Every summer, from whichever house the family had rented in Scotland or the Lake District, Beatrix Potter wrote letters to children. Not ordinary letters — she drew in them. A rabbit in a blue jacket running through a garden. A squirrel on a raft with his tail for a sail. A frog in a little house under broad leaves by the river. She drew the story as she told it, fitting pictures in around the words, sometimes sideways or upside-down when the page ran out of space.
She had been doing this since the early 1880s. By the time the first of her books was published, she had written dozens of these picture letters over more than a decade.
Annie
Annie Carter had been Beatrix's governess from 1883 to 1885 — a private teacher hired to educate her at home, since girls of her class did not go to school. She was good at her job and Beatrix liked her. When Annie left to marry a man called Edwin Moore and start a family of her own, the friendship did not end. It shifted.
The Moores' children became Beatrix's audience. There were eventually eight of them — Noel, Eric, Marjorie, Winifred, Norah, Joan, Beatrix, and Andrew — and she wrote to them steadily from her holidays, keeping up with each child's age, adapting the stories as the children grew.
Annie kept every letter.
What Was in Them
The letters drew on whatever was in front of her when she sat down to write.
From Falmouth, in Cornwall, she wrote to Eric about a pig she had seen on a ship docked in the harbour — a ship that sailed to Newfoundland, where the sailors took a pig and ate it when food ran short. She drew the pig noticing the cook approaching with a knife and fork. She drew the pig rowing away in a small boat.
"If that pig had any sense it would slip down into the boat at the end of the ship and row away," she wrote. The pig in her drawing did exactly that. Ten years later — she drew this too — the pig had grown very fat on his island and was still watching for the cook through a telescope. The letter to Eric is the first version of what would eventually become The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, published in 1930.
From Lingholm, on Derwentwater in the Lake District, she wrote to Norah about the red squirrels she had been watching in the woods — squirrels who paddled across the lake on little rafts, using their tails for sails, to gather nuts on Owl Island from a bad-tempered owl named Old Brown. The squirrel story ran to many pages, had riddles in it, and had a proper ending.
This was not unusual. The letters were long. They had plots.
4 September 1893
On that date, from a house called Eastwood on the River Tay in Scotland, Beatrix wrote to Noel Moore, who was five years old and had been ill.
"I don't know what to write to you," she began, "so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were — Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter."
The next day she wrote to his younger brother Eric. Eric's letter was about a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher who lived in a little house on the bank of a river, went out fishing on a lily pad, and caught a stickleback — a small spiny river fish — instead of the minnow he had hoped for. She told Eric, conspiratorially, that Jeremy had ended up eating roasted grasshopper with ladybird sauce — and that frogs considered this "very good indeed, but I think it must have been nasty."
Two letters, two days: The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, two books that would eventually sell in the millions. Neither Noel nor Eric knew any of that yet. They just had the letters.
What She Was Learning
The picture letters were the place where she worked out how to tell a story to a child: how to pace it, where to put the pictures, how to keep the thing moving, when to be funny and when to let the image do the work.
She later said she thought that was the secret of Peter Rabbit's success: "it was written to a child — not made to order."
The letters were not drafts. They were letters, written to real children she knew, about things she had actually seen. But in writing them, over fifteen years, she built up exactly the skills the books would need.
Borrowing Them Back
By 1900 she was ready to try for a publisher. She wrote to Annie and asked to borrow the letters back — particularly the Peter Rabbit letter and the Squirrel Nutkin letter she had sent to Norah.
She copied the Nutkin letter into an exercise book before sending it out, in case it was not returned. She was careful with her own work by then.
Annie had kept everything. The letters were in good condition. They came back.
Six books came out of the Moore children's letters, directly or indirectly. Frederick Warne published Peter Rabbit in 1902. Squirrel Nutkin followed in 1903. Mr. Jeremy Fisher came in 1906.
Noel Moore, who had received the rabbit letter when he was five years old and ill in bed, lived to see Peter Rabbit translated into dozens of languages and read across the world. He died in 1959. The original letter — four pages, illustrated in pen and ink, with a rabbit in a blue jacket on the first page — is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Annie kept every one of them.
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