Beatrix Potter: Victorian through the Child’s Eyes

Per Scriptum E. Wesley – Mackinac Center Intern

Imaginative, lively, and brimming with ideas, children’s author Beatrix Potter reflected the longings, sorrows, and dreams of an entire age. She was raised in London, affording her a close, contemporary view of English politics, but she frequently holidayed in Scotland and the Lake District of Cumbria, giving her writings and illustrations that northern Scottish feel that was so fashionable during the Victorian years. Eventually, she moved to the Lake District, wrote her fairy tales, and raised sheep. Her search for order, stability, natural beauty, and Englishness represents a larger Victorian struggle to hang on to truth in a spinning world. Yet, she remained largely undecorated, shunning publicity, and admired the humble and quiet life. This is why her stories are so original and timeless. They speak of preservation, morality, and beauty. To understand Beatrix Potter is to discover Victorianism through the genre of fairy tale.

On July 28, 1866, Helen Beatrix Potter was born in South Kensington, London at 2 Bolton Gardens. Her parents Rupert and Helen Potter called her Beatrix or “B” so as to avoid confusing Beatrix with her mother. The Potter family was a higher-middle class family, having inherited Lancaster cotton fortunes. Being on the higher end of the Victorian middle class, Beatrix was low enough to understand the rising middle class, but high enough to live a life of ease and discovery. The most invigorating time of the Potter calendar was the summer holidays in Scotland and the Cumbrian Lake District. However back in London, Beatrix was left to the guardianship of a nursemaid, and her parents hardly nurtured her with much needed attention. Instead, Beatrix became withdrawn, lonely, and shy. Her secluded life allowed her to improve private hobbies such as drawing and listening to the Celtic fairy stories of her Scottish Highland nurse Miss McKenzie. These stories inspired her imagination, and she admitted in her dairy on November 17, 1896, “I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child” (Potter, “The Journal,” 435).

Her brother Bertram was the closest and only friend of her youth, and their relationship was complementary. Bertram, who later himself became an artist, encouraged Beatrix to pursue what he saw as her visual talents, and under the eye of her governess Miss Hammond, Beatrix experimented with art. She also enjoyed reading. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels, recounting the adventures of the Scottish Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, became enduring favorites. Beatrix and Bertram shared a love for natural history, and spent countless hours dissecting animals and enjoying the beauty of the outdoors. During the summer holidays Beatrix would draw animals, flowers, and fungi. Fungi stirred her imagination, “I think one of my pleasantest memories of Esthwaite is sitting on Oatmeal Crag on a Sunday afternoon, where there is a sort of table of rock with a dip, with the lane and fields and oak copse like in a trough below my feet, and all the little tiny fungus people singing and bobbing and dancing in the grass and under the leaves all down below, like the whistling that some people cannot hear of stray mice and bats, and I sitting up above and knowing something about them” (435). Indeed, her love for fungi eventually became a ten year scientific endeavor of meticulously painting images of fungi for botanic study.

Potter’s parents finally caught on to her talents, and hired Miss Cameron to hone Potter’s skills. Miss Cameron trained Potter for five years in perspective, freehand, model, and some water-color flower painting. In Potter’s opinion, taking twelve lessons in oil painting from Lady Eastlake stifled her artistry in water-color and her more individual experimentation. However, her father was a photographer for the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Millais, who encouraged her to draw. The Pre-Raphaelite influence on Potter was invaluable, and one painting she spends time in her journals describing is Millais’s An Idyll of 1745, for which her father took background photographs to help Millais establish the scene.

From 1881-1897, Potter kept an encrypted journal to stop her mother from reading it. In it, she not only recounts her artistic aspirations, but also her keen suspicions of London politicians. Potter was by no means just a dreamy artist under the spell of Romanticism. Her artistry and life was guarded by the moral and stable foundations of Victorian Christian culture. As such, she looked at the world through an ethical lens, and viewed much of politics as an unsteadying of English life. On the negative, her humor, especially in her early years, was almost cynically sarcastic, and bordered on the petty. Prime Minister Gladstone in particular became an outlet for her unbalanced criticism. She disliked him because he rocked the boat, and lacked firmness when dealing with the Irish riots. Far from being just unrestrained and revolutionary, Gladstone’s reforms are largely considered some of the greatest in English political history. However, Potter gets at the heart of politics when she points out the dangers of any one man’s influence on the people of England. More than his actual policies, Potter’s difficulty with Gladstone was his sense of exulted status that became detrimental to the people. She wrote in her journal in 1885, “In future day people will not be able to realize how completely England has been under the thumb of that shifting, incapable old man. May it never again be so completely in any one man’s power for good or ill” (162)! Gladstone was certainly not “incapable,” but he was only popular because of his power to change things. This power Potter pointed out in 1884 is dangerous,

“It strikes me that that august body, and indeed the House of Commons itself, is regarded with very little respect by the country at large. Gladstone has got hold of power, and I suppose will stick to it till he dies, unless the opposition unite better. A certain class who owe everything to Mr. Gladstone, or who hope to get something from him, stick to him.

The commoners take that side because they hope from his promises to obtain more power. If you offer a thing, commonly considered pleasant and desirable, to any person, he will be likely to take it, though he might not have asked for it. Changes are to be treated with the greatest caution, and only granted when really desired and needed.

It is nonsense to say the country longs unconsciously for the Radical reforms that are turning up now. They are simply baits. I say nothing about their merits or de-merits, but simply that there is no feeling in the country like that which animated sober, quiet men at the time of the Reform Bill or repeal of the Corn Laws. Doubtless times have changed, but Englishmen are still Englishmen, and if they want a thing they will ask for it” (97).

Wow, this almost sounds like Edmond Burke! Imagine writing in 1884 that policy is bait to extend power. Change is a frightful thing which ought to be handled with absolute delicacy. Her love for a stable England is very similar to Burke’s understanding of liberty. She knew that politics was about compromise; “Radicals furious because old Gladstone is trying to make terms with the Tories. There is no doubt what has driven him into his senses, it is the Egyptian difficulty. He is going to get the Franchise Bill through as best he can, retire to the House of Lords, and leave the Tories to make the best of twenty millions deficit” (119). Although Potter’s ideas about individual policies may have been contradictory in some places, her love for order and skepticism for political change was constant. As such, she admired government that took a hard line against socialism and the Irish riots and explosions of the 1880s:

“A new and most wicked warfare has been attempted by the American Socialists. They sent some barrels to Germany full of potatoes infected by the Colorado beetle. It is feared some packages may have got in unnoticed.

They fear there is great risk of a terrible riot in Newry quarry. What on earth is come over our Government? They permit Parnell’s people to meet to denounce them and snub the loyal Orange men. It is a most serious business. If there is bloodshed tomorrow, and orangemen are arrested, the Conservatives will stand by them. The Grand Old Man [Gladstone] will of course do the opposite, will the Liberals follow him? Will things ever come to a head in this Irish question, which involves the Land question, socialism, law and order?

The times are as stirring as those which Lord Macaulay described in the Siege of Londonderry, as interesting events are going on in Ireland, but we have on mind clear and wide enough to take it in. In the same way there is as much strange and wild, though times and manners have changed. As wonderful a book as Rob Roy might be written if there was a Scott. There are plenty of odd originals, and dark intrigues, but there is no great colourist to paint them…

Rioting at Newry was not serious, for which merciful fact small thanks were due to Gladstone whose timid policy was justly derided by the Nationalists” (91).

Very much like Locke, Potter saw the English Government lax in its duty to protect order and private property (she mentioned land particularly). Her view of private land was explicate, “The government does nothing. Reports of riots in Leicester and Nottingham. Rioters at Birmingham are going to Chamberlain. I wish he would openly take the part of Hyndman and Co and be involved in their condemnation. He is with them in spirit. Land is as much personal property as plate or carriages” (182). However, she was well rounded enough to notice the flaws of the Conservatives,

“I don’t know what will come to this country soon, it is going at a tremendous speed. I think and hope that this extension of the Franchise may not be as bad as the Conservatives fear. No doubt if the labourers get power they will be greedy at first, but I think the sentiments of the lower-classes in the country are rather conservative on the whole, very loyal and tenacious of England’s honour. Still, landed property is not a particularly secure possession at present. It is middlemen who have pushed up, that are such mischievous radicals, like Chamberlain” (90).

Even though the Conservatives and Tories had faults, Potter respected their attention to order and disliked the demagogical method of the Radicals:

“The nominations begin today. I believe the Tories will get in. I hope so, though I am a Whig, anything is better that the Radicals. I think even if the Liberals win, it will be by so small a majority that the present Government will not be disturbed. Lord Salisbury is advancing in public opinion.
Mr. Gladstone has certainly made less impression in Midlothian than on the last occasion. There is a theory that he will retire in a few weeks, because he will be so mortified at having lost his hold on the people. It certainly does seem as if the Liberal tyranny was being shaken when one hears it said of one of the Manchester candidates, ‘so and so would have no chance if he was not a Tory” (161-162).

Potter’s personal ties with the Whigs did not interrupt her panoramic view of English politics. She grants Gladstone leeway only when he takes on a more humble disposition, “Gladstone: first great speech, showed great falling off in his power of voice, part was spoken in a conversational tone, and part was read” (199). However, Potter’s unabated scrutiny of the world and her wit that always pointed out the hypocritical in others took her pen boldly to even controversial topics of the day:

“I never have believed in those MacClarens and their radicalism, and young Mrs. MacClaren, I have always looked upon with the greatest contempt. She divided her time between women’s rights and the fashions. She is a most extravagant person, and yet they say it is a sin to be rich. Old Duncan MacClaren and Poachin are both completely self-made. The former a canny, exceedingly close old Scotchman came into Edinburgh from the Western Highlands as a shepherd boy, barefoot. His wife Priscilla, violent women’s rights, is sister to Mr. Bright, who has rather fallen off from them owing to the said women’s rights question, as also with the Cobden girls” (100).

Potter’s dislike for socialism, Irish violence, and political hypocrisy can be summed up with a statement from her journal in 1885. She was looking for stability on the eve of the modern world, “In the evening the state of things was this. The Borough elections were virtually over. As a matter of figures, the Parties were even, but morally the Conservatives had a great victory. Whatever may be the verdict of the Counties, the educated classes have declared firmly for sense and order” (164). Politics was by no means a fringe issue for Potter, it reflected a larger battle to conserve that which was good. The sense of personal insecurity in the face of civil unrest provoked her to unite her political views with the literary fascinations of her youth; “Cluny McPherson is just dead at the age of eighty. He is the grandson of the Chief who was out in the ’45 [the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion]. I should have thought it was longer ago, not that we have moved on so far in some things since then. I can’t help thinking that the state of society, as regards personal safety, has rather gone back lately” (125).

A woman with many facets, Potter’s cynical nature did not dim her sense of sympathy. If politics was a war to preserve, then life was the experience of preservation. Indeed, when she lost a father figure Mr. Gaskell she decried the sense of change and lamented the event as a symbol of her lost youth:

“Oh how plainly I see it again. He is sitting comfortably in the warm sunshine on the doorstep at Dalquise, in his grey coat and old felt hat. The newspaper lies on his knees, suddenly he looks up with his gentle smile. There are sounds of pounding footsteps. The blue-bottles whizz off the path. A little girl in a print frock and striped stockings bounds to his side and offers him a bunch of meadowsweet. He just says, ‘thank you, dear’, and puts his arm round her.

The bees hum round the flowers, the air is laden with the smell of roses, Sandy lies in his accustomed place against the doorstep. Now and then a party of swallows cross the lawn and over the house, screaming shrilly, and the deep low of the cattle comes answering one another across the valley, borne on the summer breeze which sweeps down through the woods from the heathery moors.

Shall I really never see him again? But he is gone with almost every other, home is gone for me, the little girl does not bound about now, and live in fairyland, and occasionally wonder in a curious, carefree manner, as of something not concerning her nature, what life means, and whether she shall ever feel sorrow. It is all gone, and he is resting quietly with our fathers. I have begun the dark journey of life. Will it go on as darkly as it has begun? Oh that I might go through life as blamelessly as he” (93-94)!

With Mr. Gaskell’s passing came the responsibility to honor him by living in his footsteps. Potter’s maturity at the age of eighteen is truly marvelous. Regarding the balance between adulthood and childhood she later wrote at the age of thirty, “retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense,… fear no longer the terror that flieth by night, yet… feel truly and understand a little, a very little, of the story of life” (435). She was destined to become a children’s author.

At the urging of her brother, Potter sent some of her drawings to the greeting card company Hildesheimer and Faulkner, which requested that she send more. Her old friend from Wray Church in the Cumbrian Lake District, Rev. Rawnsley also cheered her publishing on. While twenty seven, Potter began writing stories into letters with illustrations, and sent them to children of one of her old governesses when they were ill with scarlet fever. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, and The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy Winkle were some of her letters. Eventually, Potter asked to borrow these letters back in order to make them into books. She sent them to Frederick Warne and Company, and Norman Warne helped her publish them. Norman began courting Potter in his own right, and the two became engaged in 1905 against the wishes of Potter’s parents. However, Norman died just a few months after the engagement.

Now was Potter’s time to retreat from a life of pain, excitement, and action. Finally finding a quiet life, she purchased Hill Top farm with her book money in her old fantastical summer holiday location of the Cumbrian Lake District near the village of Near Sawrey. Here, she began breeding sheep in the quiet of the English countryside. Consequently, this life provoked her sense of scenery, and she continued writing stories for Frederick Warne and Company, with scenic illustrations inspired by the magnificence of her humble country living. Her “little books” are about what she had earlier called “the story of life.” They speak of the preservation of what is good, and reflect timeless Victorian truths.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902):

Everyone knows this one. The main theme here is obedience to parents. It is particularly striking that Potter would write about obeying parents when she herself suffered from a lack of parental attention. Parental authority intrinsically necessitates the duty of respect and obedience. When one forgets one’s duty, ill comes of it.

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903):

This story is about decorum and, like Peter Rabbit, respect for authority. Squirrel Nutkin’s unrestrained cheek and ill-mannered riddles in the face of the prestigious owl Old Brown with no motive other than to resist and break away from restraint only gets him into trouble. Nutkin ends up barely keeping his life and losing his tail, which he had always boasted in. With the absence of a happy ending, this story was probably meant to be startling to children. In fact, one of Potter’s young readers C.S. Lewis claimed Squirrel Nutkin had inspired him as a child. This inspiration would carry on into what is presently perhaps the most popular children’s series in the world, The Chronicles of Narnia.

The Tailor of Gloucester (1903):

Tailor tells the story of a poor tailor who falls ill with a fever while making a coat for the mayor of Gloucester’s Christmas wedding. Mice finish the coat for him, and the tailor is able to work with the mice to rise above his poverty. Perhaps Potter’s most fanciful opening for any of her stories is the opening of Tailor. I remember being entranced as a young child with these lines; “In a time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets – when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta – there lived a tailor in Gloucester” (Potter, “The Complete Tales” 39). It was as if a spell of silver rain laced my imagination. I’ll never forget the feeling of these words. Tailor was Potter’s personal favorite of all her writings. It is perhaps Potter’s only great fairy tale, and embodies all of what the Victorians would see as both fanciful and practical. In Tailor, Romanticism and Realism are complements, and mesh harmoniously. Here, Potter looks back in typical Romantic fashion to the 18th century as an inspiration for ethereal finery and chivalric manners. Potter’s perception of decorum takes on an elegance in Tailor that far surpasses Nutkin. However, like a Realist and similar to a Dickens novel, Potter’s main character is a poor Tailor who has only his wares to remind him of the unreached life of civility. He is selfless, knows nothing of self pity, and enjoys his humble life with a gentle and grateful spirit. Potter’s love for the quiet life shines through the tailor’s humility and endearing nature. Fancy and practicality meet in the celebration of Christmas. Dickens had inadvertently bridged the gap between Romanticism and Realism for Victorians with A Christmas Carol, which once again revived in England the fascination as well as the service of Christmas. Potter takes the Victorian concept of Christmas to a whole new level by embedding it in a fairy tale. Her lightness of theme springs ahead of the heaviness of rhetoric in Dickens. By conforming to the genres of her day, Potter transformed them to an unprecedented height of beauty and grace. She was imparting morality to children without a hint of being overbearing. The moral of service and duty to one another becomes precious when placed within a delicate fairy story. Tailor deserves a place among the greatest fairy tales of all time. It demonstrates Potter’s mastery for placing the truths of Victorianism into a tale.

The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905):

Tiggy-Winkle is my personal favorite of all Potter’s books. I admire its unadorned sense of beauty and friendship. Whereas, Tailor is ethereal in its delivery, Tiggy-Winkle is softer, more sublime, and closer to the mortal heart. It’s a story about a farm girl Lucie who is befriended by a washerwoman named Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle invites Lucie to tea, takes her along to deliver the clean laundry, and finally disappears into the hillside. Generosity and industriousness are the virtues of this story. Potter makes these points so gently that the reader also walks away with a sense of longing intrigue. Tiggy-Winkle certainly has a feel for the northern countryside.

The Tale of Pigling Bland (1913):

The story that romanticizes the English countryside more that any of Potter’s other stories is Pigling Bland. Pigling Bland, while going to market, only wishes that he “could have a little garden and grow potatoes” (291). He befriends a lady and escapes to the county line from Cumbria into Westmorland, where he can retire to a life of gardening. Defining English Victorian life for children, Potter created a myth of freedom and quietness in Pigling Bland. Potter defines freedom as escaping every force to coerce one into an unstable life and finding a place of peace. Whether inspired by Potter or not, Tolkien later situates this English virtue of quietness into his Hobbiton. Pigling Bland is not only Potter’s life story, but also the story of English rural life as a whole.

Certainly Potter was imparting wisdom in her novels, but she was doing so with the bloom of her rosy pen. She proved that Romantic ideals could and should work alongside stable ethics. Her stories aren’t just entertainment, they embody what she wrote in her journal in 1896; “retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense,… fear no longer the terror that flieth by night, yet… feel truly and understand a little, a very little, of the story of life” (Potter, “The Journal” 435). This statement can essentially sum up Victorianism.

Living, writing, and raising sheep in her retreat, Potter shunned publicity and in 1912 married a local solicitor, William Heelis, who shared her love for the country. In 1909 she bought another farm named Castle Farm. By the time of her death on December 22, 1943, she had acquired four thousand acres. Tragically, she gave all of it to the National Trust when she passed on. This last move was somewhat contradictory to her ideas, given her thoughts on private property; “Land is as much personal property as plate or carriages” (182). Perhaps her fear for the devastation of the English countryside in the context of “progress” took her to a hypocritical extreme. However, her works still stand as a light into the Victorian era for generations of readers.

Sources:
Potter, Beatrix. The Journal of Beatrix Potter 1881-1897. Trans. Leslie Linder. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., Frederick Warne & Co., 1989. Print.
Potter, Beatrix. The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter. New York: Viking Penguin Inc., Frederick Warne & Co., 1989. Print.
http://www.visitcumbria.com/bpotter.htm
http://www.visitcumbria.com/lakes.htm
http://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/hilltop.htm
http://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/sawrey.htm
http://www.visitcumbria.com/amb/esthwait.htm
http://www.library.pitt.edu/libraries/is/enroom/illustrators/potter.htm#bibliography
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/prints_books/features/potter/index.html
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/online/exhibitions/childhood/idyll.asp
http://www.mackinac.org/6881
Image of Beatrix Potter1 from Wikipedia
Image of Tale of peter rabbit 12 from Wikipedia
Image of Squirrel Nutkin Mr Brown from Wikipedia
Image of Tailor of gloucester mice from Wikipedia
Image of Mrs Tiggy Winkle and Lucie from Wikipedia
Image of Pigling Bland pg 31 from Wikipedia