Over the hills and far away

Beatrix Potter transcended a lugubrious childhood to emerge as a highly original writer and illustrator, whose cherished characters– inspired by the Nature around her–have more than stood the test of time, believes Matthew Dennison

- Matthew Dennison

BEATRIX POTTER loved, respected and, on occasion, in her later life as a Lakeland farmer, feared Nature: boundless curiosity fired her engagement with the world around her. In her own assessment one of the ‘children who-have-never-grown-up’, she retained lifelong the sense of wonder she had conceived as a child. She was fascinated by butterfly wings and ‘white scented funguses’; her pet lizard Judy; the ‘two great cedars’, their branches like ‘outstretched arms’, their green bark splashed with red, that punctuated the velvet lawns of her grandfather’s house in Hertfordshire; and her succession of tame rabbits, trained to perform simple tricks. These culminated in Peter, ‘bought at a very tender age, in the Uxbridge Road, Shepherd’s Bush, for the exorbitant sum of 4/6’ and afterward immortalised in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which has since sold more than 40 million copies. ‘The spirit of enquiry leads up a lane which hath no ending,’ Potter wrote in 1892, at the age of 26. In her own case, it was quite true.

The wholeheartedness of her curiosity played a key part in the success of what, with mixed emotions, she called her ‘little books’ and emerges powerfully from a new exhibition at the V&A Museum, ‘Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature’. Among the works on display are images of a terrapin, pomegranates, water lilies, a hedgehog, sea holly, a bat’s skeleton and the fungi that fascinated her in her twenties, ultimately leading to the research paper she submitted to the Linnean Society in 1897, On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae, as well as sketches of Judy the lizard and Peter the rabbit. ‘I like to do my work carefully,’ Potter explained to a young reader in 1928. Here is abundant evidence of that more-than-workmanlike carefulness.