The lonely passion of Beatrix Potter

The story of the extraordinary boom in children’s literature over the last 100 years could be bookended with a ‘Tale of Two Potters’ — Beatrix and Harry. The adventures of the latter have sold millions, but the foundations of his success were laid by the former, whose series of ‘little tales’ Matthew Denison estimates in his equally condensed new biography, ‘are purchased somewhere in the world every 15 seconds’. That is not bad for an author whose first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, came out in 1902 — 40 million copies sold so far, and counting — with neither the benefit of the internet or a movie franchise to spread the word.

Much has been presumed about the effect of J.K. Rowling’s experience as a single mother on her writing, and Dennison focuses on what could be described as Beatrix Potter’s ‘single childhood’. In a Kensington townhouse, with grand holiday homes taken in the Lakes or Scotland, it was certainly not materially deprived — the Potters rarely travelled without a fairy caravan of domestic staff — but ‘like Griselda, the heroine of Mrs Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, published when she was 11, “It was very dull. It got duller and duller.”’ It was also very lonely. Her parents were determined to seal their daughter off from the outside world in a third-floor nurseryland of nannies and governesses, reared on a library of what Beatrix called ‘fat, stodgy books’.

These dour Victorian tomes may have shaped her moral outlook, seen in the essentially conservative nature of the tales, but not her imagination. What inspired her was the world beyond the nursery windows, already noting down the fauna she spotted by the roadside at the age of eight. The young naturalist made many original observations of her own, such as that ‘the British smooth newt does, very rarely, utter an extremely sweet whistling note’.