Acknowledgements

THIS life of Beatrix Potter, modest and unsensational though it is, could never have been written without the confidence and help of the late Mr. William Heelis, and the generous assistance of Beatrix Potter’s family and friends. Without their aid, her biographer must have been entirely at a loss, for her life had been lived so privately, and was so carefully hidden from the public eye, that solitary research would have been all but fruitless. Mr. Heelis gave throughout the most valuable help, and placed many letters and photographs at my disposal, as well as his wife’s portfolios and private papers.

Among the members of Beatrix Potter’s own family who generously lent me letters and supplied information and personal recollections of her early life, I would like specially to remember her cousins, Miss Dora Roscoe and Mrs. Caroline Clark. Mr. and Mrs. W. F. Gaddum and Miss Eileen Bowen-Davis also gave valuable assistance, as did many of Beatrix Potter’s correspondents and friends, notably Mrs. H. D. Rawnsley, Mrs. Annie Moore, the Rev. Noel Moore, Mrs. James Boultbee, Mrs. Fruing Warne, Miss E. L. Choyce, Miss Margaret Hammond, Miss Janet Adam Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Delmar Banner, Mr. Samuel Cunningham, Miss Bertha Mahony, Miss Helen Dean Fish, Miss Anne Carroll Moore and Miss Mary Gill.

Mr. Leslie Linder, to whose patient and brilliant work on The Journal of Beatrix Potter I owe so much, has my especial gratitude. Without his nine years’ labour in transcribing that extraordinary document from code, much of the detail of Beatrix Potter’s early life would have remained unknown.

The firm of Frederick Warne & Company has a special place in Beatrix Potter’s life, and my debt is great to those members of it, especially Mr. Frederick Warne Stephens and the late Mr. W. A. Herring, who were her personal friends as well as her publishers, and who put their very large collection of letters at my service.

The officials of the National Trust (in particular the then Secretary, Mr. D. M. Matheson, and Mr. B. L. Thompson) were uniformly sympathetic and helpful, and set before me the whole of Beatrix Potter’s long correspondence with the Trust: I take this opportunity of thanking them. I owe much gratitude, too, to those Herdwick sheep-farmers and shepherds who gave me some little insight into their subject, and into Beatrix Potter’s work as a breeder and farmer. In this connection it gives me real pleasure to mention with appreciation Mr. W. Wilson, Mr. George Walker, Mr. Thomas Storey, Mr. Thomas Stoddart, Mr. John Cannon and Mr. Joseph Moscrop.

M.L.

i

THE squares of Earl’s Court and South Kensington, like those of Pimlico, have survived into the present day without much confidence. The tide of middle-class prosperity has receded, leaving the broad streets and Victorian houses a little shrunken. Some have retained their air of prosperity, others have not. There is a great deal of flaking paint and a preponderance of dustbins. A large part of the area has reached the shabby-genteel; its occasional beauty is due to the bloom of decay.

In the ’sixties and ’seventies of the last century it was very different. There were well-kept gardens and even the relics of orchards, and the houses were newer then; their steps were whitened each morning by housemaids in lilac print, tradesmen descended the area steps solicitously, and in the mews behind each solid front there were real carriages and coachmen. At regular hours ladies drove out in these carriages and left cards on one another, and the doors were opened by tall parlour-maids with streamers and even by butlers, and tea was drunk amid ferns and cushions in drawing-rooms, while the carriages waited.

All this, and more, could be seen by anyone who had leisure and patience to watch from any of the upper windows of Bolton Gardens; and in the ’seventies, at the barred third-floor windows of the second house, there was stationed day after day a little girl who had leisure and solitude enough for the most prolonged study. She was solitary because she was an only child until she was five years old, and lived in a house which made no concessions to childhood; and she had limitless leisure because she was very rarely sent for out of the nursery or taken anywhere, and she never went to school. She had been born on 28 July 1866, and her name was Helen Beatrix Potter.

Number Two Bolton Gardens was very quiet. The ticking of the grandfather clock could be heard all over the house, like a slow heartbeat, and there were other reliable indications of the time of day. At the same hour every morning Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Potter came down to the dining-room for breakfast, a meal consumed in silence. Between ten and eleven Mr. Potter left for his club. At one o’clock a tray furnished with a small cutlet and a helping of rice pudding went up to the nursery by the back stairs, and as the clock struck two the carriage was at the door and Mrs. Potter, small and inflexibly upright and dressed in black, came down the whitened steps and got into it, and was driven away. At six o’clock Mr. Cox, the butler, could be observed through the dining-room windows preparing a solemn ritual with napkins and spoons and forks on the mahogany table. Soon the curtains would be drawn and the nursery lamp be extinguished, and to the street the house would give no further evidence of life.

In the same way, the seasons of the year could be judged with fair accuracy by even an indoor observer. Christmas, it is true, was not distinguished from an ordinary Unitarian Sunday; but Easter meant a family exodus, generally to the seaside, lasting several weeks, while the servants spring-cleaned the house from top to bottom; and in summer the Potters and their servants removed in a body to a furnished house in Scotland, where Mr. Potter rented some shooting and fishing, and where gentlemen were invited. These Scottish holidays usually lasted for three months, and provided a long stretch of idleness and boredom for everyone except the servants, whose attention was focussed on the problem of reproducing the life of Bolton Gardens in a foreign setting—the one o’clock cutlet, the two o’clock drive for Mrs. Potter, then afternoon tea at five, followed by Mr. Cox’s evening ceremonial of constructing cocked hats and water lilies out of table napkins.

Whether in London or in Scotland, life as the Rupert Potters understood it held little to interest the solitary child upstairs, and it would perhaps have surprised them if anyone had suggested that life might conceivably be made interesting to one so young. She was provided with a Scottish nurse of Calvinistic principles; she had a clean starched piqué frock every morning and ‘cotton stockings striped round and round like a zebra’s legs’; a cutlet and rice pudding came up the back stairs every day for lunch, and in the afternoon, unless it rained, McKenzie the nurse took her for a good walk. What more could a child want? Nothing, perhaps; for quiet, solitary and observant children create their own world and live in it, nourishing their imaginations on the material at hand; and she was not at all unhappy. Did not Ruskin, as a child, have as his sole plaything a bunch of keys? The child Beatrix Potter had more, much more; she had ‘a dilapidated black wooden doll called Topsy, and a very grimy, hard-stuffed, once-white flannelette pig’, which did not belong to her, but which was brought out on special occasions from the bottom drawer of her grandmother’s secrétaire; and the house contained the Waverley novels, on which she learned to read, and the complete works of Miss Edgeworth; and she composed hymns and ‘sentimental ballad descriptions of Scottish scenery’, and in her unmolested upper storey constructed a child’s defence against the airless grown-up life which went on below, and which seemed to have no idea of evoking response, and which certainly offered her nothing.

She had been born into a period and a class which seem to have had little understanding of childhood. Her parents were rich, both of them being the possessors of Lancashire cotton fortunes; but they were removed by at least a generation from the hard-headed Lancashire vigour which had made those fortunes; and being a well-to-do married couple of the ’seventies, not ‘in society’, no longer personally contaminated by trade and not active in any profession, they had fallen without knowing it under the most enervating and stultifying influence of their century—the sterile spell of moneyed and middle-class gentility.

It is not quite true to say that Rupert Potter had no profession. He had been called to the Bar, and described himself as a barrister; but he had never practised, since the only brief he had ever received had turned out to be a hoax—a discovery which he made with great relief. But after all, what need was there to work? He had plenty of money, and although there was a certain dignity in being a barrister, to renounce the actual toil of the profession was even more becoming in a gentleman. So Mr. Potter made a life for himself, and lived it punctually. He spent much time at the Athenaeum and Reform Clubs, where he read the newspapers; he paid afternoon visits, and perfected a dry querulous ironical style of anecdote which served for conversation; and he came out strong as an amateur photographer.

It was an age of pioneer photography; the invention was still young, the equipment expensive; and Mr. Potter, though he seems to have lacked the artist’s eye which produced so many beautiful Victorian photographs, achieved at least a high level of technical excellence. He took views of Scottish scenery, he photographed trees, he arranged serious groups on the steps of country houses, he made portrait studies of Mrs. Potter (who often received compliments on her likeness to Queen Victoria) pausing to reflect against a background of conifers, or resting her gloved hand on a rustic post. More interesting still, he took his apparatus on certain afternoons to Mr. Millais’ studio, and photographed the artist’s sitters in the pose in which they were being painted, thus combining the pleasures of his hobby with performing a useful service for a friend. (‘Mr. Millais says the professionals aren’t fit to hold a candle to Papa.’) In this way he made an interesting collection of portraits, of which his study of Gladstone—severe, eagle-eyed, putting on the elder statesman with just a shade too keen a sense of personal drama—is probably the best. There is a family tradition that Millais offered, in return, to paint the rosy little girl he had caught a glimpse of on one of his return visits to Bolton Gardens. Her cousin Kate Potter, a remarkably beautiful child, had sat to Rivière for a sentimental nursery picture called Cupboard Love, but Mr. Potter is said to have refused to have Beatrix painted because it might make her vain.

Beatrix herself, more than twenty years later, admitted in her secret journal that she had been ‘unmercifully afraid of [Millais] as a child … I had a brilliant colour as a little girl, which he used to provoke on purpose and remark upon at times. If a great portrait painter’s criticism is of any interest this is it … that I was a little like his daughter Carrie, at that time a fine handsome girl, but my face was spoiled by the length of my nose and upper lip.’

Personal vanity was frowned on in the Potter household, and Beatrix, though she was a pretty child and afterwards a distinctly attractive woman, seems never to have felt the least temptation to it. She submitted patiently to the starching and brushing and tying up with ribbons, the lacing of boots and the carrying of muffs, which was a part of well-to-do childhood in the ‘seventies; but she was never beguiled. It was something to escape from, when one should be old enough, a part of that stagnant life which went on in the drawing-room, and which laid it down that little girls, except when they were in pinafores, should be booted and dressed as though they were going to church.

Church-going, as it happened, was less rigidly insisted on in the Potter household than in many Church of England families, for both Mr. and Mrs. Potter were Unitarians, and possessed a fair degree of the tolerance, if not the intellectualism, of their sect. They went to various Unitarian churches, and ‘sat under’ this minister or that; but the religious atmosphere of the household was not oppressive, and their children (for by the time that Beatrix was old enough to go to church she had a brother) were allowed to grow up in the belief that one might, without spiritual injury, enjoy a simple religious service of any denomination, provided it were plain. In their religious faith, as in their lives, the Potters were calm, avoiding the vulgar enthusiasms which had made their forebears interesting; for Mr. Potter, at least, had had remarkable parents, his father having been a self-made man of the best type, and a reformer, and his mother (who died at the age of ninety, when Beatrix was twenty-five) being a Crompton, which meant that there was something about her which was full of character and oddity, and which made her, in the eyes of an impressionable child, a fascinating grandmother.

Rupert Potter was extremely proud of his father, not because he was a self-made man—that, perhaps, least of all—but because he had been Liberal M.P. for Carlisle and a friend of Cobden and Bright, and had died in possession of more money than he knew what to do with. He was, in fact, an attractive and remarkable person, a reformer as well as an industralist, one of those clear-sighted, humane and science-loving Victorians who made it easy for the age to believe in its own progress. He had been born in Manchester in 1802, into a poor family with a respect for education. His early life had been hard, but not unrewarding; he had taken his decent education and his integrity into the calico-printing trade, and to such good effect that in middle-age, owner of the Dinting Vale Works at Glossop and a magistrate, he had found himself at the head of the new industry. His rise had not been easy, but he had never been afraid of work, and had driven himself to stringent efforts in the face of adversity. In the ‘thirties, about the time that his son Rupert was born, the calico-printing trade had had reverses, and Edmund Potter’s firm had failed, and he had gone bankrupt. Almost without a pause he had begun again, going back to manual labour and small beginnings; and in the course of the next ten years, with north-country pride of honesty, had paid back all his creditors to the last farthing and was already on the upward slope to fortune.

Yet he was not at all a harsh man; indeed, his life was largely spent in trying to propagate and share among his fellows those advantages which had helped to make him successful. As a poor boy he had profited by education; in Parliament he made popular education his chief concern. Himself a Dissenter (for he had been brought up and remained a strong Unitarian, one of that ethical-intellectual Manchester group which centred in the Gaskells) he campaigned for religious equality and toleration. He was a Radical, a free-trader, a humane magistrate, a delighted spectator of the progress of science, an amateur of the arts. And perhaps because he was also handsome, in the blue-eyed, strong-featured, gentle intellectual mode which speaks to us with such delighting frequency from the daguerreotypes of the period, he had married a woman of beauty and spirit, that same Jessie Crompton who was to provide the first mental stimulus for her small grand-daughter, Beatrix.

ii

Beatrix’s grandmother, Mrs. Edmund Potter, knew what life was composed of, and she distilled it, drop by drop, never generously, never deliberately, but at least without fraud or censure, in leisurely reminiscent conversations to which the child, seated on a cross-bar underneath the library table and hidden by the green fringed cloth, could surreptitiously listen. There was much that she heard in this earliest, under-the-table stage of listening to her grandmother that she did not follow; nor did she attend much at first, having adopted this sanctuary not at all, really, for the purpose of listening, but in order to nurse the flannelette pig in peace, and to eat the hard gingersnap biscuits which her grandmother gave her privately from a canister, and on which, one by one, she loosened her milk teeth. But even on these earliest visits to Camfield Place, the hideous but very comfortable yellow brick country house which Edmund Potter had adapted for himself near Hatfield, the name of Crompton was dropped so often into the conversation, and with such emphasis, that it acquired a special potency, and drew her gradually into a charmed attentiveness to the reminiscences of her Potter grandmother.

By the time Beatrix was ten years old, and, though very small for her age, too big to sit without eccentricity under the table, her grandmother was already an old lady of seventy-five, dressed always in rich black silk with a white shawl, white cotton stockings, a white cap with black velvet ribbons, and mittens. Yet in spite of these trappings of old ladyhood, and her three grey corkscrew ringlets on either cheek, it was still possible when her brown eyes sparkled, as they did very often and in the liveliest manner, to imagine the vanished beauty which had made her a toast, and had even caused her (or so she said) to be mobbed in the streets of Lancaster. To say that in youth one was mobbed for one’s beauty is a bold claim. To be stared at, yes; to be admired, to have three proposals in a week and be the envy of the ballroom—all these have a flavour of possibility, and an accepted place in the recollections of grandmothers. But to believe in mobbing one must imagine a crowd gathered and the way barred, rude yet honest Lancashire faces thrusting and peering, a delicious terror and embarrassment which few women who are not celebrated actresses ever know. Yet one must also remember that Mrs. Edmund Potter was a Unitarian, and had been well brought up. Great were the battles, she told Mrs. Rupert, which as a girl she had waged against her non-Unitarian schoolfellows, ‘for the faith’. And the Cromptons, who were an arrogant lot and given to extravagant expressions of opinion in politics and ethics, were also proud of their hard-headed cautiousness in matters of fact. So the beautiful Jessie Crompton was conceded, in her husband’s family, that romantic mobbing; the more easily, perhaps, since she never claimed it wholly for herself, but was always careful to share the glory with one or other of her eight sisters.

There were other stories which Beatrix, now sitting up to the oval table itself (for her grandmother did not permit young people to sit in armchairs or loll about at random) with book or needlework before her, felt that she must remember, even to the words that her grandmother used and the tone of her voice. Ostensibly busy drawing butterflies, she began to record her talk on odd sheets of paper, using a self-invented secret writing which was partly an ingenious code, partly a script so small that (as with the Brontës’ childhood manuscripts) no inquisitive grown-up, unless prepared to go the length of using a magnifying glass, could see what it was. Worth remembering, for instance, was the sad story of one of Grandmama’s earliest admirers, who had drowned himself for love in a lily pond. He had written a poem beginning ‘Sweet harp of Lune Villa!’—a charming line, suggestive of northern summer evenings and the nine Miss Cromptons sitting in the drawing-room in their Regency muslins, with the windows open, and the beautiful Miss Jessie at the instrument. But Grandmama could remember no more than that opening apostrophe. ‘Then he made away with himself …’ It was dreadfully sad, and surprising, too, when you came to think of it. (There were disloyal suggestions from other branches of the family that his death had been an accident.) Perhaps, then, he had been haunting the garden of Lune Villa in the dark, yearning at the drawing-room windows and listening to the harp, and had taken a rapt step backwards against the stone margin of the pool, so that there had been a cry and a dreadful splash, and the harp had faltered for a moment while the nine Miss Cromptons listened …

Equally harsh, but less harrowing, was the fate of another lover who attended the same chapel and sat under the same minister as the Radical and Unitarian Cromptons. ‘Quite a common man,’ said Grandmama dispassionately, ‘one of the congregation. My mother directed the footman to put him under the pump.’ Beatrix herself in the last year of her life rediscovered these childish pages, and deciphered this anecdote with a less simple amusement than she had felt at twelve years old. ‘Alas,’ she wrote in the margin, ‘alas for the rights of man and universal equality!’ For the Cromptons, despite their summary methods with social inferiors, were themselves great Radicals and individualists, and prided themselves on the amount of trouble they had managed to get into (in spite of their wealth) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ‘Oh, we were such Radicals in those days!’ said Grandmama Potter, gazing into the fire as her grand-daughter’s pencil moved silently over the page. ‘Those days’ were early in the century, for she well remembered the national mourning for Princess Charlotte, and had been walking with her governess in the streets of Liverpool when ‘we heard of Waterloo’. (These scraps of code writing, microscopic and mysterious, eventually developed into a voluminous secret journal which Beatrix kept until she was past thirty.)

The Cromptons, for as far back as they could be traced, had always been men of character and arrogant conscience—substantial yeomen, rich farmers, country bankers, cotton spinners and merchants, embedding themselves from time to time like sharp flints in the under-crust of smaller Lancashire gentry. ‘I am descended,’ wrote Beatrix Potter in old age to an American friend who had asked for particulars of her descent, ‘from generations of Lancashire yeomen and weavers; obstinate, hard-headed, matter-of-fact folk … As far back as I can go they were Puritans, Nonjurors, Nonconformists, Dissenters. Your Mayflower ancestors sailed to America; mine at the same time were sticking it out at home, probably rather enjoying persecution.’ The male Cromptons certainly seem to have relished persecution, or at least the thought of it, for their Radicalism was of the argumentative rather than the practical variety, and Grandmama Potter’s father, Abraham Crompton, seems to have been the only one who suffered at all publicly for his opinions. Grandmama remembered something about it, and also about the moral courage of one of her uncles, and spoke of these things with a mild detached satisfaction, laying great stress on the fact that she was a Crompton herself, and a Potter only by marriage. ‘I remember my Uncle Crompton at Eton; he hid a man in his house—one that would have been hung. And my father was just as bad. It was about the time of the Manchester Massacre … about 1819. You know, he was taken off the Bench of Magistrates because he went to see a man who was in the Castle. He did not care about persecution, but my mother did. She did not like it.’

The man whom Abraham Crompton visited in prison was Thistlewood, the Cato Street conspirator, who had learned his revolutionary theories in Paris and had dedicated himself on his return to England to the manufacture of hand grenades and the study of strategy. After several attempts to organize an English revolution, and several consequent imprisonments, he decided in 1820 on a coup d’état which was to be both original and decisive. The Cabinet was to be assassinated at dinner with a bomb, Coutts’s Bank razed, public buildings in the City set on fire, the Tower seized, and a provisional government set up in the Mansion House with a cobbler called Ings as secretary. The thorough-going spirit of this programme seems for some reason to have appealed to Crompton, who took it into his head, after Thistle-wood had been arrested in his Cato Street arsenal, to champion the man’s cause and quarrel with his fellow magistrates. He even went the length of visiting the conspirator in prison, to encourage and console; but without happy results. Thistlewood was hanged and Crompton removed from the Bench.

Grandmama could not remember if her father had ever been to France, to account for the surprising warmth of his revolutionary sympathies. She thought perhaps he must have done, for he had some odd tastes in food, and used as a very old man to wander out into the grounds of Lune Villa on damp summer evenings in search of snails, which he liked prepared with butter and chopped parsley, and ate with a pin.

He seems to have enjoyed his Radicalism, however, chiefly because it supported the Crompton reputation for crustiness, for in spite of his expressed sympathy with Thistlewood’s principles he liked to see his wife and thirteen children living in style, being no hater of private property, and indeed fond of adding to his own when the profits of the cotton trade allowed it. He had inherited Chorley Hall in Lancashire (which had originally been bought by his great-grandfather, another Abraham Crompton, from the Crown) but had sold this property while Grandmama was still a girl, and bought Lune Villa. He also bought land ‘for pleasure’ in the Lake District, a small farm in a fold of Tilberthwaite Fell, where he and his family repaired for a few weeks in the summer. And Grandmama remembered that there were other farming properties, too, bought for profit; and had a dreamlike recollection of driving with her father in a gig across Lancaster Sands to pay for a rich farm that he was buying. In this anecdote, half memory, half dream, which Beatrix remembered all her life with peculiar pleasure, the moon had been rising and the tide had been coming in rapidly over the wide sands; and Grandmama had been nervous, and wished that the horse would go faster, and had clasped the bag of purchase money—all gold, and very heavy—in her lap.