Homebody — another woman artist, Beatrix Potter (1855-1943), poetry for Sunday

Beatrix Potter squirrel

Photo of Potter in her mid-thirties with a rabbit (1866-1943)

‘In affectionate remembrance of poor old Peter Rabbit, who died on the 26th of January 1901 at the end of his 9th year … whatever the limitations of his intellect or outward shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet. An affectionate companion and a quiet friend.’ — in privately printed early copy of Peter the Rabbit

homebody — a person who enjoys the warmth and simple pleasure of being at home

Dear friends and readers,

I carrying on my homebody life of reading and writing during the day and watching movies in the evening. I’ve not been able to go to the gym, swim or walk — as I wrote last time I hurt my big toe badly, it was all the wrong colors as Austen might say, with a trauma from blood under the nail. But I have hobbled about to less directly physical activities, including a mild dance session. Last Saturday Izzy and I went to a JASNA meeting where we heard a lecture on The Way People Really those Quadrilles in Regency England (see Dancing Austen style with a touch of extra historical accuracy), and then with the other people there danced three dances ourselves. I wore ballet slippers.

How Hogarth perceived an assembly dance

I carried on my feeble gardening — I can’t dig very deeply since my right side and arm has become so weak — but I’ve a third patch of bell-like flowers and pretty-leaf plants, three silver.

I’ve begun the summer Film Club at the Cinema Art (every three weeks and then once a month) and we saw a mildly comic fairy tale-like story centering on the plight of old people in the US (no or little money, not care for in their illnesses, prevented from living a comfortable enjoyable life of their own): The Last Man Club. This Wednesday I start teaching again: Trollope’s Small House at Allington.

I write to record more at length just some of what I heard in an informative lecture (an hour and a half) which turned into a lively and insightful question-and-answer period (another hour) by Linda Lear about Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) at the Smithsonian Associates this morning. Lear revealed a woman whose work comprised more than her curiously memorable and phenomenally successful “small books” about small domestic and wild animals. Potter became a strong conservationist, an environmentalist avante la lettre, and used the money she made from her art and writing to set up working Herdwick sheep farms in the Lake District, Hill Top and Castle Cottage. She was such a good farmer, and breeder, that she eventually owned huge tracks of the Lake District and left the land to the National Trust. She had a strong social conscience and acted on it to back up social programs improving the life of people around her too.

The 2006 film presenting Potter so positively (featuring Renee Zellweger) was not an exaggeration

One of Potter’s earliest sketches

Lear told of a life where Potter had to break away from an unsympathetic pair of parents to find herself: they were themselves amateur landscape artists, and as wealthy elite people in Britain, who were themselves dissenters (unitarians) whose money came from industry in Manchester, brought their daughter and son, Bertram (six years younger) up among a literate, artistic and free-thinking scientific group, and they provided governesses and plenty of time (especially in long summer vacations in Scotland) for her to lose herself in the natural world. (Lear has written academic-style papers on these summers and Potter in Scotland.) But they imposed on her a stifling routine, and expected her not to marry but remain at home, obedient to them, with her duty to them and local society her first consideration, and caring for them in their old age her final goal. She fulfilled her talents slowly, beginning in her twenties drawing because she was looking for something to do, and sending exquisitely accurate and touching sketches of rabbits and other animals in letters to the children of her ex-governess, Annie Moore.

Realistic sketches

Peter Rabbit

As she was told by friends, family, and local people she was close to (one Charlie McKintosh who was missing an arm and became a mailman) that her talent, artistic ability, powers of observation and drawing were superb, she tried to publish her art as children’s books. She was turned down by a commercial publisher, so she began to publish the the books herself and hand them out to people she knew for their children. As this was noticed, an editor, Norman Warne (at Frederick Warne & Co) took her work on. The books became a stunning success.

I suggest her fantasy pictures are filled with kindly warmth she felt towards her subjects. She sees small animals as tenderly affectionate creatures with no harm in them. The colors are exquisitely delicate, and (to some extent like Kliban cats), these creatures are pictured doing homebody daily acts together a small child might see in a sheltering home and local neighborhood. It’s no surprise that Potter liked Edward Lear’s lyrics.

She and Warne, fell in love but could not marry because her parents did not approve of him as a husband (too low a status). They finally disobeyed (she was in her thirties) and were engaged but he contracted leukemia before they could marry. She enacted a similar trajectory with the man she eventually married and spent 30 contented years with, William Heelis (this time the man was a solicitor, also not acceptable). Here her brother helped her break away by finally telling his parents around that time he had been secretly married for 11 years to a barmaid. Lear did not tell us her name (!); Lear showed a residue of snobbery I fear when she assured us the couple were happy together. (She herself is part of an American elite I could tell; she managed to publish her two superb books out of her relationships with people in national biographical societies and universities.) Bertram was also an artist; he died relatively young: stress had led him to become alcoholic.

Benjamin Bunny

In Potter’s later independent life, an attempt was made by friends to introduce her to a a man actually named Thistle Dyer who managed Kew (the famous gardens) with the idea she could provide fruitful ideas: he dismissed her as a woman and amateur. She had interesting friendships with people like the Roscoes, Liverpool merchants by trade, they provided important centers of cultural life (my note: Maria Roscoe was the first English writer to translate Vittoria Colonna and try to write her life). Lear told of further books by Potter for adults, her life-writing, about her work as a landowner: Fairy Caravan. She recommended a book by a Potter friend and associate of Potter’s: James Weavis, A Shepherd’s Life, about the conservationist and farming movement, and an attempt to declare the Lake District a UNESCO site. Potter’s later years were spent with much activity preserving farming in the Lake District, and Lear said far more people visits Hill Top and Castle Cottage than they do the Wordsworth shrines. Lear spoke of the beauty of this natural sanctuary: the fells are mystic in feel (she said), the lakes mirroring the sky, the high mountainous terrain. Potter herself was also a landscape artist.

Turner, Buttermere Lake with Park (Cromackwater)

Potter studied fungi especially (it doesn’t sound thrilling but she was fascinated by plant life) and introduced kinder and more productive methods for animal husbandry and sheep shearing, and did much landscape art. Herdwick sheep are small, black when young, turning white when older. Their fleece are good for carpets, and in the war (WW2) were used for warm blankets. They are hardy creatures whom Potter spent years trying to protect, went to shows for and so on. Recently the national Trust did sell off a farm with many Herdwick sheep on it; a protest was mounted that was strong, and much ill-will created, and Lear thought the National Trust would not do that for money again. Potter adumbrated the an understanding of symbiosis. She was in effect a scientist and a Temple Grandin roled into one. A paper she wrote was “tabled” at the Linnean Society (put there for others to read, the custom) but as a woman she could not be a member, attend meetings much less give a paper. Her paper was probably thrown away.

Hill Top Farm today

I wanted to tell about this lecture because Jim had some favorite passages from Beatix Potter books, which he had read as a boy, quotations he would recite. We took out from the library and bought in bookstores too, a number of Beatrix Potter books which I remember Laura and Izzy could read by themselves. Perhaps children like these books so since they are readable on their own. Independence. Sadly, I can’t remember Jim’s favorite quotations any more. I did not myself read or have Beatrix Potter books in my house when I was young and maybe that’s why I can’t remember what he’d allude to. But allude he did. A favorite image was that of

Jemima Puddleduck

and I know he liked to recite parts of this poem of the runcible spoon:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
— Edward Lear

I saw Miss Potter, alone since Izzy didn’t want to come, and connected its warmth and a radiant kind of humanity to Zellweger’s Nurse Betty with Martin Freeman. I remembered the film ever after because of a sudden moment of startle: where we meet Potter’s grandmother and she turns out to be Barbara Murray in a wheelchair, once Madame Max in the Pallisers. I recognized her instantly and to see her so aged took my breath away.

I will soon watch again, with a DVD from Netflix.

Miss Drake