On the fourth of September, 1893, Beatrix Potter was on holiday in Perthshire when she heard that a boy she knew was ill. He was five years old. His name was Noel.
She sat down and wrote him a letter.
"I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were — Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter."
That was how it began. Not in a publisher's office, not with a commercial plan. In a letter, from a Scottish holiday house, to a sick child — because his mother had once been Beatrix Potter's governess, and they had never lost touch.
The mother was Annie Moore. She is the reason Peter Rabbit exists.
Miss Carter
Annie Carter arrived at 2 Bolton Gardens on the eighteenth of April, 1883. Beatrix was seventeen. She had been expecting her education to be finished — instead here was a new governess, assigned to teach her German.
She was not pleased. And then she was.
Miss Carter was only twenty years old. Only three years older than her pupil, and already, as Beatrix noted in her journal, "a great deal older in experience." She had lived in Germany as a student, had been earning her own living for several years. She was not the remote, pitiable figure the Victorian governess was supposed to be. She was company.
They spent two years together in the third-floor schoolroom at Bolton Gardens — the room where Beatrix kept her menagerie of rabbits, mice, frogs, and a hedgehog, and where she drew and studied with the focused attention that had nowhere else to go. Miss Carter did not merely tolerate the animals. She found the whole enterprise interesting. That was enough.
When Annie left to marry Edwin Moore in 1885, Beatrix wrote in her journal: "I have liked my last governess best on the whole — Miss Carter had her faults, and was one of the youngest people I have ever seen, but she was very good-tempered and intelligent."
For Beatrix Potter, that was warm.
20 Baskerville Road
Annie and Edwin moved to a new house at 20 Baskerville Road, overlooking Wandsworth Common, after the birth of their first child, Noel, on Christmas Eve, 1887. Annie would spend the rest of her life there — sixty-two years in the same house, until her death in 1950.
Edwin Moore was a civil engineer whose work took him as far as the Aswan Dam in Egypt, leaving Annie to manage a household that grew to eight children in sixteen years. The house ran on her energy: church twice on Sundays, Sunday school in the afternoon, Bible readings every day, religious pictures covering the walls. Annie was a Primrose League Tory and a firm Anglican. Edwin, on his returns from abroad, was a dedicated Socialist who had joined the Communist Party and blamed everything, including the mice in the cellar, on the capitalist system.
Their youngest child Beatrix remembered it clearly, decades later: "We children used to kick each other under the table whenever Father started politicking. Mother had an 'At Home' every Thursday, with tea and cakes on a cakestand, and if Father was at home he used to shout through the door, 'You are all parasites!'"
Edwin also brought home a grey parrot from Uganda. It learned every family member's name and, when Edwin spent hours trying to teach it the Red Flag, managed only the first two notes, which it repeated monotonously until the cloth went over the cage.
Into this household came Beatrix Potter, arriving over the Thames in her mother's carriage with a straw bonnet tied under her chin and a basket containing a rabbit or a cage of white mice. The contrast with Bolton Gardens was total. The noise, the quarrels, the children careening through hide-and-seek games, the parrot, the piano lessons, the cakestand — all of it both excited and unsettled her. She came back, year after year.
The Letters
When Beatrix was away, or when the children were ill, she wrote. The letters started arriving in the late 1880s and kept arriving through the 1890s and into the next decade — illustrated in quick pen and ink, calibrated to each child's age and temper.
Noel, the eldest and his mother's favourite, got the rabbit. Eric, born eleven months after Noel, got a letter the very next day, September 5, 1893: "My dear Eric, Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank of a river..." Marjorie got letters about museum visits and publication news. Freda — Winifrede, the quietest of the older children — got something different.
At Christmas, 1901, Beatrix sent Freda a handwritten manuscript in a stiff-covered exercise book, illustrated with twelve watercolours. It was a story she had heard told in Gloucester about a tailor who came back to his shop one morning to find his waistcoat finished, the buttonholes neat, with a thread run out and a scrap of paper reading "No more twist."
The dedication read:
"My dear Freda, Because you are fond of fairy-tales and have been ill, I have made you a story all for yourself — a new one that nobody has read before. And the queerest thing about it — is that I heard it in Gloucestershire, and it is true!"
That was The Tailor of Gloucester. Beatrix later said it was the book she cared most about. It started as a Christmas present to a child who liked fairy tales.
The Suggestion
By 1900, Beatrix Potter was thirty-four years old. She had published some greeting card designs. She had submitted a scientific paper on fungus spore germination to the Linnean Society, which had returned it with a note suggesting further work was needed. She was still living in Bolton Gardens, still largely dependent on her parents, still unsure what, exactly, she was for.
Annie Moore had kept every illustrated letter Beatrix had ever sent her children. She had watched the children's faces when they arrived. She had watched them read.
During a visit in 1900, she told Beatrix that perhaps some of those letters might make good books.
It sounds simple. It was not nothing. Beatrix had been writing and drawing and sending these stories into the world one sick child at a time, with no audience larger than a household in Wandsworth. Annie was the first person to look at that body of work and see what it added up to.
She offered to return the letters so Beatrix could copy them out for publication. Beatrix borrowed them back, copied both the words and the illustrations, occasionally changing a phrase as she went. The letter to Noel became The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The letter to Freda became The Tailor of Gloucester. Seventeen years of correspondence became a publishing history.
20 Baskerville Road, 1950
Annie Moore outlived Beatrix by seven years. She died in January 1950, a week before her eighty-seventh birthday, in the same house she had moved into as a new mother in 1888.
Every Christmas until the end, a turkey arrived at 20 Baskerville Road from Hill Top Farm. The Christmas cards from later years were signed, simply, "from B. Heelis to ABM."
Her children scattered, eventually, but some came back to the area. Joan and Marjorie, the middle daughters, settled together near their brothers in Buxted — in a house they named Hill Top Cottage.
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