JAMES GRASBY : 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.

Have you ever imagined being a fly on the wall of history? Join

me for an inside view of the stories of people, places and

moments that made us.

I'm historian James Grasby, lean in for a tale from time. Back

When.

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.

SARAH GRISTWOOD: Beatrix had the childhood of a Victorian young

lady, which really was quite an isolated one.

JAMES GRASBY : This is Sarah Gristwood, author of The Story

of Beatrix Potter.

SARAH GRISTWOOD: 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

JAMES GRASBY : A voice you will be familiar with. Back When

co-presenter Helen Antrobus, who in 2022 worked alongside the

Victoria And Albert Museum to curate an exhibition showcasing

some items that belonged to the Potters.

HELEN ANTROBUS: The contents of the drawers are filled with

specimens from the natural world that are hand labeled by

Beatrix. We only actually have one drawer on display in the

exhibition. It's filled with rocks and fossils and geological

specimens.

JAMES GRASBY : The cabinet usually lives amongst other

items in the Lake District where Beatrix spent a lot of time and

lived and rather symbolically made its own journey to London

for the exhibition.

To understand how Beatrix's own 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.

It's there that we meet Laura White to uncover some other

items from Potter's cabinet of curiosities.

LAURA WHITE: 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 and then there's some more common ones like red

admirals and tortoiseshell and painted ladies.

JAMES GRASBY : The contents of the cabinet are striking with

somewhat of a macabre undertone. For pinned to boards are row

upon row of preserved moths and butterflies.

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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

JAMES GRASBY : It was through the hours spent drawing and

cataloging 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 8 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

JAMES GRASBY : Some of these went on display in the Beatrix

Potter exhibition back at the V&A, including one very

surprising specimen, as our own Helen Antrobus reveals.

HELEN ANTROBUS: First and foremost, they were scientists

and even their favorite 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.

JAMES GRASBY : Joining Helen from the V&A is Annemarie

Bilclough.

ANNEMARIE BILCLOUGH: Probably when she was a teenager, but she

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.

JAMES GRASBY : This is Isabelle Charmantier, head of collections

at the Linnaean Society Of London.

DR ISABELLE CHARMANTIER: 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 1st of July 1858 by Charles Darwin and Alfred

Russell Wallace, and that paper was on the theory of evolution

by natural selection.

JAMES GRASBY : During her twenties, Potter pursued her

fascination with fungi and became a dedicated student to

the science of mycology.

She would spend hours analysing specimens she'd collected 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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 fraught

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 4

little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and

Peter."

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

Some time 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 story.

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.

JAMES GRASBY : This is Christiaan Jonkers, owner of

Jonkers Rare Books in Henley on Thames, who specialize in rare

books and manuscripts, particularly those of Beatrix

Potter.

CHRISTIAAN JONKERS: 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 6 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.

She found a printer, they issued 250 copies of Peter Rabbit.

JAMES GRASBY : The tale of Peter Rabbit immediately captured

young readers' 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 Company, 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

serious authors for children.

JAMES GRASBY : 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 weary of living in the city and yearned to find a way

to escape to the countryside where 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 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

JAMES GRASBY : For the next chapter of Potter's life, that

connection with the landscape played a pivotal role. At the

summit of Loughrigg Fell is Harvey Wilkinson, a cultural

heritage curator who knows all about Beatrix's legacy in the

Lake District.

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.

There are 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.

JAMES GRASBY : Together with family friend Hardwick 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 breeds

of sheep, the Herdwick, which had grazed the fells for

centuries but was under threat.

HARVEY WILKINSON: One of the big differences with Potter is she

was buying land to preserve the 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.

JAMES GRASBY : 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.

There is one final tale in the story of one of Britain's most

beloved children's authors.

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 Puddle duck finally manages to

take flight, but no one knows precisely where and that's the

way Beatrix wanted it.

JAMES GRASBY : Thank you for listening to this episode of

Back When. Make sure to follow and subscribe to this podcast in

your favourite app to be the first to hear new episodes as

well as enjoy others from our collection.

To find out more about Beatrix Potter, please take a look at

the links in our show notes. And while you're there, be sure to

follow the links to our nature show Wild Tales.

I'm James Grasby, and we'll be back soon with another tale from

time. Back When.