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,