecting these specimens was a way of feeding their curiosity as well as giving them a window on the world outside the confines of their strict Victorian upbringing. Back to Beatrix Potter's biographer, Sarah Gristwood.

Beatrix's family home, on the one hand, it was this place of absolute Victorian respectability. On the other hand, she had this extraordinary range of pets there. Not just the famous rabbits but things like salamanders, hedgehogs. I mean, she and her brothers had bats, birds of all sorts. The place must have been alive with grunts and squeaks.

They adored their pets so much. They took them everywhere.

There are amazing pictures of Beatrix boarding a train in London with a Rabbit on the lead. I mean, she and her brother took their pets on holiday with them, but again, we're not just talking, you know, dogs or a cat in a cage or something. We are talking this absolute menagerie. She absolutely saw animals and other aspects of nature as something to study as well. I mean, she'd be doing extraordinary things like bringing a bat into the house, you know, smuggled in, in a paper bag.

It was through the hours spent drawing and cataloguing her specimens that her skills as an artist really started to shine.

I'm looking now at a page from a sketchbook she made when she was only eight years old. It's a page of careful drawings of insects, caterpillars and the plants on which they feed. Beautifully detailed, It's impossible to realize that it's a young child doing that.

As her fascination with the natural world grew. She'd even dissect her specimens to gain a better understanding of their anatomy.

She was quite unsentimental when they died. She and her brother would even boil the skeletons down to study and to draw.

Some of these are on display in the Beatrix Potter exhibition back at the V&A including one very surprising specimen, as curator Helen Antrobus reveals.

First and foremost, they were scientists and even their favourite pets didn't escape that scientific treatment. Now, Benjamin Bouncer, which was Beatrix's pet Rabbit who would become the inspiration for Benjamin Bunny. When he died, of natural causes, I feel I should stress! Beatrix, we believe skinned Benjamin so she could keep his pelt. He had been her model for so long that I think she wanted to keep it to ensure consistency and detail in her work.

Back to V&A curator, Annemarie Bilclough.

Probably when she was a teenager, Beatrix started to take drawings of what she saw through microscopes. For example, here is a beetle shown at different levels of magnification. Later on, she also produced lithographs for a teacher who gave lectures in natural history. So she's starting to move into the world of scientific illustrator. Around the same time in the mid 1880s, she became interested in mycology, which is the study of fungi.

During her twenties, Potter pursued her fascination with fungi and became a dedicated student to the science of mycology. She would spend hours analyzing specimens she'd collect and would go on to produce over 300 detailed botanical drawings. DR ISABELLE CHARMANTIER: Botanical art still has a function at the end of the 19th century despite the apparition of photography.

She actually developed a theory on how they reproduced by means of spores. And she wrote a paper that was delivered to the very prestigious Linnean Society. Only, of course, because Beatrix was a woman, she couldn't read it herself. It had to be read for her by the director of Kew Gardens.

Order Order. Order. DR ISABELLE CHARMANTIER: Her paper was quote "read and discussed on the 1st of April 1897." But then it was withdrawn by Potter on 8th of April. And it was never resubmitted. And that's because some additional work was required on the manuscript before it could appear in print. But it seems that the work was never carried out.

Many decades later in the 1990s, the society acknowledged that she'd been treated scurvily.

Potter was left frustrated by the barriers imposed on women in the world of academia. But despite this setback, she decided to turn her passion for nature and her flair for illustration to a different direction completely. Potter's eventual success as an author would be long and fought with obstacles. But the inspiration for her very first publication came about in the most unexpected way.

Her first picture book, a Tale of Peter Rabbit actually began as a picture letter that she made for the son of her former governess Noel Moore. We're shown two pages of this letter that is written in pen. And within the letter, you see the outline sketches of rabbits.

The little boy Noel wasn't the only child of the governess to get a story. Others included one to Eric about a frog who loved fishing and another to Nora about a very cheeky squirrel. Sometime after Potter started to share her stories with children, she had the idea that perhaps her colourful characters could be enjoyed by a wider audience.

She began with pencil sketches and these are in the V&A collection. So you can see the really quite familiar sketch of Mrs Rabbit and the three bunnies and Peter he's facing away from her and about to go off somewhere. And those pen and ink sketches that she created were inserted into an exercise book and on each page of the exercise book, she wrote out the stories.

She'd sold a few drawings to greetings card manufacturers in the 1890s. So when she took up the notion of publishing these illustrated stories, she had quite a firmly preconceived idea of what they should look like and how she was going to deal with the publishers. My name is Christiaan Jonkers. I own Jonker's Rare Books in Henley On Thames. And we specialize in rare books and manuscripts, particularly Beatrix Potter.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit immediately captured young reader's imaginations. It proved so popular that Potter had another 200 copies printed. At this point, the publishing world could no longer ignore the little book. Publisher Frederick Warne And Co. who'd originally rejected Potter's manuscript, agreed to take on the book and print an initial 8000 copies. The Tale Of Peter Rabbit would go on to become one of the most successful children's books of all time.

It's amazing how quickly things happened. 1901 private printing 1902, it's published and by 1903, there were already Peter Rabbit dolls being sold all over the place. So clearly, Beatrix instantly hit a nerve.

She was able to produce these beautifully produced books and still sell them at a shilling each. It helped move the market away from the late Victorian period where books for children were really only for wealthy families to a situation where these books were if not available to all were available to a much much wider audience. The commercial success of Peter Rabbit and then the subsequent books led to Potter being one of the first really successful series authors for children.

Beatrix had found wealth recognition and importantly an outlet for her love of the natural world. She'd become an overnight success with the Tale of Peter Rabbit and was creating many more, including the Tale of Two Bad Mice and the Tales of Miss Tiggy Winkle. But despite all her achievements, there was still something missing. She was wary of living in the city and yearned to find a way to escape to the countryside while she felt she belonged.

When she bought it in 1905, she was unmarried and although she was in her late thirties, it wasn't the done thing then to live away from your parents. So she used hilltop as a holiday home. It was an escape from her London life. She was really inspired by it. She went on a huge creative flurry nearly every book that she subsequently wrote had illustrations that were either based in the house or the garden or the surrounding village.

Eventually, in 1913, Potter was able to move her life permanently to the Lake District. When she married local solicitor, William Heelis, she fully embraced life as a farmer and became passionate about the conservation of the local landscape.

She had a huge impact on the preservation of this area and the best way to find out about that is to get out into the landscape really.

For the next chapter of Potter's life, I've taken Laura's advice and I'm making my way to the summit of Loughrigg Fell to meet Harvey Wilkinson Cultural Heritage curator who knows all about Beatrix's legacy in the Lake District. Hi, Harvey, how you doing?

Hi, Hi, nice to meet you!

It's a miserable wet, cloudy, cold day. But I mean, even now just standing here looking down into the valley, it's kind of awe inspiring, isn't it?

It's incredibly beautiful and the Lakes always wears bad weather really well. It never really gets gloomy, it just gets more romantic.

My understanding of Beatrix Potter in the Lakes is hilltop. So how is she connected to what we're looking at now?

The aspects of the Lake District were a bit more like a native Kensington. The place was full of intellectuals, artists, writers, and very very rich merchants and industrialists who were building villas around the Lake District. Before 1800, this was an entirely farmed landscape with a little village church in the middle of it. Now we look at it and we do indeed still see the same farmed landscape, kind of squeezed in the middle of that and the lake, we see the villas. We see the development.

Together with family friend, Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, one of the founding members of the National Trust, Beatrix would devote much of her time and wealth trying to stop these developments by defensively buying up huge swathes of local countryside. She would also become an expert on the local traditional breed of sheep. The Herdwick which had grazed the fells for centuries but was under threat.

It was one of the big differences with Potter. She was buying land to preserve a way of life and she certainly helped to preserve Herdwick Farming in the Lake District, which is now a very, very important part of the World Heritage Site. So you tend to look at landscape, you tend to think visually, but Potter was also working socially. She was aware that it was a landscape that people needed to access, the same sorts of stuff we're working on here in the

Beatrix Potter died at home at the age of 77 on the 22nd of December, 1943. She bequeathed to the National Trust 4000 acres of land, including 15 farms and buildings which are still working today. Much of the land she left now constitutes the Lake District National Park which she had spent years of her life preserving.

Dear listener, we have now come to the end of our little Tale Of Beatrix Potter. To this day you'll find so many of her little tales at bedtime around the world as they're lovingly shared from generation to generation. But our story has perhaps been one you hadn't heard before. This is the tale of a girl and how the natural things of the world fuelled her imagination and guided her through the ups and downs of growing into a woman.

When she died, she left instructions that her ashes should be scattered on the hillside above Hilltop Farm. It's the slope where Jemima Puddleduck finally manages to take flight, but no one knows precisely where and that's the way Beatrix wanted it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the National Trust Podcast. You can experience the remarkable world of Beatrix Potter for yourself until the eighth of January 2023 at the Beatrix Potter Drawn to Nature Exhibition at the V&A in London in partnership with the National Trust. To find out more you can head to this episode's show notes.