As a child I was never introduced to Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-duck, the Flopsy Bunnies and their friends. As an adult I saw their representations in fine bone china shops and was aghast at the prices. I was aware of the huge popularity of the children’s stories, but I had seen none of the TV and films of either the author or the characters.
Then on one of my regular trips to USA to lecture my students, I saw that on the menu of films I could watch was Miss Potter, a biographical film starring Renée Zellweger that was released in December 2006. It was written by Richard Maltby, Jr. and directed by one whom I knew as an Australian film director. It had been a long time since BABE for Australian director Chris Noonan. But now came his biography of the author, Beatrix Potter, who made Peter Rabbit a household name.
I was so taken by the film that I also watched it on my return over the Pacific. In fact over the next year I saw it four times, all at an altitude of 40,000 feet. I then saw it at home.
Miss Potter chronicles the life of a single woman, played by Renee Zellweger, who in the first decade of the last century was determined to be the artist and writer she was destined to be. Hers was a fight against the odds that many great women had to fight.
According to Wikipedia, “Helen Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943) was an English author, illustrator, mycologist and conservationist, who was best known for her children’s books which featured animal characters such as Peter Rabbit. Born into a privileged household, Potter was educated by governesses, and grew up isolated from other children. She had numerous pets, and during holidays in Scotland and the Lake District she developed a love of landscape, flora and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted.
As a young woman her parents discouraged intellectual development, but her study and paintings of fungi led her to be widely respected in the field of mycology. In her thirties Potter published the highly successful children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and became secretly engaged to her publisher, Norman Warne, causing a breach with her parents, who disapproved of his social status as a printer. Warne died before the wedding could take place.
Potter eventually published 23 children’s books and became the world’s most successful children’s author until J. K. Rowling and “Harry Potter”. Having become financially independent of her parents, she was able to buy a farm in the Lake District, which she extended with other purchases over time. In her forties she married a local solicitor, William Heelis. She became a sheep breeder and farmer while continuing to write and illustrate children’s books.
Potter’s books continue to sell well throughout the world, in multiple languages. Her stories have been retold in various formats, including a ballet, films and in animation.
An uncle attempted to introduce her as a student at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but she was rejected because she was female. Potter was later one of the first to suggest that lichens were a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. As, at the time, the only way to record microscopic images was by painting them, Potter made numerous drawings of lichens and fungi. As the result of her observations, she was widely respected throughout England as an expert mycologist.
She also studied spore germination and the life cycle of fungi. Potter’s set of detailed watercolours of fungi, numbering some 270 completed by 1901, is in the Armitt Library in Ambleside, Lake District.
In 1897, her paper on the germination of spores was presented to the Linnean Society on her behalf by her uncle Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, as women were barred from attending meetings. The Royal Society also refused to publish at least one of her technical papers for the same reason. But she was allowed to lecture at the London School of Economics several times.
In 1901 she wrote a book entitled The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Mr. McGregor’s Garden. She sent it to six publishers, but was turned down by all of them. The primary complaint from all of them was the lack of colour pictures, which were popular at the time. In September 1901, she decided to self-publish and distribute 250 copies of it now renamed The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
Later that year, because the colour printing blocks were already created and other children’s books were popular, she finally attracted the publisher Frederick Warne & Co. The publishing contract was signed in June 1902 and, by the end of the year, 28,000 copies were in print.
She followed it with The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin in 1903. Such was the popularity of these and her subsequent books that she gained an independent income from their sales.
With the steady stream of royalties from her books, she began to buy pieces of land under the guidance of local solicitor William Heelis. In 1913 at the age of 47, Potter married Heelis and moved to Hill Top Farm permanently.
Some of Potter’s best-loved works show the Hill Top farmhouse and the village. While the couple had no children, the farm was constantly alive with dogs, cats and even a pet hedgehog named “Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle”.
On moving to the Lake District, Potter became engrossed in breeding and showing Herdwick sheep. She became a respected farmer, a judge at local agricultural shows, and President of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association. When Potter’s parents died, she used her inheritance to buy more farms and tracts of land.
After some years Potter and Heelis moved down into the village of Sawrey, and into Castle Cottage. Her letters of the time reflect her increasing concerns with her sheep, preservation of farmland, and World War II.
Beatrix Potter died at Castle Cottage in Sawrey on 22 December 1943. Her ashes were scattered in the countryside near Sawrey. In her will, Potter left almost all of her property to the National Trust — 4,000 acres (16 km²) of land, cottages, and 15 farms. The legacy has helped ensure that the Lake District and the practice of fell farming remain unspoiled to this day. Her properties now lie within the Lake District National Park. The Trust’s 2005 Swindon headquarters are named “Heelis” in her honour.
Beatrix Potter Gallery, a gallery run by the National Trust and situated in a 17th-century Lake District townhouse in Hawkshead, Cumbria, England, now displays her original book illustrations.”
I wanted to buy the magnificently produced book, “The Classic Tales of Beatrix Potter “with the most advanced electronic scanning methods from entirely new transparencies of Beatrix Potter’s original watercolours,” but the price was too much at $78. Last year I found it in a garage sale and purchased it for $2. Then the Folio Society, a few weeks ago told me the 12 original books plus the magnificent colour illustrations were available for $275 (plus P+P)! Then I saw the set in David Jones’ New Year Sale for $155: still too expensive. Then three weeks ago I saw this same set, totally unmarked and looking as if they were unread, in a garage sale for $5. So now I have that set in mint condition.
Lessons: see the film, video or DVD of Miss Potter. Don’t pay high prices for books your little grandchildren will not read. Visit some garage sales and buy your own, but don’t pay too much for them!
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
Email Gordon - gordon.moyes@parliament.nsw.gov.au
Beatrix Potter 
