The envelope arrived in May 1890. Inside was a cheque for £6 and a letter from Hildesheimer & Faulkner — a London publisher specialising in greeting cards and illustrated stationery — asking the sender to submit more designs. The letter was addressed to a gentleman. Beatrix Potter was twenty-three years old.
The Rabbit Who Made It
The designs were based on Benjamin Bouncer — a tame hare who lived in the nursery at Bolton Gardens. She described him in her journal as "that charming rascal Benjamin Bouncer our tame Jack Hare" and used him as a model in the early months of 1890, working up six designs for Christmas and New Year cards.
When the signed cheque finally came, her first act was this:
"My first act was to give Bounce (what an investment that rabbit has been in spite of the hutches), a cupful of hemp seeds, the consequence being that when I wanted to draw him next morning he was partially intoxicated and wholly unmanageable."
Then: "I retired to bed, and lay awake chuckling till 2 in the morning, and afterwards had an impression that Bunny came to my bedside in a white cotton night cap and tickled me with his whiskers."
There is no other entry in her journal that reads quite like that. She was not a person who wrote about being happy. She wrote about hay, and rats, and the condition of the oat crop. That she lay awake chuckling until 2am tells you what the cheque meant.
Bertram
She did not do it alone.
She and her brother Bertram had what she called "a mutual admiration society" — the two of them complaining together about how little the rest of the family understood her work. Bertram was four years younger. He painted too. He understood what she was trying to do.
It was Bertram who picked Hildesheimer & Faulkner from the list they had put together, and walked the drawings in himself on his way to sit his Oxford entrance exam. Because he was the one who had submitted the work, the cheque came made out in his name — and to cash it, she needed him to sign it over to her. He had forgotten to do that. She had to send it back. She did not seem to mind.
The original motivation, she wrote in her journal, was "pique and a desire for coin to the amount of £6." She would never have said the work mattered to her, or that she had been hoping for this. But she noted that she would never have overcome her "constitutional laziness" without Bertram to push her. That was as close as she came to saying thank you.
She said nothing to the family until the cheque was in her hands. When she did, the response was relief: "the cheque was a great softener: I think they were much pleased." The money made it real, and real was easier to accept than ambition.
What £6 Meant
In 1890, Beatrix Potter had no money of her own.
The Potters were wealthy — the fortune built on Lancashire cotton mills — but the money belonged to her father, and before that to her grandfather, and it moved according to rules she had no say in. She could not earn. She could not spend without permission. She could not go anywhere without a chaperone, take a room of her own, or make a single decision about how her days were ordered. She was twenty-three and lived entirely inside her parents' arrangements.
Six pounds was roughly three months' wages for a domestic servant — not nothing, but not life-changing money either. It did not change her situation. What it changed was the principle.
The work could earn. She had proved it with six drawings of a hare. If six drawings could earn £6, more drawings could earn more.
The Thread
She kept drawing. She kept selling. The royalties bought a field, then a farm, then fourteen more farms and four thousand acres of Lake District land, left to the National Trust when she died in 1943.
The thread starts here: Benjamin Bouncer, six Christmas card designs, and a cheque that had to be sent back because Bertram forgot to sign it.
She lay awake chuckling until 2am. Then she got up and drew something else.
Leave a Visiting Card
Consulting the visiting cards...