A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter

Abstract

A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter Patricia Dooley Rural life and rural landscape, scaled down but not diminished, drawn with intimate knowledge and straightforward love: this was Beatrix Potter's formula and her forte, in words, in pencil, or in brush. Knowledge kept her from sentimentalizing; love, from condescending to her simple subjects. As a result, her work has the charm of simplicity without a residue of cloying sweetness. The solid and precise detail, the accurate and uncompromising diction satisfy even in repeated readings. Her small world remains enduring as well as endearing. All the elements of this success are well documented in Leslie Linder's 1971 collection, A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter. This volume follows The Art of Beatrix Potter, written by Linder in collaboration with W. A. Herring, of Warne's, in 1955, and Linder's transcription of Potter's coded Journals in 1966. Leslie Linder, in the best British tradition of the amateur, was a stress engineer as well as an authority on Beatrix Potter. When he died in 1973, he left the largest private collection of Potter's works and drawings in the world (most of it going to the Library of the National Book League, which had published an exhibition catalogue on the Linder Collection in 1971.) A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter is several things at once: a guide to the provenance of the texts and to the models for many settings (illustrated by photographs, chiefly of Sawrey and environs); a history of the publication of the Beatrix Potter books, tracing her dealings with Warne's (in which she showed the spirit that lay behind both her painstaking art and her prosperous farming); a source-book for fugitive and unpublished pieces; and a compendium of information for the bewildered bibliographer (Appendix 3 alone devotes twelve pages to identification of first editions in the Peter Rabbit series." Merely as a research tool this book would easily justify its existence. The picture-letters to Potter's child-friends (from 1893 to 1907) are reproduced in fac-simile; they contain the first versions of Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, Pig Robinson, and others and are full of convincingly observed and vividly drawn animal figures, in contrast to the few awkward and badly-drawn humans. The "miniature letters," transcribed, are notable for their mixture of the imaginative and the prosaic—a blend characteristic of all Potter's work. Here the animals are conceived of as engaging in correspondence with each other—but the subjects of their brief notes are exclusively domestic and rural: food, health, weather, washing. Potter's original fairy tale, "Llewellyn's Well," is promising though incomplete, but her versions of Perrault's "Cinderella" and "Red Riding Hood" are disappointing, precisely because they are overburdened with domestic detail and description of setting. Nor does Potter's "Sister Anne" (Phila., 1932), of which a precis is given, appear to improve in any way on "Bluebeard"; Linder notes simply that Potter's text is "seven times as long" as the original. It is not Linder's intention, however, to pass critical judgment; the value of his book lies in making these stories, rare or unpublished, accessible. Not only the texts themselves but a wealth of accessory data is assembled here. After this volume Beatrix Potter became, according to the TLS, "almost the best-documented writer of the century." The reproductions of Potter drawings, paintings, and mss. are numerous and excellent. Relying extensively on unpublished letters, Linder gives us Beatrix Potter's own criticism of and comments on her literary and artistic output. Her preferences and dislikes reveal the human personality; her favorite book was The Tailor of Gloucester, and she eventually—after a painting book, music books, a play and many foreign translations—became "sick of Peter Rabbit!" The places she wrote of and the audience she wrote for, children and country-folk, assume their rightful importance as influences and inspiration. "Place" indeed is revealed by Linder's careful research as a surprisingly complex and pervasive motif in Potter's work. It is not simply that many of her imagined characters moved in real-world settings. More important than the identification of...