London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks.
Story time. History time.
Close your eyes and picture Beatrix Potter time.
You’re probably seeing the Lake District.
Mossy stone walls.
Herdwick sheep.
Fells dissolving into the morning mist.
Little cottages with roses tumbling over the front door.
Peter Rabbit disappearing under the garden gate with Mr McGregor in hot pursuit.
You’d be forgiven for imagining she arrived in the world wrapped in a Cumbrian blanket with a badger standing by as midwife.
Not a bit of it.
Beatrix Potter was born in London.
Born today, July 28th, 1866.
Her first cries didn’t echo across the hills.
They echoed through Kensington.
And there’s another delicious London twist.
When she finally married, at the age of forty-seven, she didn’t marry in some tiny Lakeland church.
She was married at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington.
London provided both the beginning and one of the happiest days of her life.
Now that’s irony.
The woman who came to embody the English countryside began and, in an important sense, came of age in London.
Mind you, hers wasn’t an ordinary London childhood.
Victorian children from wealthy families often lived oddly cloistered lives.
No school.
No playground gangs.
No scrambling up trees in the local park.
Beatrix and her younger brother Bertram were educated at home by governesses.
Their companions weren’t neighbourhood children.
They were rabbits.
Mice.
Frogs.
Lizards.
Hedgehogs.
Bats.
Newts.
Even insects.
The Potter household was half nursery, half natural history museum.
Beatrix adored them all.
She watched them.
She handled them.
She drew them.
And here’s the thing.
She wasn’t drawing cuddly little cartoons.
She was producing scientific studies of astonishing accuracy.
Every whisker.
Every feather.
Every claw.
Long before she became one of the world’s best-loved children’s authors, she was a first-rate naturalist.
She became fascinated by fungi.
Not because mushrooms looked picturesque.
Because she wanted to understand how they worked.
She carried out original research into how fungi reproduced.
It was serious science.
She even wrote a scientific paper.
There was just one snag.
She was a woman.
The Linnean Society, Britain’s leading scientific body, wouldn’t allow women to present papers.
So a man had to read her work on her behalf.
Imagine that.
Clever enough to make an original scientific contribution.
Not acceptable enough to walk to the lectern and explain it yourself.
More than a century later, the Linnean Society formally apologised for the way women scientists had been excluded.
There’s another lovely London story.
One of her pet rabbits was called Benjamin Bouncer.
He travelled with her.
On trains.
When the ticket inspector appeared, Benjamin would sometimes emerge from his basket and charm the carriage.
Try that on the Circle Line tomorrow morning.
Every summer the family escaped London.
First to Scotland.
Then, increasingly, to the Lake District.
Those holidays changed everything.
She fell hopelessly in love with the landscape.
She learnt the flowers.
The birds.
The sheep.
The streams.
She noticed how the light shifted across a hillside after rain.
She noticed the texture of bark.
The curl of fern fronds.
The way a rabbit actually sat.
That eye for detail is what makes the world of Peter Rabbit feel so convincing.
Those aren’t fairy tale landscapes.
They’re lovingly observed real ones.
Peter Rabbit himself began life as a letter.
A little story she wrote to amuse the young son of a former governess.
A mischievous rabbit in a little blue jacket.
Friends adored it.
Publishers didn’t.
One after another rejected it.
So Beatrix did something wonderfully stubborn.
She had 250 copies printed at her own expense.
Then Frederick Warne, one of the publishers who had turned it down, had second thoughts.
He agreed to publish it properly.
On one condition.
The illustrations had to be in colour.
A splendid decision.
Publishing history has seldom produced a happier change of heart.
The book was an immediate success.
Then came Tom Kitten.
Jemima Puddle-Duck.
Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
Squirrel Nutkin.
Benjamin Bunny.
One triumph followed another.
And then there was Norman Warne.
Frederick Warne’s younger brother.
Her editor.
They fell in love.
They became engaged.
It was not universally applauded.
She came from a comfortably wealthy family.
Norman was “in trade.”
For some Victorians that was enough to make the match unsuitable.
It didn’t matter to them.
They were blissfully happy.
Then, just weeks after their engagement, Norman died suddenly of leukaemia.
He was only thirty-seven.
It devastated her.
It’s one of the saddest chapters in her life.
And, in a curious way, it changed England.
The following year she bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake District.
It became her refuge.
Her consolation.
Eventually, her true home.
Hill Top still stands today.
Walk through its rooms and you feel as though Peter Rabbit might nip round the corner at any moment.
Its furniture.
Its windows.
Its garden.
They all found their way into the books.
There’s another surprise.
Beatrix Potter more or less invented literary merchandising.
In 1903 she patented a Peter Rabbit doll.
Long before Mickey Mouse.
Long before Harry Potter.
She understood that beloved characters could step off the page and into children’s lives.
But perhaps her greatest achievement came later.
The books made her wealthy.
Very wealthy.
She spent much of that money buying farms.
Not because she wanted to become a grand landowner.
Quite the reverse.
She was terrified the wrong people would buy them and spoil the landscape she loved.
One by one she rescued farms.
Fields.
Woodland.
She became an expert breeder of Herdwick sheep.
Local farmers respected her not as a celebrity but as one of their own.
When she died in 1943 she left more than 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust.
Without Beatrix Potter, the Lake District we treasure today would look very different.
So today, on her birthday, spare a thought for London.
The city that gave her museums.
Libraries.
Scientific curiosity.
Publishers.
Her wedding day.
The city that quietly prepared one remarkable little girl for an extraordinary life.
Then, wisely enough, it let her go.
Because we think of Beatrix Potter as belonging to the countryside.
And of course she does.
But the story begins here.
In London.
And that, somehow, makes Peter Rabbit’s first hop all the more delightful.
And we’ll be hopping back here tomorrow. See you then.