Before we get into your beatrix potter book choices, what do you attribute its perennial appeal to? why do you think it has been so popular for so long?
His first book was published in 1902, when he was already 36 years old, and the books have been selling ever since. obviously the stories appeal to children. they are aimed at children and have text and illustrations that appeal to them, but they also appeal to adults, who are happy to read the books with children because they have an underlying interest that many children’s books don’t necessarily have for adults.
You are reading: Books about beatrix potter
Although his stories aren’t moralizing, they do have a purpose and a point, and they do have a bit of humor. for a child they can be very exciting. there is a page change element. In addition, his illustrations are exquisite. they are realistic, compared to many other children’s book illustrations.
It has to be said that for something to be so successful for so long, it must also have good publicity and good marketing. In the early days, the potter and her publisher were very cunning. they realized the importance of advertising pretty quickly and that has continued to this day. You certainly couldn’t fault Frederick Warne, now under the umbrella of Penguin Random House, who is as good at publicizing Beatrix Potter as anyone was when she was alive.
You’ve touched on the other question I wanted to ask, which is is there any underlying theme to his work, or can it be read on two levels, one of which may not be immediately obvious to children, but could be enjoyed? by adults?
Some of the stories are definitely written on two levels. they can be very simple: “here’s a cat, here’s a mouse, and this is what happens when you put them together.” it’s a funny story and it’s slapstick; I’m thinking of something like the story of miss moppet. but several of his later books are definitely written on two levels, with a caveat that the world is not as simple or benevolent as one might think. examples here are the story of jemima puddle-duck, or the story of mr tod.
“I was indeed obsessed with the drawing”
for children, the double layer is usually completely out of reach, but it doesn’t matter because the story still works with a beginning, a middle and an end, and an adventure in the middle. but for adults it’s very satisfying because there’s a moral element, or an element of danger or ‘I told you so’ that adds a bit of interest. There is no universal theme in the books, but there is definitely a second layer to many of the stories. And to be honest, I guess that’s part of what kept Beatrix Potter interested, the idea that she could write something that was very simple at first glance, but more interesting and fun if you dig deeper. some of the books are very funny.
I especially remember being obsessed with peter rabbit when I was younger. certainly it was that the world was not as safe as one might expect, and also full of brutal and nasty human beings.
There are nasty humans in the books, but some animals are nasty to other animals, too. there is a ‘red tooth and claw nature’ side to the books. And of course, like Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter is obviously not always on the Goody-Goody-Two-Shoes side. has a certain sympathy for the rebel or the mischievous. and that also makes it loved by both children and adults.
let’s move on to the beatrix potter books you’ve chosen for us. The first is Linda Lear’s Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. tell us why this is a good introduction to your life. Also, can you tell us a bit about his life, to get an idea of how he became the person he ended up being? She came from a pretty interesting family, I think her parents were amateur artists and she was an obsessive cartoonist from a very young age.
In fact, I was obsessed with drawing: “I can’t rest, I have to draw, however poor the result may be…”. I think that was part of the background it came from. drawing and art were acceptable talents for girls and I imagine most girls her age, with money, would have had governesses and been learning to draw. What became an overriding passion for her is probably partly genetic: her parents were amateur artists and her father was a very enthusiastic amateur photographer. there was also a certain amount of art in the background of it. One of her grandparents was a philanthropic patron of the arts, for example, and her father collected the work of Randolph Caldecott.
wasn’t she related to john everett millais?
no, she wasn’t related to him, but he was a friend of her father. rupert potter took reference photographs for millais to use when she was painting in his studio or away from her subject. Some of these photographs are now in the National Portrait Gallery. As a result of that, Beatrix Potter met him several times. her father also took her to the royal academy and other galleries and exhibitions in london. Thus, from a very young age, she was exposed to the great masters of painting, Rembrandt, Titian, etc., but also to more contemporary artists, such as the Pre-Raphaelites. she was not only learning to paint and draw at home, but she could see what other artists were doing.
This was all made possible by your background. His parents were extremely wealthy. Both came from the Manchester area and their families had made their fortunes in the cotton trade. The potters liked to downplay this, as they moved to London in part to establish themselves in society. his father was a lawyer by training, although he practiced very little. but it was quite difficult for the potters to be accepted into London society: they came from the north and probably had a northern accent, their money had been made in trade and they were non-conformists, which closed certain avenues for them.
They had the money to behave like upper-middle class people, but their backgrounds didn’t allow them to get into all the circles Mrs Potter would have liked to get into. they could afford the beautiful long summer holidays that the upper classes enjoyed, and they could afford servants, they had a nice house in kensington, they had a carriage, beatrix had governesses, and they sent their son to school, but they mostly mixed with other mavericks and other professionals instead of the real upper classes.
Tell us specifically about Linda Lear’s biography. what is the beatrix potter story told in this book?
linda lear’s main interest is observing people in relation to the natural world and science. The first and very successful biography of Lear was that of Rachel Carson, who fits that profile. In America, she’s the go-to expert on Rachel Carson. She first met Beatrix Potter when she discovered that she also had interests in those areas. she was looking for a new subject to write about and, by chance, she saw some of the potter’s mushroom paintings, which are meticulously detailed and scientifically accurate and very, very beautiful. This completely amazed her, so she began to investigate the life of Beatrix Potter and discovered that there was much more to her than just the story of Peter Rabbit and other little books.
So, his biography started from that point of view, so it’s called ‘a life in nature’. She writes about the entire life of Beatrix Potter with great insight, but she focuses a lot on the influence of place, the influence of education, and the opportunities that allowed Beatrix Potter to learn through nature, through science, and also through through his drawing and painting. .
she follows this path until the last third of beatrix potter’s life, which is probably the third that people are least familiar with, when she was living and working as a farmer in the lake district and had left the little books behind its. Many of her neighbors in the Lake District had no idea until she died, it was the obituaries that revealed the fact that Mrs Heelis living among them and visiting sheep fairs and such, was actually Beatrix Potter.
“the book is also very good about how such a limited environment produced a woman with such independence and confidence”
linda lear has the advantage of being one of the most recent biographers, of course. there are earlier biographies, the first is by margaret lane in 1946, and the later one by judy taylor (1986) is very good. but we know so much more now, and a contemporary biographer always benefits from everyone else’s research. Linda’s book, published in 2007, is quite long. it’s a pretty dense read and the illustrations are in sections, rather than scattered throughout the book, so it’s definitely a “read” rather than lots of beautiful pictures with a bit of text. but she tells you everything you could possibly need to know about beatrix potter in every part of her life and the notes and references are very gratifying.
is particularly interesting for her background and the non-conformist side of her family, but it’s also fascinating as an image of a girl growing up in Victorian England and transitioning into the 20th century, living in a strict household, but longing to be something completely different and, of course, with an unexpected interest in science. the book is also very good about how such a limited environment produced a woman with such independence and confidence, so totally different from how you would have expected her to be.
You mentioned that you yearned for independence. you also mentioned that he had stopped producing his books when he started farming in the lake district, where he had quite a large estate. When and why did he stop writing his books and go into farming?
If you divide her life roughly into thirds, in the first third she was a dutiful Victorian daughter, learning a certain amount, but entirely schooled by governesses or self-taught at home, leading a rather restricted and isolated life but drawing everything. She eventually went on vacation with her parents, beautiful long vacations to Scotland and then to the Lake District, and she wrote many letters, even to her children’s acquaintances.
but when she reached her thirties, she realized that the kind of marriage her parents wanted for her was not the one she wanted and she was not the kind of wife young men were looking for. she was shy, her social life beyond her family and her cousins, etc., was practically non-existent, and she didn’t miss her. but she did want independence, to be able to do things for herself that, in those days, was very difficult outside of marriage, because daughters were supposed to stay at home with their parents. so she needed to earn some money and that’s where the little books came in.
“She did want independence, to be able to do things for herself that, in those days, was very difficult outside of marriage”
Her last governess, who became her friend, suggested that she look at the letters she had been writing to the children with little stories and pictures, to see if they could be made into books. the writing of the little books actually extends from about 1900 to 1913, although there were some later titles. it was a very short time, during which she wrote prolifically and was full of ideas. that’s the second third of her life.
During those years, he started buying up land in the Lake District, so his stories were very Lake District based. the change from deed to land ownership was not really a conscious decision, but she was making money off the books, which she spent on farms and lands and then more farms and more lands, accumulating responsibility for everything and being very practical . . then interesting things happened in the fields and on the moors, with the sheep, for example. also her eyesight deteriorated with age, which made it difficult to do all the complicated little illustrations, and gradually the writing lost ground to her agricultural interests. she very revealingly wrote to her publisher in 1918, saying, “somehow, when one is up to his eyeballs in working with real live animals, it makes one despise the animals of paper books…!”
She suddenly became a full-time farmer. she ended up owning more than 4,000 acres, with about 15 different farms. she was drawn into the world of a respected and established landowner, with all the responsibilities that comes with it, and that was the last third of her life. there was no conscious decision from one day to the next. that was how her life unfolded. and, it must be said, she still relied on royalties from the booklets for this life. she understood that she needed the income they were generating.
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but his estate was funded entirely by his own efforts, wasn’t it the result of inheriting money from his parents?
no, not just your own efforts. he also inherited money from both of his parents. the potters were very rich. I saw an equation somewhere that tells you what they would be worth in today’s money. it’s a lot.
let’s move on to the art of beatrix potter by anne stevenson hobbs. Is this book largely just illustrations, or is it really talking about her development as an artist and how she worked?
There is a good long introduction to this book that talks about the development of the potter’s art, with quite technical explanations of her drawing and painting technique, as well as a discussion of her influences and subject matter. and is beautifully produced and illustrated. but the reason i chose a book about her art as one of the five books is that to understand beatrix potter it is very important to realize that she is so much more than just the little books.
anne’s book has examples of her early art, what she saw on vacation in scotland as a child, through her teens when her work is a bit more stylized and we know she belonged to a drawing society and became graduated. exams everything is a bit more formal. several still lifes, for example, are a bit stiff. But Potter also experimented with fantasy drawing, illustrating fairy tales, rhymes and fables from an early age, and some of it is charming. then, in the 1890s, she made a little money selling designs to companies that made greeting cards.
“it is possible to follow the trajectory of his life in the same way that you would a biography, but seeing it visually through his own work.”
but the whole time he was drawing, and this book shows that very well too: pages and pages of sketches of rabbits, mice, birds and frogs (most of them his own pets) and of flowers and landscapes. she is always drawing and then when she came to produce the little books (which of course are also illustrated in this book), you can see that the illustrations are based on years of observation and drawing. that’s what makes them so precise.
Later in his life, he painted some wonderful watercolor Impressionist landscapes of the Lake District in and around the town where he lived. these are among my favorites.
Another very important thing to mention about this book, already mentioned in connection with Linda Lear’s biography, is that it shows Beatrix Potter as a natural historian and scientist. in addition to all the animal sketches and later landscapes, there are highly detailed botanical paintings of flowers, mosses, and lichens. and there are the absolutely fantastic mushroom paintings. There are several hundred of them and most of them are in the Armitt Library and Museum in the Lake District, while others are in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery. They come as a surprise to most people, who only know the little Beatrix Potter books, or her connection to the National Trust and her role in the Lake District. Fewer people know the time in her life when she was making these meticulous and precise drawings and paintings.
and all these different aspects of beatrix potter are contained in this book about her art, and with the introduction and the subtitles it is possible to follow the trajectory of her life in the same way that you would a biography, but looking at it visually through through your own work. some of that work is absolutely beautiful.
Your mushroom drawing actually led you to publish scholarly papers on the subject, didn’t it?
yes, he did. she was not only very interested and very good at studying fungi, but she also became a bit obsessed with them. she believed she had discovered something about the symbiotic relationship between lichens and fungi. I can’t explain it to you perfectly because I’m not a scientist, but Linda Lear’s book is very good on this. Ella Potter did some research at Kew Gardens and the Natural History Museum and set up her own little laboratory in the basement of the Potters’ House. With the encouragement of her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, she submitted her paper, “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae,” to the Linnaean Society of London.
“at one point, she thought she could make money as a scientist”
There are various points of view about what happened next. The document was read on her behalf by one of the Kew Gardens scientists, because women were not admitted to society meetings. some sources say the document was rejected. but it wasn’t actually rejected right away, but returned requiring “more work”, which was not an uncommon response. people have been quick to say that she was shunned because she was a woman and an amateur, and as a result, Linnaean society has been quite vilified. Actually, I don’t think that’s exactly what happened. I think the members simply asked her to work on it more, although her gender and lack of training might have had something to do with how the request was submitted. anyway, for whatever reason, she lost interest, maybe her confidence was affected or she felt she had been rejected. we don’t know the paper itself was lost and also any comments about it, or she didn’t write them. and it’s clear that her interest in her mushrooms faded after that and she became more interested in making money from her booklets.
I think at one point she thought she could make money as a scientist. It was clear to her that she was not going to be able to and that she needed to earn money. so, she had to find another way. I think that’s probably the easiest way to describe what happened.
Obviously he continued to paint after he stopped making little books, when he lived in the lake district. Is all of his work pencil sketches or watercolors, or did she paint or create in other media?
There are some oil paintings, but they are mostly early. she preferred watercolor. ella bertram de ella’s brother was an accomplished artist and painted in oils, but that was not a medium she enjoyed. her work is almost all in pencil, watercolor or pen and ink.
let’s move on to beatrix potter’s letters, edited by judy taylor. You have already alluded to some of these. Does it consist largely of fan mail, or family and farming, or is it a mix?
the letters cover every part of his life, really. Judy Taylor has annotated the collection so that when it is not obvious what a letter is about or who it is written for, there is an explanatory note. Judy wrote a number of other books on Beatrix Potter, including her biography, and became the go-to expert on all aspects of Beatrix Potter’s life. this particular edition of her letters range from one or two surviving letters written when she was a child, you know, ‘dear dad, how’s the dog?’ (or whatever), even some written a few days before she died in 1943. There are letters to fans, family, friends, and publishers. then letters to well-known peasants and to the national trust. there are also letters to American visitors and to children, some of whom he knew and who were the lucky recipients of picture letters, and to children who had written fan letters to him, some of whom he corresponded with for several years. p>
many of the most interesting letters are the ones where she is an ordinary person writing to a friend, when she is not an author, farmer or celebrity. She is just Beatrix Potter or, as she became, Beatrix Heelis. they remind us that beatriz potter was really just like you and me. she was an ordinary person who did extraordinary things in her life, and the letters run parallel to the biography and the art, completing the character and personality of this extraordinary woman.
I think that, for a modern generation, the idea that a person should have written thousands of letters in a life spanning 77 years is unthinkable. We’ve probably all written thousands of emails, but that’s not the same thing and they’re not preserved in the same way. it is amazing that it is possible to read someone’s life through the letters they wrote, and there are hundreds of letters that are not published at all, despite another book edited by taylor, letters to children, and a volume of letters to beatrix potter’s americans, selected and edited by jane crowell morse.
She had a huge fan base in the US, right?
The American side of the potter’s fanbase is a very interesting story, a result in part of the United States having a very strong tradition of libraries. they had an importance there that they did not have here. They were the main introduction to reading and literature for many children and families, and librarians held a rather more respected position there than they tended to enjoy in Britain. In fact, librarians were the first Americans to visit her in England, and that started in the 1920s. Having closely guarded her privacy, she was persuaded by her publisher to accept a visit from an American librarian and was shocked to discover to a woman of great intelligence and culture, who truly appreciated her work for its literary and artistic merits. This was the respected New York librarian, Anne Carroll Moore, whom she introduced to others.
In Britain, Potter felt her books were treated like toys by booksellers, while Americans, she gradually discovered, regarded her with much more respect and genuinely appreciated the literary qualities of her books.
She was flattered, of course. but there is a very interesting parallel between potter—a nonconformist, independent, and, as it turned out, freethinking woman in a still fairly repressed English society—with these educated American women from the east coast, whose ancestors had left on the mayflower and they were founding fathers. They were energetic, intelligent and stubborn and she found that she could interact on equal terms with them, whereas here in England, class got in the way. you were an employer or an employee. you were well educated, or not. none of that interfered with the Americans, so her letters to her American visitors are, in many ways, very open and very interesting about England, the war and politics. fascinating.
It is interesting what you say about American libraries. I hadn’t really appreciated that, but I have occasionally visited public libraries in some American cities, for example Chicago, and they are amazing buildings. the one in chicago is like a palace, with all these mosaics and huge quotes from milton and shakespeare all over the walls. it is an absolutely extraordinary place and you really get the feeling that it has been built as a temple of learning.
in new york and in philadelphia, it’s probably the same in chicago, you have the central library, but the libraries in other parts of the city are part of the same organization. In the UK, our libraries tend to be more independent of each other. But a library in a New York suburb is still linked to the New York Public Library and so is the Philadelphia Free Library. I think that’s still the case now that libraries are more important in the US than here. An extraordinary percentage of the members of the Beatrix Potter Society of America, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, are actually librarians or related in some way to librarianship, perhaps where it overlaps with elementary education.
“in britain, potter felt her books were treated like toys by booksellers, while americans… looked at her with much more respect and really appreciated the literary qualities of her books”
This digression illustrates a point about the letters, actually, that if you’re reading what someone has written about their life in this way, it sends you in many different directions beyond their life and work. they act as a social story springboard into all sorts of other areas you might not necessarily have thought of, but can be very interesting.
absolutely. the death of letter writing is a great tragedy for future historians.
our emails will disappear and disappear. what we are left with is what is being said on websites and such, and that will not necessarily be from a primary source. it’s a shame.
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On that wistful note, let’s move on to the hedgehogs from Beatrix Potter. This is a publication of the Beatrix Potter Society. what about beatrix potter and the hedgehogs?
this book is judy taylor again. the original idea was to celebrate judy’s 80th birthday. Over the years and all over the world, he gave Beatrix Potter talks on many different topics and we chose one of his unpublished talks to turn into a little booklet. the society has produced all kinds of publications during its 40 years, but for a selection of five books like this, most of them are too specialized, because they tend to be collections of papers from international conferences of the society, for example. hedgehogs is a topic of interest to everyone and the talk is reasonably light-hearted and informative. It’s suitable for a birthday and celebrates Judy Taylor, without whom we would know much less about Beatrix Potter than we do.
What’s interesting for the general reader is that it illustrates everything we’ve been talking about so far in a small 24-page illustrated booklet. It begins with Beatrix Potter’s interest in hedgehogs from a natural history standpoint and his observations of them in nature and in real life. he had a pet hedgehog named mrs tiggy, about whom he wrote in letters to children and drew pictures and whose behavior he examined. When he started writing his little books, one of them included a hedgehog based in part on Mrs. Tiggy and it became the story of Mrs. Tiggy. tiggy-winkle. then immediately you have the transfer from real life to the life of the booklets, which is the pattern that almost all the booklets followed.
“she had a pet hedgehog named mrs tiggy, whom she wrote about in letters to the children and drew and whose behavior she examined”
The brochure illustrates all aspects of Beatrix Potter’s interests, but also shows how incredibly astute she was as a businesswoman, and here are examples of her marketing ideas. and although mrs tiggy-winkle is an old book [1905] and was written before potter actually became a farmer or landowner in the lake district, it is set in the lake district with all the background in the images based on sketches made during a vacation in the lake district.
so, tied to one theme, you have all the themes that run through beatrix potter’s life. I thought it was a good example to use and the illustrations are beautiful.
finally, beatrix potter at home in the lake district by susan denyer. I’m interested in understanding how she became so attached to the lake district. but, anyway, what story does this book tell?
I realized that we needed a book that focused a little more on the latter part of his life. There is quite a bit of detailed work available on his farming interests and sheep and all that I didn’t think would be suitable for our purposes, and Linda Lear’s book covers this very well. but the positive thing about susan denyer’s book is that she herself worked for the national trust for a long time and is very knowledgeable about the topography and culture of the lake district as well as her farming.
There is an element of all of those in this book. but basically it’s also an introduction to the lake district on a more superficial level, and beatrix potter’s involvement there, and it’s beautifully illustrated, with some stunning photography.
For many years, potters went to Scotland for their summer holidays. But in 1882 the house they purchased in Perthshire, Dalguise, was no longer available. beatriz was 16 years old and they rented wray castle, a house in the lake district. That was the family’s first holiday in the Lake District which they all enjoyed and from then on they used to spend their holidays there either around Derwentwater or Windermere.
“she felt like a northerner, which she probably missed a bit”
I think there are two reasons for Beatrix Potter’s interest in the area. one is the fact that he had a happy vacation there and thought the scenery was very beautiful. but also, even though she was born in london, she hated it and it made her sick. His family had originally come from the North, and as he grew older, he put more emphasis on his Northern roots. they became more and more important to her. Perhaps they also helped explain why she never really settled in London or London society. she felt like a northerner, something she probably missed a bit.
after she had been living in the lake district for 20 years and had already purchased a large amount of land and farms, a private property, called monk coniston, came up for sale, and included a small farm which It had once belonged to his great-grandfather on his paternal mother’s side, Abraham Crompton. he had been a wealthy merchant in lancashire and had bought holme ground as a holiday home several generations earlier. she was no longer in the family and potter liked the idea of buying it back.
Denyer’s book describes the potter’s vacations, her growing love of the area, her first purchases, including the hilltop farm, and her other farms in the Windermere area. She also shows her interest in livestock practices, in sheep, in learning to understand the cycle of the livestock year and the different ways of treating the land. all of that became a great passion for her and she sought the advice of the local people and built a reputation of herself as a respected sheep farmer. it’s a fascinating ending to a life that began so differently. She actually, she almost reinvented herself as a respected farmer and sheep farmer, and there is also a strong element of conservation and stewardship, which Linda Lear’s biography clearly discusses.
I wanted to ask you about that because I think it’s a fascinating aspect of the whole story. he left all his land to the national trust. she clearly was very concerned about the development of that part of the world and the loss of her character which, given that she died in 1943, seems to be quite prescient. Can you tell us a bit about her life as a conservationist?
potter was introduced to the national trust from its inception because her father was one of its first members. As a family, they knew Hardwicke Rawnsley, who was one of the three founders of the National Trust. He was met in the Lake District in 1882 and was a great influence on Potter, teaching him much about the traditions and history of the Lake District, and how to read the landscape and appreciate its local character. so that was ingrained in her from a very young age.
As she grew older and became a landowner, she became aware of the threat posed to the Lake District by development, particularly chalets and holiday homes, and the expansion of the railway and the roads. she also saw a threat from the forestry commission, which would plant large tracts of hillside with conifers. So, there was a double threat; the development threat tended to be in the valleys and lowlands around railways and roads, and the forest threat was more widespread in the hills.
“She ended up owning over 4,000 acres, with about 15 different farms.”
so, initially, a strong motivation for buying land was to protect it from development. There is one particular property that he bought, Troutbeck Park, which sits in a beautiful valley with moorland all around and behind it. there was prime land to develop at the bottom of the valley because it was easily accessible from windermere and ambleside and from the railway, which already ran into windermere. she was desperate to prevent the valley from being redeveloped and developed, so she bought it, and she was lucky enough to do it.
There’s an interesting contradiction here, and I’m not sure it’s been fully investigated yet, and that is that potter understood that the lake district needed visitors and tourists and so on, and he understood that the national trust had a role that play on that as well, but he also understood that you couldn’t have development just any old way. I suspect that, to some extent, she wasn’t in my backyard, but she didn’t really stop people from coming onto her land. she complained about the coach tours and people not understanding about locking the doors and such, but she wasn’t completely against them. I suppose it is the same contradiction that continues today among landowners, farmers, and members of the public.
is the classic complaint of upper-class tourists. When I was young and very rich, hardly anyone went on vacation to the Lake District. it seemed cool that some people like her did it, but when a lot of people started doing it, it ruined the fun.
the lake district is very accessible, especially from liverpool and manchester, and there was a big movement, which was partly related to the national trust, to make green space available to factory workers, who they needed a place they could go. a day trip or for a vacation, and encourage them to go there.
but although potter started out wanting to preserve the lake district, he actually found the whole business of farming, landholding and so on interesting. and, as with everything else she had done in her life at various stages of it, she wanted to know about it, learn about it, and be productive, useful, and good at it. she therefore, she learned all she could about raising sheep (herdwicks in particular) or cattle and herding, and she was quite modern in some respects, she got rid of diseases, etc. and she followed new farming practices. (She allowed electricity in farm buildings, though not in her own house!) She was also very astute in choosing the best people to come work for her and had no qualms about poaching the good shepherd of a farm neighbor if he was the person to improve his flock of sheep. And, if she could pay him a slightly better salary and offer him a slightly better house and maybe offer his wife a job, then all would be fair in love and war, so to speak.
Is your Lake District property still operating much as you left it, or did economic pressures force you to make changes?
Her Lake District bequest to the National Trust is preserved for the most part as she intended, as her farms are still farmed, with a herdwick herd of sheep where appropriate, and the hilltop house remains being a place to visit exactly as it was when she left it however there have been some changes and one or two of the estates have had to merge lately. Every time this happens there is a dispute between those who think that her will should be exactly followed and those who think that the national trust should be free to make changes, given the current economic and agricultural climate.
I’d say his legacy is doing pretty well, and if he came back now, he’d acknowledge most of it. but there have had to be changes because the national trust has to make money and be solvent, like the rest of us.
so I’m not on the side of those who think it’s wrong for them to make any changes, and I think the public has to trust them to make changes as close as possible to what potter would have understood on her own. if i have any quibbles with the national trust and what it does with her legacy i would say it has more to do with marketing is the wrong word a bit of stupidity and a tendency to market her as a bit cheesy which she wasn’t into absolute. that was something she wasn’t. but overall she’d say they’ve done a pretty good job under very difficult circumstances.
Finally, what is the role of the Beatrix Potter Society in managing your estate?
none: that role falls to their publishers, frederick warne, or the national trust. The Beatrix Potter Society is a registered charity and appreciation society, a literary society. was founded by people who were already involved in his legacy, working with the potters’ collections left behind at v&a. Increasingly, people were asking if there was a Beatrix Potter Society, and so eventually one was founded in 1980. The Society organizes conferences and meetings, but it is also a forum for sharing information about Beatrix Potter, researching her life and work. and publishing their findings. it also produces a magazine and newsletter three times a year and has an active e-newsletter, website and social media platforms.
The times are complicated now because people can find information about beatrix potter on the internet without having to join the society. so it has fewer members, which means less income and a lack of volunteers. Those who used to have time to volunteer are now few and it is difficult to find people prepared to do it in the same way as before.
and of course some of the older members are not particularly interested in the internet and some of them don’t even have access to it. the movement for many similar societies, and in life in general, is online. But if you’re in your 80s or 90s, online isn’t necessarily an option open to you. therefore, there is an ongoing tension between going online to save money and cut costs and reach a new audience, and worrying about depriving some members of material in doing so. So far, the balancing act is working, and thanks to its hard-working committee, the society has done well to reach its fortieth year, despite the restrictions of the pandemic. It has members all over the world, from the UK and America to Japan and Australia, and is a great source of joy and interest for many people, as well as a valuable resource for anyone interested in Beatrix Potter.
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