In this new co-curated and book tie-in exhibition, familiar Beatrix Potter themes and topics will be explored from new angles, and light is cast on more uncharted corners of her imagination through objects and artworks sometimes little seen from our own collection and from others around the world.
Coinciding with co-curator Dr Penny Bradshaw’s new book of the same title, the exhibition is a fresh take on a retrospective view of Potter’s career across multiple areas. With interest for adults and activities for kids, we invite all the ages to explore the life and work of Beatrix Potter like never before.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a range of events across the year, many set here in the museum exploring themes and events in Potter’s life in even more depth.
B
is for Beatrix:
Who was Beatrix Potter?
An Illustrator?
A Conservationist?
A writer?
A Poet?
An Author?
A Scientist?
All of the above! Potter was an extraordinary woman, a woman of great talents across numerous avenues in the arts and sciences. Her career, though rooted in the Lake District, has brought worldwide inspiration and acclaim. The life and work of Beatrix Potter has been subject to extensive research, yet this exhibition takes a new approach. As we weave through key elements of Potter’s life, her work, and her legacy, familiar themes are encountered from fresh and new angles.
L
is for Lake District
Beatrix Potter’s first visit to the Lake District was in 1882, when her family rented Wray Castle on Windermere’s Western shore for the summer. Over the next thirty years, the Potter family would spend numerous holidays in the Lake District, stopping in a range of grand houses situated in different Lakeland Landscapes. Her trips to the Lake District would be a foundation for her work; she would spend time collecting and drawing Fungi as well as partaking in several outdoor activities like rowing, fishing, and sketching on location.
Potter would claim, ‘it was not the Lake District at all that inspired me to write children’s books’, but its landscapes, flora and fauna, buildings, and people regularly appear in her writing for children. Her part in shaping the modern Lake District Cultural landscape is difficult to ignore, and yet her contributions towards shaping this ‘Cultural Landscape’ went largely unacknowledged as the Lakes were nominated for UNESCO World Heritage Status. Potter, however, has had a definitive impact on the modern Cultural Landscape of the Lake District as the scene of adventures for a group of popular anthropomorphized animals has indisputably shaped tourist perceptions of the region and contributed to the Lake District’s global appeal.
N
is for National Trust
Beatrix cared deeply about the land she lived in, and the Lake District was subject to profound changes at the turn of the 20th century. Potter was an advocate for the conservation of the area and was outspoken about activities and industries that would be detrimental to the landscape. She was extensively involved with the National Trust, the seed of this involvement being sown during her first holiday to the Lake District.
The Potter family befriended Hardwicke Rawnsley, a writer and Wordsworth enthusiast, who was committed to preserving both Wordsworth’s legacy and the landscapes which had inspired his work. Rawnsley would go on to co-found the ‘National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty’ in 1895, and Potter would join Rawnsley in campaigns against an aeroplane factory at Cockshot Point on Windermere’s eastern side. Potter would take influence from Rawnsley, also believing that land ownership was the only way to ensure the protection of the Lake District. She worked closely with the Trust throughout her life, helping establish farming and land-management practices that remain valuable today. When Potter passed away in 1943, she left 4,000 acres of land to ‘be held by the National Trust as an inalienable property’.
P
is for Peter Rabbit
Peter Rabbit is the most notable of Potter’s characters, yet she faced initial trouble with the publication of the tale. Six publishers, including the book’s eventual publishers, Warne, initially turned down the book’s publication.
Potter noted that nobody ‘would publish poor Peter!’ despite a trend for these small picture books growing at the time. The book eventually got published in 1902, selling 50,000 copies in its first year!
The world of Peter Rabbit would be expanded via new characters, his friends gaining their own books in time, the release of Peter Rabbit’s Almanac in 1929, giving us an insight into Peter going about his business over the course of a year, thus reinforcing the idea of him living on in time and space. The characters were eventually brought into the real world through the development of merchandise. She produced a template for a Peter Rabbit doll, registering the design at the Patent Office in December 1903. The doll was the first of what she called her ‘side shows,’ and in Potter’s own lifetime, these would come to include games, painting books, and pottery figurines.
U
is for Uncanny
Although Potter’s work can present the Lake District as an idyllic pastoral English space, her work doesn’t ignore heavier themes of death, violence, or unsettling experiences of space. Her journal entries touch on some of the darker sides of Lake District life, in 1885 she describes Keswick as a ‘terrible place for drink’ and records the drownings in Derwentwater, which were an occasional consequence of an overconsumption of gin.
Potter describes the drowned as bodies coming up ‘like a cork’ in a passage which is suggestive of the German concept of ‘Unheimlich’ (something which should have remained hidden but is now revealed), an idea which Sigmund Freud later explored in his 1914 essay on the ‘uncanny’. The idea of unknown horrors lurking in the depths is echoed in Jeremy Fisher when the ‘frightful’ shadowy outline of a giant fish emerges from the depths to carry the frog into the pond below.
Potter spent great lengths wandering through the haunted place, ‘listening to the voices of the Little Folk’ and finding traces of our ancestors. She doesn’t experience the psychological disturbance which Freud attributes to the ‘uncanny’ though, and is comforted by the sense of co-existence with those beyond the realm of the living.
Contributors/Victoria and Albert Museum / Fredrick Warne & Co Ltd / The Royal Ballet and Opera / The National Trust / The Beatrix Potter Society / Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University / Free Library of Philadelphia / The Morgan Library & Museum / University of Iowa Libaries’ Special Collections & Archives / National Fairground and Circus Archive, University of Sheffield / Brittney Wichard / Yoshihide Kawano / Helen Duder / Christopher Scott / The Classic Modern Prop Hire Company /
