The first thing to know about Beatrix Potter's journal is the Michelangelo entry.
She was at an Old Masters exhibition in 1884, eighteen years old, and she had looked at the paintings carefully. Then she wrote, in her private cipher: "No one will read this. I say fearlessly that the Michelangelo is hideous and badly drawn; I wouldn't give tuppence for it except..."
Those four words at the start — "No one will read this" — are the whole point. The code gave her permission to think what she actually thought. When Leslie Linder cracked that cipher in 1958, he expected to find the private thoughts of a shy Victorian woman sitting quietly in a room. What he found was a record of a mind that had been running at full speed for thirty years, behind a lock nobody had thought to open.
Two hundred thousand words. Nobody's idea of a passive woman.
On Art
Through her father, Beatrix had a seat at the working edge of the London art world.
Rupert Potter was a skilled amateur photographer who supplied Millais and others with reference photographs — models, landscapes, light studies. This got his daughter into studios and exhibitions, usually in a quiet corner of the room. She used the access to form her own views.
Her most sustained study was of Millais. John Everett Millais was one of the most celebrated painters in England — co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, later President of the Royal Academy, the kind of figure whose name appeared in newspapers the way film stars' names appear today. He was a frequent visitor to Bolton Gardens — Rupert had photographed him and his family, and the two men were friends. Beatrix watched him work, followed his exhibitions, compared his finished canvases against the photographs her father had supplied. Millais, she concluded, was a technician of the first order who occasionally missed a drawing. When he painted Bubbles — the famous portrait of a child with a soap bubble — she looked at the finished work and noted, flatly: "I can see where the drawing's wrong."
He repaid her, in his way. He told Rupert once, in Beatrix's hearing: "Plenty of people can draw, but you... have observation." She recorded it without comment. She did not need to comment.
John Ruskin — the most famous art critic of the age — she glimpsed at a lecture and dismissed as "one of the most ridiculous figures I have seen."
On Politics
Her father belonged to the Reform Club and the Athenaeum — the most prestigious gentlemen's club in London, whose members were drawn from the top of politics, science, literature, and the church. Political conversation was part of the household furniture. Beatrix listened, then went upstairs and wrote it down.
She had no fixed political opinions. What she cared about was the gap between how politicians looked and what they were actually like. Gladstone — William Ewart Gladstone, four times Prime Minister, the most dominant political figure in Victorian Britain — she returned to several times in the journal. Not to judge him, but to describe him, the way she would a specimen.
The Gladstone entry is addressed to "My dear Esther" — Beatrix's imaginary companion, the friend she wrote to in the absence of real ones. "He really looks as if he had been put in a clothes-bag and sat upon," she wrote. "I never saw a person so creased. He was dressed entirely in rusty black... hair straggled from under his old hat. But very waken, not to say foxy the old..." She noted separately that at a private view, his medical advisors had said he was too ill for dinner but not too ill for the theatre afterward. She did not elaborate. The observation was complete.
On the People Around Her
She turned the same eye on everyone she met.
Her last governess, Miss Carter, after two years of service, received twelve words in the journal: she had "her faults" and was "one of the youngest people I have ever seen." No elaboration. The dismissal was total.
A Perthshire postmaster encountered on a summer holiday was recorded as a "fat, hunched old fellow, with little piggy eyes," wearing a "smoking-cap with a yellow tassel," fumbling with stamps in what she called "imbecile" slow motion.
Her Uncle Fred was "deaf, placid, rather dateless, excessively obstinate... and sublimely unconscious of the fact that he cannot drive."
These were not cruel portraits. They were accurate ones. She had learned the discipline from natural history drawing: you recorded what was there, not what you thought should be there. The right detail did the rest.
On Science
By the early 1890s, much of the journal was about fungi.
She was drawing them — hundreds of watercolours, made with scientific accuracy — and she had begun growing fungal spores on glass plates under the microscope in the nursery. When she tried to engage the botanists at Kew with her findings, they dismissed her. Her work, they implied, was that of an amateur. She was not welcome at professional meetings. Her paper on spore germination, submitted to the Linnean Society in 1897, had to be read by a male colleague because women were not permitted to attend.
She wrote the frustration down plainly. The Kew botanists were, in her view, "making theories out of dried specimens without the least experience of the way things grow." She did not believe she was wrong about the spores. She was right — her conclusions were later confirmed — but she had no way of knowing that in 1897.
She kept the anger in the journal. She kept the science going elsewhere.
On Her Animals
The same method she used on Gladstone and the postmaster she also used on her own pets.
Her rabbit Benjamin Bounce she studied with genuine affection and absolutely no sentimentality. She noted his "vulgarity," his attempts to "put a face upon circumstances," his habit of pretending to eat a piece of string when caught in an embarrassing position — specifically, when he fell into an aquarium and found himself sitting in the water with no graceful way to explain it. She described rabbits in general as "characters that are easily put upon... amiably sentimental to the verge of silliness."
This is where Peter Rabbit came from. Not from tenderness. From the same discipline she had applied to Gladstone and the postmaster and Uncle Fred: watch closely, record exactly, refuse to soften. The journal ran for sixteen years. Every page of it was practice.
Leave a Visiting Card
Consulting the visiting cards...