Like many authors of stories aimed at infants, Potter (1866–1943) was not a writer by profession. Her chief enthusiasm was natural history. Childhood family holidays in Perthshire and, later, the Lake District had given her the freedom to experience the natural world at first hand, and at the Natural History Museum in London, not far from her home in Kensington, she had made meticulous studies of plants and animals, often with the use of a microscope. Allied to an imagination that delighted in traditional fairy stories, it was this background that gave Peter Rabbit and Potter’s subsequent animal tales their peculiar atmosphere of believable wonder.
Aimed at the very young, with minimal text, the book is clearly not fine literature in the way of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Yet, as in the latter, much thanks to Potter’s illustrations, the humanised rabbits seem to exist in a recognisably real place. As Potter once admitted, the ‘careful botanical studies of my youth’ informed the ‘reality’ of her fantasy drawings.
Esta historia es de la edición July 07, 2021 de Country Life UK.
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