Linda Lear
BEATRIX POTTER
A life in nature
608pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 713 99560 2
US: St Martin’s Press. $30. 978 0 312 36934 7
In the summer of 1909, Beatrix Potter wrote of the cat that modelled for Ginger, the cat-shopkeeper in Ginger and Pickles: “His colour is so unusual, I thought it was rather a shame to cover him up with clothes in the pictures, but unfortunately there is a demand for comic animals in coats, and trousers . . . . it is an unfortunate fact that animals in their own pretty fur coats don’t sell so well as dressed up”.
An unfortunate fact. Linda Lear, the author of Beatrix Potter: A life in nature, would share Potter’s estimation of the matter, as it shows her subject as primarily a naturalist and countrywoman, and the clothes as a concession to popular sentiment and traditional illustration. But do we have to agree? If one considers the role of clothes in Potter’s books it seems quite fortunate there was a call for them. Many of her stories would have no plots if the animals had no clothes. In The Tailor of Gloucester, some mice finish a suit to help out a sick tailor; Tom Kitten’s mother makes him wear “elegant uncomfortable clothes” for her tea party, and then, in the sole dramatic incident, his buttons burst; Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is a washerwoman, sorting clothes, a page to a garment. Other stories turn on clothing: Jeremy Fisher’s mackintosh saves his life; Peter Rabbit’s blue jacket nearly does for him when its buttons get caught in a strawberry net. Clothes also make Potter’s animals half-human, and help supply the details of their personalities – details of character, status and social pretension, all of which may be of interest to a biographer seeking clues to a writer’s inclinations in her work.
Lear, however, is principally interested in the other, non-human side of Potter’s creatures. Potter didn’t produce Peter Rabbit until she was thirty-five, and had spent the years before studying natural science for her own pleasure and interest. She read into entomology, mycology, geology and palaeobiology. She drew and painted natural objects by the thousand, outside on the Northern hill when a family holiday allowed, or, when it did not, which was most of the time, through the glass of their cases in the Natural History Museum. At home in South Kensington she and her younger brother Bertram peopled their nursery quarters with a private menagerie of small rodents and reptiles, which Beatrix drew, in all moods and postures, both living and in cross-section. So when she came to write her stories, she brought this accumulation of observation and knowledge to the task. “She invented a new style of animal fable”, writes Lear, “in which anthropomorphized animals behave always as real animals with true animal instincts and are accurately drawn by a scientific illustrator.”
Because Beatrix Potter’s stories are curiously resistant to generalization (Mrs Tiggy-Winkle doesn’t behave at all like a real hedgehog, until her clothes fall off), this is both true and not true. To me, Potter’s combination of scientific precision, anthropomorphism and comedy recalls the taxidermists’ tableaux of the day, with their queasy relationship to evolutionary theory, where groups of stuffed frogs and kittens were posed in games of billiards and the like. But one takes the point: her animals have, on the whole, the appetites and the morals of animals, which may account for their enduring popularity with children. The absence of moral instruction is particularly apparent when one compares Potter’s fictitious animals to those in later twentieth-century stories, with their egregious preachiness; for example, the animals of Farthing Wood, in Colin Dann’s series of that name, who dwell in a vegetarian people’s co-operative, threatened only by the spoliations of man and his improvements.
Potter’s animals live by the laws of nature, and a nature, moreover, that submits to benign human intervention. Take The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck: as far from the lessons of Farthing Wood as it is possible to be. Here, a farmyard duck (Jemima) grows discontented, because the farmer keeps removing her eggs to be incubated by his hens. So off she goes to find a “convenient dry nesting place” to hatch her eggs on her own. The opportunity is there, in principle, for us to admire her as an independent duck, defying the forces of paternalism to take charge of her own reproductive destiny. In the Farthing Wood model, the woodland creatures (under their “elected leader”, the fox) would certainly rally round such an enterprise. Potter, however, was no kind of feminist, and Jemima is not a strong duck but an utter goose. The urbane and solicitous “sandy-whiskered gentleman” who offers her a dry shed, inexplicably filled with poultry feathers, for her purpose, is a fox who plans to eat both her and her eggs. In a masterful elision of human and animal concerns, he sends her back to the farm on a suicidal errand: collecting herbs for a roast duck dinner (“not even the mention of sage and onions made her suspicious”). In the end, a sheepdog and two foxhounds – agents of the farmer and his hunt, anathema to Farthing Wood – rescue her, kill the fox and impartially gobble up her eggs. There is no moral to this tale, just the withering verdict, “She always was a poor sitter”.
This would seem very much to bear out Lear’s estimation of her subject’s priorities: animals behaving naturally, and nature itself, subject to the requirements of a pragmatic, hard-headed and conservative farming programme, such as Beatrix Potter herself would practise on the estates she bought in the Lake District. But natural verisimilitude is only half of what Potter achieved with her little books, though one looks in vain for discussion of anything else in Lear’s book. This raises the question of how it is possible for a biographer who seems to have omitted nothing, who has seen her way to including the deaths of snails and what must be every particle of correspondence with the National Trust, to have left out so much. Beatrix Potter: A life in nature reads as a fortress of facts, thrown up to deter aftercomers in the field; but come they will, to forage this heap of undifferentiated research and make of it something more refined. And when they do they might like to address what Lear has not: the other half of Potter’s animals, the side that is not simply pig, kitten, rabbit, frog, but a member of a Victorian, or Edwardian, family.
One can understand a general biographer’s reservations about providing textual or psychological interpretation of the tales of Beatrix Potter. There may be whole outlying academic departments devoted to Potter studies; and the risk of comedy is high. But it might have been possible for Lear to remark how many of Potter’s stories are about animals that escape – from their clothes, or their farmyards, or their placid domestic routine, or their parents – and briefly to consider this, without fear of mockery, in the light of the thirty-nine years Beatrix Potter spent imprisoned in her parents’ house.
Potter’s life of miserable daughterly servitude was in some ways typical of a woman of her time and class. She was too shy to attract a suitor acceptable to her socially ambitious mother, and so she lived as an unconsulted spinster daughter, entrained to her parents’ daily and annual arrangements. Concessions to her growing maturity were made, moreover, not in the granting of freedoms or privileges, but in the transfer of domestic duties from her mother to herself. Her attempts to escape through formal channels of natural science, like mycology or fossils, were frustrated by her dim-spinster status, which, in the eyes of professional practitioners, eclipsed whatever interest her researches may have held. They ignored the accurate and ground-breaking successes she achieved with the germination of fungal spores. Though she spent almost every day in the Natural History Museum, she was effectively invisible to its curators, even when she met them in society. “I wonder if people know the pleasure they may give a person by a little notice . . . I must confess to crying after I got home”, she wrote, returning from an evening where the museum’s director, Sir William Flower, had snubbed her; “my father being as usual deplorable”, she continued.
How was her father deplorable? There is a hole at the centre of this book where Potter’s dominating parents ought to be. We are told they blocked her every exit, disapproving of her writing and trying to prevent her marriage, first to Norman Warne, the nephew of her publisher, and then to William Heelis, the country solicitor who helped her with her later land purchases. Yet we have no sense of them at all. Perhaps the problem is lack of documented description, combined with a writer who is not very good at noticing things or expressing sense and meaning from even the most revelatory material. In Lear’s hands, the opening of the Yew Tree Tearoom on one of Potter’s farms is made to weigh almost equally with the fate of Warne, who died on the very brink of springing her from her attic in Bolton Gardens. Nor does Lear have much sense of the seedtime and harvest of a life. She draws no parallel, for example, between Potter’s treatment at the hands of the museum professionals and her own campaign of persecution, many years later, against the unhappy Bruce Robinson, a professional land agent sent to manage her estates when she had handed their control to the National Trust. Potter sneered at his lack of aesthetic sense and derided his dull jobsworth professionalism. Though long inches of compressed paper separate these events, it should yet be possible to spy a connection.
A biographer like Lear is clearly going to be at a loss where material itself is thin, so all she can do with Potter’s big black spider of a mother is to post some scant search results and hope for the best: Helen Potter liked to dance, never smiled, might have had bad teeth, wouldn’t let Beatrix have the carriage, opposed her marriages, made social calls. This does not explain why Beatrix called her mother “the enemy”, or what it was that Helen and her husband used to block Beatrix’s marriages. It was not just the authority of snobbish Victorian parents over an unmarried female dependent: at the time of her engagement to Heelis, Potter was a forty-six-year-old landowner. Furthermore, when Bertram was pulled into the Heelis row, it was found that he had long ago burst his buttons and had secretly married the daughter of a Scottish wine merchant. Even now, as a middle-aged man, he dared not tell his parents that his father-in-law was in trade.
Whatever the reasons, Beatrix Potter was obliged to remain a daughter for a long time, and it may be that this extended stint in the nursery – her attic was literally that – allowed her to identify with the privations of childhood long after most adults have forgotten what it was like. The perfect elision of child and animal in her characters enables the trapped child to escape from his nursery with animal agility – to squeeze bonelessly under the garden gate or get right up the interesting chimney, as Tom Kitten does in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. He emerges onto the roof; Potter’s drawing conveys the resulting vertigo with a contrast of focus between the too-close chimney stack and the blue vacancy of the far hills. Coming back through the dark flue system he tumbles into an unknown chamber of the roof, tenanted by Samuel Whiskers and his skinny wife, Anna Maria. Samuel and Anna-Maria are enormous rats – hence a terrifying threat to a kitten; but the genius of Beatrix Potter is in giving the rats a human identity that is correspondingly scary to an Edwardian child. In this case, they seem to me to be very like domestic servants – the secret masters of middle-class houses when the parents were out. Such a household would have been, to a child, a warren of locked doors and forbidden places – the kitchen, the cupboards, the pantry, the garden that is “Mr McGregor’s” – each with its own despotic, resentful keeper poised to vent the frustrations of subordinate life on an inquisitive child.
The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, with its tight black tunnels and its serial-killer Whiskerses, is too frightening for many small children, and not just because Tom is almost eaten. Potter was admirably economical with her plots, so someone nearly gets eaten in most of her stories. But because she writes excellent prose, such as Jane Austen might have written had she made books for children, she can adjust the degree of menace with a phrase. Consequently some of the books, like The Tale of Mr Tod, where the entrance to a fox’s house has “many unpleasant things lying around, that had much better have been buried; rabbit bones and skulls and chicken legs and other horrors” – are very much darker than, for example, The Flopsy Bunnies or The Tale of Pigling Bland. This, the most joyous of her tales, emerged simultaneously with her decision to marry William Heelis against her parents’ obdurate will, and being, as even Linda Lear can see, a celebration of that great escape, it is worth some attention. The story revolves around the matter of licences required for a well-behaved young pig to leave his maternal home and go to market in another county. Pigling Bland doesn’t want to be sold at market, but to have a little garden and grow potatoes. He cannot see a way out of this. On he goes nevertheless, until a farmer of low principles finds him sheltering in a henhouse, and, seizing him, shuts him in the farmhouse kitchen. Grudgingly, the farmer heats him up some porridge, whereupon “It seemed to Pigling that something at the further end of the kitchen was taking a suppressed interest in the cooking”.
This beautiful sentence is, of course, the one-line autobiography of someone who had taken a suppressed interest in the cooking all her life; so when the “something” turns out to be “a perfectly lovely little black Berkshire Pig” we are not surprised to see that this cheerful little sow looks, in the illustration, rather like Beatrix Potter. (The Berkshire, by the way, is a breed from near London, notably placid and adaptable, with a strong constitution. As Potter doesn’t usually mention breeds, this may be a self-commendatory joke for her intended.) The obnoxious farmer has had this Pig-Wig, as she is called, locked in a cupboard. Pigling Bland asks how she came to be there.
“Stolen”, replied Pig-Wig, with her mouth full. Pigling helped himself to meal without scruple. “What for?” “Bacons, hams”, replied Pig-Wig cheerfully.
“Why on earth don’t you run away?” exclaimed the horrified Pigling. “I shall after supper”, said Pig-Wig decidedly.
The irrepressible Pig-Wig is Potter’s only delightful female character. Any child reading this can see at once that she is the type to sort Pigling out. And so it proves: they give the slip to the farmer and his market, and run off to grow potatoes ever after. Such is the perkiness of Pig-Wig in this scene, that we can hardly grasp what a horrible thing has been shown to us. Here, in this tale of piggies at market, there is abduction, incarceration, attempted murder, the triumph of character over oppression – everything for the thrilling story which, in other hands than Lear’s, would be Beatrix Potter’s own. Potter’s next biographers could do worse than to look at this story and ask what we would really like to know: what was it like in the cupboard, and how did Pig-Wig survive?
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Nicola Shulman's biography of Reginald Farrer, A Rage for Rock Gardening, appeared in 2002.
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