Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter, who is best known as the creator of Peter Rabbit, was born on 28^th July 1866, in London. Her father was a lawyer who later inherited a large amount of money. Beatrix was christened Helen Beatrix, but, because Helen was her mother’s name, she used the name Beatrix throughout her life.

Beatrix had a lonely childhood, often visited by poor health. She filled much of her time with painting and drawing. During visits to Scotland and her grandfather’s house in Hertfordshire, Beatrix and her younger brother became fascinated with animals and birds, which Beatrix in particular learned to record on paper.

When she was 16 she paid her first visit to the Lake District of North-West England, and her interests extended to fossils and fungi. Indeed, she became something of an expert on the latter subject, having a paper read at the Linnean Society of London in 1897.

When in the Lakes, Beatrix wrote letters to the children of her former governess, illustrated with pictures of animals, and those animals became the subjects of simple little stories. It was in one of these letters, written in 1893, that Peter Rabbit made his first appearance. Beatrix made efforts to get the story published, but she eventually had to do this herself, producing an edition of 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in December 1901, which had most of the illustrations printed in black and white. She did the same with The Tailor of Gloucester.

The breakthrough came when Frederick Warne and Co., and particularly Frederick’s son Norman, approached Beatrix with an offer to publish Peter Rabbit if she could produce colour illustrations. This was very much a speculative bid by Warne, but it proved to be spectacularly successful, with a total of nineteen stories being published by 1913 (there are 23 titles in the complete series). The Warne imprint (although the firm is now a part of Penguin Books) continues to publish the series to this day.

The close association between Beatrix and Norman Warne led eventually to an engagement in 1905, when she was 39, but Norman was already seriously ill with leukaemia and he died only four weeks later.

The royalties from the first few published stories were enough to allow Beatrix to buy a Lake District farm, Hill Top, where she spent as much time as she could, although she was still caring for her elderly parents in London.

In October 1913, at the age of 47, Beatrix married her solicitor, William Heelis, although she continued to write under the name Beatrix Potter.

In later life her main interest became farming, and she built a substantial landholding by acquiring farms as they came on to the market, always with a view to maintaining them as working ventures that preserved traditional ways of farming as much as possible. This included the preservation of breeds of sheep that might otherwise have disappeared, particularly the Herdwick strain.

She worked very closely with the National Trust, alerting them to properties and tracts of land that they might be interested in acquiring, and working tirelessly to raise the funds with which this could be done. For example, in 1930 she bought a 5000 acre estate on condition that the Trust bought half of it from her as soon as they had the funds. Much of the unspoilt beauty of the Lake District that tourists and walkers enjoy today is directly due to Beatrix Potter’s efforts.

Beatrix Potter died on 22^nd December 1943, of a heart attack, at the age of 77. Her substantial landholdings were left in her will to the National Trust, with the condition that only Herdwick sheep were to be allowed on the farms. However, it is the abiding charm of Peter Rabbit and his colleagues, whose exploits have been translated into thirteen languages, for which the name of Beatrix Potter will be best remembered.

© John Welford