A book small enough to fit tiny hands appeared 100 years ago thismonth. Beatrix Potter's stories have delighted children eversince, writes Mary Leland, but nobody needed their company more than their lonely author did. Potter admitted that she made up the storiesfor her own pleasure, because she never grew up. She also invented themfor solace and companionship
A child treasured for eight years the illustrated, storytelling letter written by a friend of his mother to cheer him in his sickbed. As a result, a book designed to fit the small hands of children was published, privately, 100 years ago this month. "I made about £12 or £14 by selling copies to obliging aunts," its author admitted of the very limited edition printed at her expense - of £11 - three months earlier. A new print run of 200 copies was encouraged by that response to The Tale Of Peter Rabbit among the relatives and friends of a 36-year-old single woman living with her parents in an atmosphere of stultifying Victorian rectitude.
If some subversive impulse can be read into the later creation of The Story Of A Fierce Bad Rabbit, it could be explained by the fact that, for many years, Beatrix Potter's life was restricted to a cycle of stifling predictability. Born to Mr and Mrs Rupert Potter, wealthy Unitarians who lived at No 2 Bolton Gardens in London, she spent her life almost entirely alone once her brother, Bertram, went to school. Cousins were not encouraged to visit, and it was not until her mid 20s that she was allowed to make calls on the few friends she had managed to collect. She moved, writes her biographer Margaret Lane, "a captive planet, through the Potter phases".
Yet she had two considerable gifts. The first was for drawing and painting, especially animals (she was less effective with flora and decidedly weak with the human form); the second was for friendship. Educated by governesses, she was an observant child whose delight during the regulation family holidays in Scotland was to watch and draw the birds and beasts she encountered. Sometimes accompanied by visitors to her parents (one of whom was William Gaskell, widower of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell), Beatrix and her brother discovered fishing, wild gardens and the stories of the neighbourhood. When the Lake District gradually replaced Scotland as the annual destination, the visitors included Canon H.D. Rawnsley, antiquarian, amateur naturalist, writer and poet, founder member of the National Trust and a revelation to the teenage Beatrix.
Remaining her friend for the rest of his life, he encouraged her outings to the Natural History Museum in London, where she tried to perfect her style as a botanical illustrator. The tedium of home was relieved by his letters, and also by the presence of those pets she brought back from the holidays: a rabbit, a hedgehog (already called Mrs Tiggy) or the mouse Hunca Munca. This little menagerie provided the models for the drawings she sent to Canon Rawnsley and the adventures for the playful stories she sent to the children of her friends.
Noel Moore, the five-year-old recipient of Potter's letter, was the son of the teacher employed to give Beatrix German lessons. As Mrs Moore produced her babies, so Beatrix produced her sketches and tales. But she did so, as Lane points out, without any trace of sentimental indulgence.
Potter was to admit much later that she had made up the stories for her own pleasure, because she never grew up, and perhaps what she meant was that she had for so long peopled her existence at Bolton Gardens with these creatures that the tales were merely the retelling of stories she had once invented for solace and companionship. (She had also invented a complex cipher, amounting to a 500,000 word diary, decoded and published by Leslie Linder, as The Journal Of Beatrix Potter From 1881 to 1897, in 1966.)
So here is Noel Moore, in bed with a tedious illness. Because, she says, she doesn't know what else to write to him, Potter offers a story instead. "Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter." We are not far into the book - carefully set out so there are never too many words to the page - before we come to one of the most thrilling warnings in all of children's literature: " 'Now, my dears,' said old Mrs Rabbit one morning, "you many go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr McGregor's garden. Your father had an accident there: he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.' "
Every child guesses immediately, of course, that one if not all of the little rabbits will defy this awful threat; it is with such slender but unmistakable plot lines that Potter won the hearts of her readers. When, eight years later and encouraged by Canon Rawnsley, she considered making a book from the stories, she borrowed Noel Moore's treasured letter. But if those obliging aunts knew a good thing when they saw it, Frederick Warne & Co was the first publisher (among six others) to reject The Tale Of Peter Rabbit, a decision that led the author to dip into her savings for that £11 investment.
By the time the private printing of February 1902 was ready, however, Warne & Co had offered to publish the book if Potter provided colour instead of the original, black-and-white illustrations. Fortified by the "good opinion" of Dr Conan Doyle, who had a copy for his children, Potter perfected her pictures by staying at her brother's farm and using his potting shed, cucumber frame, cabbages and gooseberry nets for the final version. She also remembered that, years before, she had patiently sketched the scenery of Stroud and Gloucester to tell the story of an old tailor in a letter to Noel Moore's sister Freda, who was "fond of fairy tales". Still uncertain of success, Potter took £40 of her own money to produce what must be her loveliest book, The Tailor Of Gloucester; sending it to Warne, she notes that "at present it is most in request among old ladies . . . "
Warne & Co printed The Tale Of Peter Rabbit in a first edition of 6,000, which sold out before publication. Here began the stream of 19 little books that made Potter famous. Originality, wit, the honesty of her depictions of animal life and the tender accuracy of her paintings can still endear her even to a world dominated by the Teletubbies or Harry Potter. As Julia Briggs notes in her book on children's literature, Potter's prose combines irony with balanced, almost biblical rhythms. Briggs also points out the subversive elements of her style and her recognition, especially in The Tale Of Mr Tod, of irreconcilable or unresolvable natural dilemmas.
These cannot have been merely the fruit of her animal dissections. Potter's steel was forged in the atmosphere of Bolton Gardens, where parental disapproval of her engagement to Norman Warne - publishing was "trade"! - darkened what should have been years of fulfilment. Both Potter and her publisher were nearly 40 years old, and she quietly withstood family opposition, but Warne died suddenly, before the wedding could take place. By now, however, Potter was becoming financially independent. She bought Hill Top, her first farm, at Sawrey, in the Lake District, and, while officially still living with her parents, established herself as a sheep farmer. From these years and these locations emerged Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Ginger and Pickles, Mrs Tittlemouse, Mr Tod, Pigling Bland and others of her magical cast. The view from the farmyard gate, the kitchen dresser, the rhubarb leaves, the dog Kep, even the village shop - all are reflected in her work. But it was coming to an end.
In her late 40s, she married - again in the teeth of parental outrage - William Heelis, a solicitor, and lived with him at Castle Farm, settling into an agricultural lifestyle. "The lambing time is beginning," she wrote to excuse the absence of another story. And so she stopped, and lived on her farm until her death, in 1943, bequeathing Hill Top and the 4,000 acres she had acquired tothe National Trust, remembering Hardwicke Rawnsley to the last.
The official Beatrix Potter website is at www.peterrabbit.co.uk
