Nature and imagination
'I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense..'
Beatrix Potter’s Journal, 17 November 1896
National Trust collection
Beatrix Potter was born in Kensington, London, in 1866. The Potters were a well-to-do family and Beatrix spent much of her childhood in the nursery and schoolroom of the elegant family home, in the care of a series of governesses.
Her younger brother, Bertram, was her constant companion until he was sent away to school. Beatrix continued to be educated at home.
From childhood Beatrix was fascinated by the natural world. With Bertram, she kept a menagerie of animals in the nursery. At various times they kept rabbits, mice, lizards, a bat, a frog and a snake. The children studied their pets' behaviour, and Beatrix made many detailed drawings of them.
Every year the Potter family would spend their long summer holidays in large rented country houses, often in Scotland and later the Lake District. The household would pack up and move to the country for three months, and Beatrix's pets would travel with her.
Her holidays provided Beatrix with an inexhaustible supply of natural objects to study and draw. She became particularly interested in mushrooms and toadstools, and from the late 1880s to the turn of the century she produced hundreds of finely detailed and botanically correct drawings of fungi.
This growing scientific interest, however, did not smother Beatrix's imaginative response to the world. The countryside was also magical - 'the whole countryside belonged to the fairies', she later wrote. For her, realism and romance could happily coexist.
This balance of reality and imagination is evident in her story books, where an exacting observation of the natural world underpins the animal fantasy and makes it 'real'.
Further reading:
Hobbs, Anne 'Beatrix Potter's Art' (1989)
Linder, Leslie 'The Journal of Beatrix Potter' 1881-1897 (1966)
Linder, Leslie 'A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter' (1971)
Taylor, Judy 'Beatrix Potter Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman' (1986)
Taylor, Judy 'Beatrix Potter's Letters' (1989)
Taylor, Whalley, Hobbs, Battrick 'Beatrix Potter' 1866-1943 (1987)
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