No longer overlooked: Beatrix Potter, author of 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit'
This article is part of Overlookeda series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, were not reported in The Times.
With The Story of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter created what would become one of the world's most famous children's book characters.
The book, about a cheeky rabbit who steals vegetables from a Mr. McGregor's garden and at one point loses his coat and shoes, became a literary juggernaut that has sold more than 45 million copies. It also spawned a merchandising empire and left an indelible mark on children's book publishing.
But Potter's manuscript was initially rejected by publishers.
It was 1900 and Potter, then 34, had submitted her book, complete with her own intricate illustrations, to at least six publishers, according to her biographer. Linda Lear.
As the rejections poured in, she took out her frustrations in one letter to a family friend, including a sketch of himself, with a book in his hand, arguing with a man in a long coat. “I wonder if that book will ever be printed,” she said angrily.
Ultimately, she decided to print it herself. The following September, she took her savings to a private printer in London and ordered 250 copies of the book, which she distributed herself. The demand was so great that she soon had to print another 200. One of the earliest admirers, she wrote in a letter, was Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries.
Ultimately, Frederick Warne & Co., a London publishing house that was among those who had initially rejected the manuscript, released “Peter Rabbit” to a wider audience in 1902.
As the books flew off the shelves (or popped off, as the case may be), Potter sensed a merchandising opportunity. She designed a Peter Rabbit doll, injecting the legs with lead to help him stand upright, and registered it as patent no. 423888.
Soon there were porcelain figurines, wallpaper and many more dolls – products she jokingly called “sideshows,” even though she herself was involved in the design, copyright and quality control.
“If it were to be done at all, it would have to be done by me,” she wrote to her editor, Norman Warne, after a reader approached her in 1904 with another wallpaper design.
“The idea of rooms covered in poorly drawn rabbits,” Potter added, “is horrible.”
Potter died on December 22, 1943, during World War II, of heart disease and complications of bronchitis. She was 77. Although the death was initially not reported by The New York Times, for reasons lost to history, the newspaper referred to it in subsequent weeks and months, noting that she left an estate valued at $ 845,544 (about $15 million in today's dollars). ) and that Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, had purchased all fifteen copies of 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit' from a London bookshop to keep at Buckingham Palace.
Potter went on to write 22 more books, whimsical but razor-sharp stories about soon-to-be-enduring characters like Jemima Puddle-Duck and Benjamin Bunny. Her characters, dressed in vests and hats, were rendered with meticulous attention to anatomical detail, an outgrowth of Potter's long interest in the natural sciences.
Her deep involvement in the business side of book writing – dealing with licensing, for example – was unusual at a time when the economic and social status of unmarried women was limited.
“It's historically remarkable that we have a female author, especially a children's author, who had so much control over her work,” Chloe Flower, an assistant professor of English literature at Bryn Mawr College, said in an interview.
It also gave Potter an escape from the overbearing family life that most women of her time were stuck with.
Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London on July 28, 1866, the son of Rupert and Helen (Leech) Potter. Her father was a lawyer, her mother the daughter of a successful merchant. (Potter's paternal grandfather had been a wealthy calico trader and member of parliament.) Beatrix's upbringing was a whirlwind of country houses and idyllic vacations—but it was also stifling, hemmed in by a limited set of expectations for women, a strained relationship with her mother and a lack of friends.
Nature gave her an escape and a sense of purpose. She and her younger brother Bertram collected insects and frogs, captured and tamed mice, and kept rabbits captive for observation. She drew them — and just about everything else — endlessly, first tying her sketchbooks with string, according to her biographer Lear, who wrote “Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature” (2006).
Bertram was sent to school, but Beatrix was not; she was tutored by governesses, took art classes and made regular trips to the Natural History Museum in London to find specimens to draw. In the mid-1890s, she sold drawings of frogs and other work to a visual arts publisher.
“You have to find a solution somehow,” she wrote in her diary in 1895. “It's something to have some money to spend on books and to look forward to being independent, even if it's hopeless.”
She had a particular interest in mycology, the study of fungi, which she would examine under a microscope, and despite her amateur status she sought out the experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London.
With encouragement from her uncle, a prominent chemist, Potter had her article submitted to the Linnaean Association, an organization dedicated to natural history, but this went unnoticed (a small matter for which the association apologized after her death). At the turn of the century, Potter was over 30 and needed something different to do.
Seven years earlier, she had written what she called “picture letters” to the children of a former governess – illustrated fictional stories about creatures in the garden.
“I don't know what to write to you,” read one from 1893, “so I will tell you a story about four little rabbits named Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter.”
It was the governess, Annie Moore, who suggested to Potter that he turn the letters into books and sell them.
Potter knew there was a market for books that were physically small, such as Helen Bannerman's “The Story of Little Black Sambo” (1899), and she wanted her book to be affordable. About a year after Warne & Co. published “Peter Rabbit,” nearly 60,000 copies were in print, Lear wrote.
In 1905, when she was 39, Potter became engaged to the editor she worked with, Norman Warne, albeit to the disapproval of her parents; they believed that a publisher could not be good enough for their daughter. But Warne died of leukemia a month later. Potter, for her part, continued to work with his family's publishing house, writing most of her books between 1900 and 1913.
The world that Potter conjured up in her books – whimsical but dark, full of bloodless observations about the food chain – appealed to both adults and children.
“It would never do to eat our own customers; they left us and went to Tabitha Twitchett's,” notes a yellow tomcat named Ginger, who, along with a dog named Pickles, owns a store frequented by mice and rabbits in Potter's “Ginger & Pickles” (1909).
“On the contrary,” Pickles replies, “they wouldn't be going anywhere.”
The stories are full of consequences for rudeness, missteps and plain bad luck, but they were also charming and warm. When Gloucester's tailor falls ill and is unable to make a waistcoat for the mayor's wedding, a team of mice sew a cherry-red garment. And Jeremy Fisher, a frog, goes on a misadventure to find lunch for his friends, Sir Isaac Newton and Councilor Ptolemy Tortoise, who only eats salad.
Maurice Sendak, who acquired rare copies of Potter's books, acknowledged that he had been influenced by her work.
“Peter Rabbit, for all his gentle trifle, loudly proclaims that no story is worth writing, no picture worth taking, if it is not a work of imagination,” he wrote in “Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures” (1988), a book of essays.
Yet Potter never aspired to become a celebrity. She used the money from her book sales to buy – and preserve – the farmland that had inspired her stories, and as she grew older and her literary production slowed, she devoted herself increasingly to rural life.
“Working with real live animals somehow makes you despise paper-book animals – but I shouldn't tell my publisher that,” she wrote cheekily to one of them in 1918.
She bought Hilltop Farm, in north-west England's Lake District, in 1905, eventually becoming an award-winning sheep breeder and conservationist, and continued to buy land with William Heelis, a lawyer whom she married when she was 47.
By then, “very few people knew that Mrs. Heelis was also Beatrix Potter,” says Libby Joy, a former president of the Beatrix Potter Society.
Potter's stories have been made into films, including one of a 1971 ballet, 'The Tales of Beatrix Potter', and two adaptations of 'Peter Rabbit' – a 1991 ballet. HBO movie starring Carol Burnett and an animated version from 2018. Renée Zellweger played the author in the 2006 biopic 'Miss Potter'.
At her death, Potter left 4,000 hectares of farmland to the English National Trust, a conservation charity.
Her posthumous books include a diary, which was written in code, deciphered, and eventually published in 1966; a late-discovered story called “The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots,” which was published in 2016 with illustrations by Quentin Blake; and her mushroom illustrations, 59 of which appear in a 1967 natural history book written by a professional mycologist.