Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) Part 1: A Savvy Businesswoman with a Fierce Love for the Wild

I don’t know who I thought Beatrix Potter was but I certainly didn’t think she was the kind of person she turned out to be once I read about her. I suppose I imagined her as some little old lady who liked to draw bunnies. As a girl, the name Beatrix was unknown to me and sounded “old.” It had a schoolmarm feel to it. I also didn’t know that Beatrix Potter wrote the text to all of her books as well as illustrating them, that she was a creative and a writer as much as she was an artist.

She had innate marketing savvy and made sure, as soon as she secured a publisher, that the copyrights to her books remained with her. She also made sure, when it was time to create merchandise around her books, that she owned the patents and that the merchandise was up to her standards. There were dolls and wallpaper, board games and tea sets that she made certain to grant final approval. She also fought the cheap imitations coming into Britain from Germany. In fact, Peter Rabbit was the first fictional character to be made into a patented stuffed toy.

She pushed for her own ideas and vision, persisted in her ambitions, and was extremely confident in herself and her work. It became important for her to make money and be financially independent because her parents didn’t approve of her choices and lifestyle. As she matured, this became increasingly unbearable.

On top of all that, she was a staunch environmentalist and “amateur” scientist. The second half of her life was happily spent as a farmer and landowner in the Lake District of England, acquiring land and doing her best to make sure it remained undeveloped after her death,  leaving it to the National Trust.  She also worked hard to save the Herdwick sheep and fell or hill farming which is particularly suited to the grazing and raising of sheep and cattle in upland areas, such as the Lake District.

When her publisher was bankrupted by an incompetent partner, it was Potter who saved them with her books, merchandise and her fame.

I had so much fun discovering Beatrix Potter and coming to know her “can do” attitude, especially since she lived in a time where women were constantly told what they couldn’t do.

Beatrix Potter’s youth and girlhood

Potter was born into an upper-middle-class family in Victorian England to parents who wanted to distance themselves from that which had created their wealth—a textile factory in the north, in Manchester.  This kind of “trade” work was viewed as distasteful to the upper-middle-class.

They put extreme limits on Beatrix to act like a well-behaved Victorian lady. She resisted while trying her best to remain a loyal and caring daughter. It was a life-long struggle for Potter. When she finally found love, later in life at age 39, her parents refused to give their consent to marriage because the man she wanted to marry was a merchant— her publisher actually. She had to fight them and while awaiting their permission, he died.

When her second chance for love came at age 46 to William Heelis, a solicitor from the Lake District whom Potter had come to know from hiring him for help with her land purchases, her parents again disapproved. This time, she did not let them stop her and had a small, private ceremony. Even so, Potter cared for both parents into their old age and remained kind.

Beatrix Potter the animal lover

As a child and young girl and even into her older years Beatrix Potter was a lover of animals of all kinds. As a girl and young woman she carried her pets with her everywhere. There were pet bunnies, hedgehogs, snakes and mice. She took them into the rooms that were hers in her various homes, carried them in crates on long train rides, meticulously observed them, and drew them. She drew everything: landscapes, trees, fungi, plants, rocks, insects. She explored and took notice of the natural world. She even made novel discoveries about fungi confirmed many years later.

Her family lived in London for the bulk of the year but every summer rented or lived with extended family on country estates. In her younger years every summer was spent with her paternal grandparents on an estate in Dalguise, Scotland. This was one of Beatrix’s favorite places. Later she transferred that love to the Lake District.

“Looking back on a decade of holiday summers in Scotland, it seemed to Beatrix that her happiest moments were those spent at Dalguise. There she got extra attention from her father, the opportunity to have as many pets as she wanted, to collect butterflies, identify birds, make friends with farm animals, explore the countryside, and draw and paint whatever she saw, whenever she wanted. ‘I remember every stone, every tree, the scent of the heather, the music sweetest mortal ears can hear, the murmuring of the wind through the fir trees,’ she recalled later. ‘Even when the thunder growled in the distance, and the wind swept up the valley in fitful gusts, oh, it was always beautiful, home sweet home’”(28).

She learned much about the land from her paternal grandfather. Her father,  a photographer, taught her the art of observation which became a defining characteristic of her art. Her grandfather, Edmund Potter, owned a calico printing factory in Manchester. He created most of the woodblock designs himself and Beatrix credited him with much of her talent. Later, when Frederick Warne & Co. published The Tailor Of Gloucester, they used some of his designs for the endpapers.

The Potter family were Unitarians and friends included many of the prominent Unitarians of the time including James Martineau and William Gaskell, husband to Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth had died before Potter was born but William Gaskell who often joined them on their summer holidays made a big impression on her in her childhood. Potter even knitted him a winter scarf.

Read our posts on Elizabeth Gaskell:
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) Part 1 — Having it All
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865): Part 2—A Voice for Women and the Working Class
Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell: Women Writers Who Were Friends

Potter studied painting and drawing with various teachers but eventually decided she learned better on her own, with her animals, out in the fields and in the forest with her gift of observation and ability to focus. Though she tried out many mediums, pen and ink and watercolor were her specialties.

While in London, Potter frequented museums of both art and natural history to continue her art of observations and gain more accuracy with her work.

She had talent for capturing nature as it was, as wild. She loved the wild.

Her books are known for capturing not only the animals but the environments they lived in, the backgrounds were not just backgrounds but beautifully captured images of sheds, country rooms, and their wooden cupboards and tea cups and woodwork, intricately detailed trunks of trees and carefully drawn leaves of plants, landscapes, and vistas.

As she matured, she began selling some of her illustrations to publishers for use on greeting and Christmas cards. She enjoyed the money she earned from this and began to consider other ways of selling her art.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

“Beatrix took Peter everywhere with her, just as she had Benjamin, drew him from every angle, taught him to do tricks, and was totally devoted to him. Noel knew Peter well and a letter about Peter’s adventures was tailor-made to cheer him.

And so it was on 4 September, the very day after discovering and drawing the rare pine cone fungus, Beatrix sat down in the sunshine on the lawn at Eastwood and wrote a picture letter about  a disobedient young rabbit called ‘Peter’ . . . Perhaps because there was a new baby at the Moore’s household that July and because Beatrix did not want little Eric, who was now nearly five, to feel left out, she wrote a picture letter to him the following day. It too took its adventures from her specific observations of the natural world around her at Eastwood on the River Tay. ‘My dear Eric,’ she wrote, ‘Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr Jeremy Fisher….”(86).

The above-mentioned children, Noel and Eric, were the children of Annie Moore, a woman who was once a Governess to Potter. Annie Moore had six children by 1899 and Potter had remained her very good friend. She knew the children well and when away from them wrote them “picture letters,” stories illustrated with ink drawings about the fantastical adventures of her pets. It was Annie who thought they would make good books and encouraged Potter to try and sell one.

Potter asked Noel for her picture letter back that detailed the story of Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter Rabbit and fashioned it into a small book with pen and ink images on the interior and a color cover to present to publishers. Her book was rejected by six publishers including Frederick Warne & Co.

Nonplussed, Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit herself using her own money. She gave many copies away which were met with great response. While this was happening one of the publishers who rejected her, Frederick Warne & Co. came back with renewed interest and offered to publish the bunny story if she would create full-color illustrations for the interior. Potter agreed and began to work very closely with Norman Warne, one of the brothers running the publishing house, with whom she would continue a very close and prosperous relationship, including an informal marriage engagement, until his untimely death in 1905.

“Potter’s success in her first book was as both writer and illustrator. Although the story was always of central importance, there is in Peter Rabbit a perfect marriage of word and image.The precision of her drawings of plants and animals, garden and woods, embellishes the text and carries the story forward to the next page with a flawless continuity of time and place, fantasy and reality. The illustrations always enhance, rather than distract from or dilute the text, even when a rather sophisticated adult word is introduced. And no matter how beautiful the illustrations, the landscape is real, the animals are anatomically accurate and the plants are planted correctly. It is a triumph of fantasy rooted in fact”(154).

While a contract was being created with her publisher she succeeded in giving all her self-published books away and began to establish a market for the new version to be published by Frederick Warne by showing her self-published book to bookshops and preparing the ground. The Tale of Peter Rabbit was published by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1902.

“A year after publication there were 56,470 copies in print”(152).

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

When Peter’s mother goes out to run errands and warns her children not to go to Mr. McGregor’s garden where their father had an accident and ended up in a pie, Peter goes immediately there.

In Mr. McGregor’s garden Peter gets into all kinds of mischief and danger, even losing his shoes and jacket in his race to escape Mr. McGregor’s angry hoe.

It’s quite frightening to read as we fear for Peter. Eventually he escapes and runs home where his mother, noticing his clothes are gone and that he seems poorly, gives him a table-spoonful of chamomile tea and sends him to bed.

“Beatrix Potter had in fact created a new form of animal fable: one in which anthropomorphized animals behave always as real animals with true animal instincts and are accurately drawn by a scientific illustrator”(153).

The Tale of Peter Rabbit is one of the best selling books of all time. Beatrix Potter went on to write 60 books, 23 of which are her popular children’s books.

In Part 2 we will explore her work with fungi and her life as a farmer.

Beatrix Potter is a Nasty Woman Writer, Artist, Activist and Woman of STEM.

© Theresa C. Dintino 2024

Works Cited

Lear, Linda. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. St. Matin’s Griffin. N.Y. 2007