SEAN DOUGLAS: Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.
I'm Sean Douglas, a senior producer at the National Trust.
And today I'm gonna start things slightly differently by telling
you a story.
So sit back, make yourself comfortable. And let's begin.
GENERIC: Once upon a time in Victorian London, there was a
remarkable young girl that lived part of her life in a world of
her own making.
It was an enchanting land where animals could talk and had
mischievous characters.
There were disobedient rabbits, disrespectful squirrels and a
very determined duck.
But the real world wasn't always as rosy. In her normal life she
had few friends who appreciated her particular ways.
And so when the pressures of growing up as a girl in
Victorian Society got too much, she would retreat into her
secret kingdom where she would be greeted with friendly furry
faces.
Where the unruly residents would gently converse with and poke
fun at her.
As she grew up, she began to sketch her animal friends and
chronicle their adventures.
The girl grew into a woman, she wanted to share her secret world
with others.
Until finally, the stories and characters from her magical
kingdom made their way into bookshops and children's
imaginations everywhere.
The name of this author was Helen, or to give her full name,
Mrs Helen Beatrix Potter.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Beatrix Potter is one of the most successful
children's writers of all time.
In her lifetime she wrote and illustrated 28 books, including
the 23 tales, which have sold more than 250 million copies.
This is the author, most of us know and love, but it's just a
fraction of the story that makes up the life of the remarkable
Beatrix Potter.
Usually the story of Beatrix Potter is told by the National
Trust through Hilltop Farm in the Lake District, a rural haven
where the author felt most at home and where many of her tales
and drawings took life.
But this journey begins a world away in South Kensington, London
to celebrate the 120th anniversary of her first
publication, the Tales of Peter Rabbit.
The National Trust and the Victoria And Albert Museum have
brought together their Collections from the author's
estate in an exhibition called Drawn to Nature.
So here I am at the V&A to uncover the lesser told story of
Beatrix Potter.
So, hi guys. Good to meet you!
Hi Sean, nice to see you!
So you're Helen, you're from the National Trust?
HELEN ANTROBUS: I am, Yeah.
SEAN DOUGLAS: And you're Annemarie, you're from the V&A?
That's right.
Traditionally in the National Trust. The story of Beatrix
Potter is hilltop.
HELEN ANTROBUS: Absolutely. It has become the setting for so
many of her books and her stories.
What we do by bringing these objects out of context is show
their significance throughout her entire life in a brand new
way that people I don't think will expect.
SEAN DOUGLAS: I'm intrigued to see what I'm going to see. So
should we crack on?
ANNEMARIE BILCLOUGH: The exhibition has four rooms. The
first room, town and country is the backdrop, the context for
the rest of the exhibition.
SEAN DOUGLAS: So as I walk in, I'm kind of noticing that
there's a lot of photography. And I would think coming to a
Beatrix Potter exhibition, it would all be about the water
colours?
ANNEMARIE BILCLOUGH: Beatrix's father was an amateur
photographer. We've got images from her from when she was a
baby right up until when Beatrix was in her forties.
SEAN DOUGLAS: The first image we see is this quite grainy image.
ANNEMARIE BILCLOUGH: I really love this image. It's one of my
favorites. It shows a really tiny young Beatrix in an
extremely large drawing room window.
She's surrounded by a mass of ivy. It's really evocative of
this idea of her growing up in a townhouse. But really in her
life, she was drawn to nature and the natural world.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: Beatrix had the childhood of a Victorian young
lady, which really was quite an isolated one.
I'm Sarah Gristwood and I'm the author of the story of Beatrix
Potter. She was home schooled. She really didn't have a huge
amount of company except for her brother. And of course, for her
all important pets.
Beatrix was born in London in 1866 but she later wrote of it
as my unloved birthplace.
She told someone that her brother and she were born in
London. Our roots, our hearts were in the north country.
The salvation for her was those huge long summer holidays the
family spent, first in Scotland and then in the Lake District.
SEAN DOUGLAS: It was during these holidays that Beatrix and
her brother Bertram developed a fascination with the natural
world and began to observe it with the sharpest of young eyes.
HELEN ANTROBUS: So we're going to look at one of the key
objects in this section under the microscope, which is Beatrix
and her brother Bertram's collector's cabinet.
The contents of the drawers are filled with specimens from the
natural world that are hand labelled by Beatrix.
We only actually have one drawer on display in the exhibition.
It's filled with rocks and fossils and geological
specimens.
Now, the cabinet normally lives at the Beatrix Potter Gallery
which the National Trust runs and cares for.
SEAN DOUGLAS: To understand how Beatrix's travels between the
city and the countryside helped shape her young mind, the next
part of our story transports us to the fresh air and rolling
hills of the Lake District.
So I've made my way 250 miles northwest of the V&A to the
picturesque village of Hawkshead.
As you enter this village, you're hit by the abundance of
stone and slate which pretty much all the buildings, cottages
and churches are made out of.
And nestled within all of that is the Beatrix Potter Gallery,
which is where I'm heading to now to meet Laura White, the
Collections and House Officer.
And here we are.
LAURA WHITE: Hi Sean, how you doing?
SEAN DOUGLAS: Hi Laura, Thank you.
This place is such a contrast to the V&A. You know, you've got
these perfectly designed sets and here, It's like something
out of Dickensian novel or something.
LAURA WHITE: Exactly, yeah, It's got loads of atmosphere and with
the creaky floorboards and wonky walls, it's a totally different
feel to the V&A.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Why I really wanted to come here was to see
some of the other drawers from the display cabinet that I'd
seen at the V&A. Can we go and have a look at some of those?
LAURA WHITE: Of course, let's do that.
So this is one of the drawers containing butterflies and moths
caught by Beatrix Potter, all different species.
Some of them probably don't exist anymore. But then there's
some more common ones like Red Admirals and Tortoiseshell and
Painted Ladies.
SEAN DOUGLAS: They are beautiful but it is a little bit macabre.
I mean, what I'm looking at is over 50 butterflies in the
drawer with pins stuck through them.
LAURA WHITE: We wouldn't do it now, we much prefer to see
butterflies flying around, but it was quite normal to do then.
It would have been a way of keeping themselves occupied when
they were on holiday.
SEAN DOUGLAS: For Beatrix and Bertram collecting these
specimens was a way of feeding their curiosity as well as
giving them a window on the world outside the confines of
their strict Victorian upbringing.
Back to Beatrix Potter's biographer, Sarah Gristwood.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: Beatrix's family home, on the one hand, it
was this place of absolute Victorian respectability.
On the other hand, she had this extraordinary range of pets
there.
Not just the famous rabbits but things like salamanders,
hedgehogs.
I mean, she and her brothers had bats, birds of all sorts. The
place must have been alive with grunts and squeaks.
SEAN DOUGLAS: They adored their pets so much. They took them
everywhere.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: There are amazing pictures of Beatrix
boarding a train in London with a Rabbit on the lead.
I mean, she and her brother took their pets on holiday with them,
but again, we're not just talking, you know, dogs or a cat
in a cage or something.
We are talking this absolute menagerie.
She absolutely saw animals and other aspects of nature as
something to study as well.
I mean, she'd be doing extraordinary things like
bringing a bat into the house, you know, smuggled in, in a
paper bag.
She once tried to bring a specimen of dry rot into the
House, but understandably, her parents weren't too keen on
that.
SEAN DOUGLAS: It was through the hours spent drawing and
cataloguing her specimens that her skills as an artist really
started to shine.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: I'm looking now at a page from a sketchbook she
made when she was only eight years old.
It's a page of careful drawings of insects, caterpillars and the
plants on which they feed.
Beautifully detailed, It's impossible to realize that it's
a young child doing that.
SEAN DOUGLAS: As her fascination with the natural world grew.
She'd even dissect her specimens to gain a better understanding
of their anatomy.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: She was quite unsentimental when they died.
She and her brother would even boil the skeletons down to study
and to draw.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Some of these are on display in the Beatrix Potter
exhibition back at the V&A including one very surprising
specimen, as curator Helen Antrobus reveals.
HELEN ANTROBUS: First and foremost, they were scientists
and even their favourite pets didn't escape that scientific
treatment.
Now, Benjamin Bouncer, which was Beatrix's pet Rabbit who would
become the inspiration for Benjamin Bunny.
When he died, of natural causes, I feel I should stress!
Beatrix, we believe skinned Benjamin so she could keep his
pelt.
He had been her model for so long that I think she wanted to
keep it to ensure consistency and detail in her work.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Back to V&A curator, Annemarie Bilclough.
ANNEMARIE BILCLOUGH: Probably when she was a teenager, Beatrix
started to take drawings of what she saw through microscopes.
For example, here is a beetle shown at different levels of
magnification. Later on, she also produced lithographs for a
teacher who gave lectures in natural history.
So she's starting to move into the world of scientific
illustrator.
Around the same time in the mid 1880s, she became interested in
mycology, which is the study of fungi.
DR ISABELLE CHARMANTIER: There was an enthusiasm for mycology
at the time and certainly in our archives, we do have a lot of
books and manuscripts and also photographs that relate to this
enthusiasm.
My name is Isabelle Charmantier. I'm the head of Collections at
the Linnean Society Of London.
The Linnean Society is a learned society founded in 1788 for the
promotion of natural history.
So this is a place where scientists send in their papers
to be read at meetings.
Probably the most famous paper was the one submitted in haste
and read on the first of July 1858 by Charles Darwin and
Alfred Russell Wallace. And that paper was on the theory of
evolution by natural selection.
SEAN DOUGLAS: During her twenties, Potter pursued her
fascination with fungi and became a dedicated student to
the science of mycology.
She would spend hours analyzing specimens she'd collect and
would go on to produce over 300 detailed botanical drawings.
DR ISABELLE CHARMANTIER: Botanical art still has a
function at the end of the 19th century despite the apparition
of photography.
Even today, if you pick up a copy of the Curtis Botanical
magazine which publishes new species of plants, there'll be
photographs.
But in order to get into the detail of the characters, they
will use black and white drawings of the plant.
She really was a gifted illustrator who closely observed
and faithfully recorded what she saw and as any scientist wants
to do, she wanted to share those results.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Sarah Gristwood again.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: She actually developed a theory on how they
reproduced by means of spores.
And she wrote a paper that was delivered to the very
prestigious Linnean Society.
Only, of course, because Beatrix was a woman, she couldn't read
it herself. It had to be read for her by the director of Kew
Gardens.
GENERIC: Order Order.
Order.
DR ISABELLE CHARMANTIER: Her paper was quote "read and
discussed on the 1st of April 1897."
But then it was withdrawn by Potter on 8th of April. And it
was never resubmitted.
And that's because some additional work was required on
the manuscript before it could appear in print.
But it seems that the work was never carried out.
It may be that she was put off by the male society that she was
having to deal with and possibly the frustration at the
scientific aspect of her research that was just so hard
to come through because she was a woman.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: Many decades later in the 1990s, the society
acknowledged that she'd been treated scurvily.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Potter was left frustrated by the barriers
imposed on women in the world of academia.
But despite this setback, she decided to turn her passion for
nature and her flair for illustration to a different
direction completely.
Potter's eventual success as an author would be long and fought
with obstacles.
But the inspiration for her very first publication came about in
the most unexpected way.
It began with a poorly boy in need of entertainment and the
seeds of a story idea about a very naughty bunny who never
listened to his mother, Annemarie Bilclough again.
ANNEMARIE BILCLOUGH: Her first picture book, a Tale of Peter
Rabbit actually began as a picture letter that she made for
the son of her former governess Noel Moore.
We're shown two pages of this letter that is written in pen.
And within the letter, you see the outline sketches of rabbits.
What she's doing here, she's just writing the text of the
start of the letter which begins, "My dear Noel, I don't
know what to write about so I shall tell you a story of four
little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton Tail and
Peter."
SEAN DOUGLAS: The little boy Noel wasn't the only child of
the governess to get a story.
Others included one to Eric about a frog who loved fishing
and another to Nora about a very cheeky squirrel.
Sometime after Potter started to share her stories with children,
she had the idea that perhaps her colourful characters could
be enjoyed by a wider audience.
ANNEMARIE BILCLOUGH: She began with pencil sketches and these
are in the V&A collection.
So you can see the really quite familiar sketch of Mrs Rabbit
and the three bunnies and Peter he's facing away from her and
about to go off somewhere.
And those pen and ink sketches that she created were inserted
into an exercise book and on each page of the exercise book,
she wrote out the stories.
CHRISTIAAN JONKERS: She'd sold a few drawings to greetings card
manufacturers in the 1890s.
So when she took up the notion of publishing these illustrated
stories, she had quite a firmly preconceived idea of what they
should look like and how she was going to deal with the
publishers.
My name is Christiaan Jonkers.
I own Jonker's Rare Books in Henley On Thames. And we
specialize in rare books and manuscripts, particularly
Beatrix Potter.
She had written the picture letters for children and she
wanted the books to be read by children in a small format that
would appeal to children and could easily be handled by them.
She also wanted an illustration opposite every page.
This was expensive to produce. So publishers who were
interested proposed making a grander larger format book that
they published at six shillings.
But Potter wanted the book to be inexpensive and accessible to as
many children as possible.
So eventually discussions between publishers and Potter
broke down.
Potter being a headstrong young lady, took matters into her own
hands at that point and published the book herself. When
she found a printer, they issued 250 copies of Peter Rabbit.
SEAN DOUGLAS: The Tale of Peter Rabbit immediately captured
young reader's imaginations. It proved so popular that Potter
had another 200 copies printed.
At this point, the publishing world could no longer ignore the
little book.
Publisher Frederick Warne And Co. who'd originally rejected
Potter's manuscript, agreed to take on the book and print an
initial 8000 copies.
The Tale Of Peter Rabbit would go on to become one of the most
successful children's books of all time.
And at the age of 36 Potter had become a successful author. Back
to biographer Sarah Gristwood.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: It's amazing how quickly things happened.
1901 private printing 1902, it's published and by 1903, there
were already Peter Rabbit dolls being sold all over the place.
So clearly, Beatrix instantly hit a nerve.
CHRISTIAAN JONKERS: She was able to produce these beautifully
produced books and still sell them at a shilling each.
It helped move the market away from the late Victorian period
where books for children were really only for wealthy families
to a situation where these books were if not available to all
were available to a much much wider audience.
The commercial success of Peter Rabbit and then the subsequent
books led to Potter being one of the first really successful
series authors for children.
Indeed, I think one could stretch a point and say that
without Beatrix Potter, we might not have Harry Potter.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Beatrix had found wealth recognition and
importantly an outlet for her love of the natural world.
She'd become an overnight success with the Tale of Peter
Rabbit and was creating many more, including the Tale of Two
Bad Mice and the Tales of Miss Tiggy Winkle.
But despite all her achievements, there was still
something missing.
She was wary of living in the city and yearned to find a way
to escape to the countryside while she felt she belonged.
Using the spoils from her publishing career. She bought
Hilltop Farm in Ambleside in the Lake District, but she couldn't
move there permanently just yet as Laura White from the Potter
Gallery explains.
LAURA WHITE: When she bought it in 1905, she was unmarried and
although she was in her late thirties, it wasn't the done
thing then to live away from your parents.
So she used hilltop as a holiday home. It was an escape from her
London life.
She was really inspired by it. She went on a huge creative
flurry nearly every book that she subsequently wrote had
illustrations that were either based in the house or the garden
or the surrounding village.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Eventually, in 1913, Potter was able to move
her life permanently to the Lake District. When she married local
solicitor, William Heelis, she fully embraced life as a farmer
and became passionate about the conservation of the local
landscape.
LAURA WHITE: She had a huge impact on the preservation of
this area and the best way to find out about that is to get
out into the landscape really.
SEAN DOUGLAS: For the next chapter of Potter's life, I've
taken Laura's advice and I'm making my way to the summit of
Loughrigg Fell to meet Harvey Wilkinson Cultural Heritage
curator who knows all about Beatrix's legacy in the Lake
District.
Hi, Harvey, how you doing?
HARVEY WILKINSON: Hi, Hi, nice to meet you!
SEAN DOUGLAS: It's a miserable wet, cloudy, cold day. But I
mean, even now just standing here looking down into the
valley, it's kind of awe inspiring, isn't it?
HARVEY WILKINSON: It's incredibly beautiful and the
Lakes always wears bad weather really well.
It never really gets gloomy, it just gets more romantic.
SEAN DOUGLAS: My understanding of Beatrix Potter in the Lakes
is hilltop. So how is she connected to what we're looking
at now?
HARVEY WILKINSON: The aspects of the Lake District were a bit
more like a native Kensington.
The place was full of intellectuals, artists, writers,
and very very rich merchants and industrialists who were building
villas around the Lake District.
Before 1800, this was an entirely farmed landscape with a
little village church in the middle of it.
Now we look at it and we do indeed still see the same farmed
landscape, kind of squeezed in the middle of that and the lake,
we see the villas. We see the development.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Together with family friend, Hardwicke
Drummond Rawnsley, one of the founding members of the National
Trust, Beatrix would devote much of her time and wealth trying to
stop these developments by defensively buying up huge
swathes of local countryside.
She would also become an expert on the local traditional breed
of sheep. The Herdwick which had grazed the fells for centuries
but was under threat.
HARVEY WILKINSON: It was one of the big differences with Potter.
She was buying land to preserve a way of life and she certainly
helped to preserve Herdwick Farming in the Lake District,
which is now a very, very important part of the World
Heritage Site.
So you tend to look at landscape, you tend to think
visually, but Potter was also working socially.
She was aware that it was a landscape that people needed to
access, the same sorts of stuff we're working on here in the
Lake District every day. It's access to beautiful places.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Beatrix Potter died at home at the age of 77 on
the 22nd of December, 1943.
She bequeathed to the National Trust 4000 acres of land,
including 15 farms and buildings which are still working today.
Much of the land she left now constitutes the Lake District
National Park which she had spent years of her life
preserving.
And despite Beatrix Potter's success and fame and fortune
from her career as an author, it's the life she built in the
Lake District tending to her flock of Herdwick sheep that
seems to bring her the most pride.
GENERIC: Dear listener, we have now come to the end of our
little Tale Of Beatrix Potter.
To this day you'll find so many of her little tales at bedtime
around the world as they're lovingly shared from generation
to generation.
But our story has perhaps been one you hadn't heard before.
This is the tale of a girl and how the natural things of the
world fuelled her imagination and guided her through the ups
and downs of growing into a woman.
And how even after she had grown up and found success beyond her
wildest dreams, she returned to nature where she felt most happy
and free.
But listen carefully to hear one final chapter to her story.
SARAH GRISTWOOD: When she died, she left instructions that her
ashes should be scattered on the hillside above Hilltop Farm.
It's the slope where Jemima Puddleduck finally manages to
take flight, but no one knows precisely where and that's the
way Beatrix wanted it.
SEAN DOUGLAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of the
National Trust Podcast.
You can experience the remarkable world of Beatrix
Potter for yourself until the eighth of January 2023 at the
Beatrix Potter Drawn to Nature Exhibition at the V&A in London
in partnership with the National Trust.
To find out more you can head to this episode's show notes.
If you've enjoyed this episode, you can follow and review the
National Trust Podcast on your favourite podcast app and you'll
find all our audio series at nationaltrust.org.uk/podcasts.
But for now from me, Sean Douglas, goodbye.