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Honest, Simple Pleasures: A Short Biography of Beatrix Potter

ByKelly Keller

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London…but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country. –Beatrix Potter

Helen Beatrix Potter was born July 28, 1866. She lived her entire childhood, and a good bit of her adult life, at 2 Bolton Gardens, Kensington (London). She was raised largely by her governess, Miss Hammond. When she was six years old, brother Bertram joined the family.

Potter recounts her childhood as solitary, with little interaction with other children. She was given to sickness, as well. To assuage her loneliness, she kept a steady supply of pets, whose names you may recognize: Hunca-Munca (a mouse) and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (a hedgehog). Her Belgian hare, Benjamin H. Bouncer, was the subject of some of her first Christmas card designs, an enterprise she undertook in the 1890s.  Many of the names for her animal friends—real and fictional—were taken from headstones in Brompton Cemetery, just down the road from her home in London. 

“I seem to be able to tame any sort of animal,” she wrote in her journal. In particular, she loved mice. She found larger animals, like dogs, sheep, and horses, more difficult to draw, preferring instead to major on mice and rabbits. Eventually, she adopted a tiny rabbit whom she named Peter, who she reported to be calmer and warmer than Benjamin Bouncer. After he died in 1901, she described him as “an affectionate companion and a quiet friend.”

When her parents noticed that she showed promise artistically, they hired a tutor to instruct her at home. She later enrolled as a student at the National Art Training School in South Kensington, now part of the Royal College of Art. Her favored subjects were always parts of the natural world; in addition to small animals, she painstakingly sketched birds, local trees, and plants. On the family trips to the seaside, she picked up shells and painted them. Often, she would walk to the Natural History Museum in London to examine the fossils. Her appetite for the natural world seemed unbounded. Eventually, she would go on to submit a paper to the Linnean Society, but she was not able to attend the reading due to the fact that she was a woman.

In 1882, when Beatrix was 16, the Potter family made their first visit to the Lake District, a portion of England to the Northwest, including the regions around Cumbria. It was a trip that proved to be instrumental for Potter’s focus for the rest of her life. One passage from her journal retells the beautiful sights at Keswick in 1885: 

The sunset was still fiery in the west and south, the moon was rising, the reflections of the great blue mountains lay broad and motionless in the water, undisturbed save now and then by the ripple of a passing boat. East, sought and north, the blue mountains with their crimson crests towered up against a clear blue heaven, flecked with little white fleecy clouds.

Readers would later find Lake District settings in all of her literature, beginning with The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.

Though her governess was dismissed by the family when Beatrix turned seventeen, Miss Hammond remained a close friend. When she heard that Miss Hammond’s son Noel was unwell, confined to bed, Potter took her first attempt at a story about Peter Rabbit to cheer him. The story was a hit with Noel Hammond as he recovered. Potter took the encouragement and submitted the manuscript to London publishing houses. She was rejected without exception. 

Hill Top Farm, Near Sawrey

Undaunted, she printed 250 copies of the story at her own expense. She sold out immediately and had to order more. In 1902, Frederick Warne & Co. agreed to publish a first run of 8,000. The quantity sold out immediately, decisively launching Potter’s career as a children’s author and illustrator.

The entire series of “little white books” includes twenty-three titles. They have been translated into over thirty languages around the world. They were published at the rate of two or three a year between the years of 1902 (Peter Rabbit) and 1930 (The Tale of Little Pig Robinson). Potter stopped writing the series due to failing eyesight in her later years.

As she grew older, her focus shifted from writing to farming. In 1905, she bought her first farm, Hill Top, in Near Sawrey in the Lake District, with book royalties. Over the next decades, right up until her death, she continued to purchase and steward land in and around the Lake District. She continued to treasure animals, notably breeding and sustaining the threatened Herdwick breed of sheep. Upon her death in 1943, she passed on fifteen farms and over 4,000 acres to the National Trust, ensuring that generations afterwards would benefit from the beautiful Lake District as she had.

by Charles King, circa 1913

If I have done anything, even a little, to help small children enjoy honest, simple pleasures, I have done a bit of good.

Beatrix Potter

For Further Reading:

Londonist roundup of Potter locations

The National Trust biography of Potter

The Beatrix Potter Society

Biography at The V&A Museum

Two titles for grownups:

“Over the Hills and Far Away”: The Life of Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life

Two for kids:
Saving the Countryside: The Story of Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit

Beatrix: Various Episodes From the Life of Beatrix Potter

And a movie:

Miss Potter (2006)

Kelly Keller
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