[A paper delivered at the Beatrix Potter Society gathering, Cotsen Children’s Library, Princeton, New Jersey,  November 3,2007]

“Discoveries and Delights in the Details of a Life”

	It is a special pleasure to return to the Cotsen Children’s Library today and this gathering of the Beatrix Potter Society.	 Nearly 3 years to the day I was invited to this same podium to celebrate the publication of the Cotsen catalogue.   I could scarcely have imagined how important it would be to my own research, and how much I would rely upon it.  So to all those who made that reference work possible, Anne Hobbs, Ivy Trent, Judy Taylor Hough, and the Cotsen staff, again my deep appreciation.   
	
	Writing a major work like Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature is something like childbirth.  When you are in the middle of it, you think it will never end, and when it’s over, you can hardly remember what it was really like.  (And just like childbirth, you are stupidly tempted to do it again) When I looked back at my notes I remembered that three years ago, I was working hard to finish what was then Chapter 6.  It dealt with the period from early 1904 when Beatrix and Norman were plotting out “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny” to Norman’s death in August 1905 and Beatrix’s decision to move ahead with the purchase of Hill Top Farm in November.  I thought of these middle chapters as the “end” to the familiar Potter story, and prologue to what I argue was her “second chance of happiness:” when her energies centered on her country life and her farms.  Two chapters later, Beatrix has married Willie Heelis and her new life has begun.  
	 As Irene Whalley noted in her review of my biography,  my account of this period begins on page 263 and its telling comprises fully half the book— it does so intentionally and without apology- for it is the 30 years of her married, county life where we find out how this shy, retiring Victorian girl became a  self-confident wife, real estate entrepreneur and finally acknowledged country expert and land agent.  I also make no apology for the 1000 citations which take up nearly 100 pages.  But, like Susan Albert, I admit to a passion for documentation, which I understand may strike some readers as excessive!  Not to me, and happily not to my publisher, but be glad you were not subjected to the first draft as poor Judy was!!!
	Back in Nov 2004, I could only speculate when my biography would be finished, and had I known the creative and physical effort the next two years would require  I might have given it all up as impossible.  But today, with shameless self promotion, I can say that Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature is in its 8th printing both in the UK and the US and that nearly 42,000 copies have been sold.  The trade paper edition will be published by Easter in both countries.  
	 I recently received the happy news that both US and UK publishers have found a way to retain Beatrix’s wonderful picture letter to Marjory Moore, which appeared as end papers in the hardback, though in paper, it will appear as front matter.  I am thrilled to have this letter published anywhere in the book--- as some of you will recall that the first 4 printings in the US lacked the end papers entirely, thanks to an omission in the PDF files sent from Penguin to St Martins.   Computers are wonderful, except when they aren’t.  This celebratory note is only slightly moderated by the fact that Penguin’s marketing division, which rules all things, decided that my subtitle, “A Life in Nature,” lacked a certain commercial “buzz.”   In their wisdom they have replaced it.  The new one is “The Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Genius.”  That this subtitle has more “buzz” than my original is quite beyond me.   I am far happier with Penguin’s decision to put Beatrix up against a background of fells and farms as a new cover design, but I had nothing to say about that either.  My American editor, a fabulous Italian, named Flamini who is an unrepentant Anglophile, likes everything just as it is, so unless I am in the UK, I won’t have to look at the new jacket or subtitle.
	Back in 2004  I was concerned with the “problems” biographers encounter in telling a life-- and not just any life, but the life of someone whose particular life perspective was rooted in the natural world.   Leonardo da Vinci once wrote “ The eye is the chief means whereby the understanding may most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature.”   Using her eyes,  Beatrix Potter, like Leonardo, documented the astonishing diversity of the natural world she inhabited.   And so my task was to tell her life from the perspective of how she responded to that world.   Chief among the problems I mentioned back in 2004 was the danger inherent in writing about an icon like Beatrix –  of allowing the scale of her accomplishments and celebrity to overwhelm the crucial details of everyday life which tell us how she got there.  All biographers know that myths erupt quickly in the absence of verifiable fact and once formed are difficult to demolish.  Speculation has its place in biography, particularly because we can never really know the thousand daily events that determine choices and forge character.  Or what factor determined one course of action and not another.  As Irenie also noted, the inclusion of such details has made my biography weighty, and she complained of its heft, but happily not of its depth.
	Neither heft nor depth would have been possible without Judy Taylor’s assistance and her collegial cooperation.  Nor would it have been possible without access to her unpublished archive of letters collected since her revised edition of 1989.  When Judy and I first discussed a new “adult” biography, we agreed that it had to be the most accurate account humanely possible, and I have Judy and Libby Joy, my brilliant London editorial assistant, to thank for the things I got right including many of the citations.  Of course there are errors, some I hope to have corrected in the new edition, but others will remain forever embedded in my assumptions.  But I have striven mightily to get the details right and in the course of that effort, I have made some are new discoveries.  In short, both the devil (the heft) and the depth (the delight, and, I hope, some good prose) are in the details.   So if you have read the biography, but ignored the footnotes, you have missed what I consider the dessert course.
	When I began my research, I was, as many of you have been, frustrated by
the nasty problem of the lack of documentation in Margaret Lane’s 1946 and 1972 accounts.  With all due respect for what Lane did to put Beatrix Potter on our radar and to rescue her from Lakeland obscurity where she had happily disappeared, the Countess of Huntingdon was sometimes reckless in her assumptions and felt no compulsion to tell us where she got her evidence.  We know now that some of her sources have totally and irrevocably disappeared. 
	Judy was frustrated by the same problems when she was writing “Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman,” and especially as she revised her editions.  By the time I came along in 2000, she had made great strides in documenting many of Lane’s quotations as new letters came to light.   I’ll always remember staying up most of one night at Judy’s house scribbling into my copy of “Artist Storyteller” the citations that Judy had amassed.
	 But details alone are merely data, and the biographer’s job is to give them coherence.  So this morning I want to highlight a few details.  Of first importance is the influence of 19th century Unitarianism which provided the context of her formative years, and of individual Unitarians on the Potter family. My research on this subject has produced more letters, questions, and interesting correspondence, than almost any other.  Happily it has led several Unitarian clergy in the UK to investigate my claims further.  I understand the Society will hear from one enthusiastic pastor at a later meeting.
	I find the influence of dissent, and specifically of Unitarianism profoundly important.  It shaped Beatrix’s philosophic outlook, her lifelong interest in science and the natural world, her participation in several areas of social reform, her restless intellectual curiosity, and her openness to experimentation.  Unitarianism and the Dissenting tradition also determined the Potter’s social circle, influenced Rupert’s law practice, and undoubtedly contributed to Helen Potter’s isolation and lack of social success in greater London society.
	It is impossible in the brief time we have this morning to convey the depth of social ostracism and opprobrium that surrounded members of this sect even into the late 19th century, or the achievements of this small band.  Beatrix’s grandparents were forced to marry in the Church of England, their unions unsanctioned otherwise, and male family members were banned from Oxbridge until late in the century, hence their necessary education at one of the reiterations of Manchester College, and their professional degrees from University College, London.   Beatrix herself absorbed the heart of Unitarianism – the uselessness of creeds in the promotion of civil society, and the validity of scientific investigation of the natural world as a means to discovering “truth.”
	Those successful cotton merchant dissenters who gathered together in the north - around Manchester – revolutionized the textile industry and helped expand the Empire.  But they spent their money on educational reform, ( including the education of women and the poor), the  advancement of art, and furthered such unpopular causes as anti slavery, prison reform, public health, and every aspect of scientific investigation.  The senior Potters and Leeches, and their forefathers, were leaders in the Manchester movement for free trade and other economic reforms, balking only at the legitimacy of trade unionism– ( Mrs. Gaskell being an outstanding exception).   Edmund Potter was celebrated in Unitarian circles for his advancement of art education to uplift  the poor, but his leadership of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, was even more important.  Edmund was charged with managing the first  coordinating body of the denomination - and, though I have no proof for this... yet... I am certain that Mary Gill, the head of the Friendly Links Society in Milton, Mass. found Beatrix Potter through this international organization once led by her grandfather.  And through Mary Gill, all the other well-educated, intelligent and polite Americans found their way to Near Sawrey.
	I have good reason to believe, but cannot prove, that Rupert, a prize pupil of
the leading Unitarian thinker of the day, James Martineau, as well as of the fiery William Gaskell, seriously considered the ministry ( accounting for the missing years in his education). By mid-century, the sons of the merchant class were urged to take up the law rather than the church and I suspect Rupert and his father agreed it better suited him, and also provided a way to improve the family’s social status. 
	 I discovered that Rupert’s legal career was not the dalliance that we had previously believed.  He was successful, both financially and within the legal community, and he did work at it.  His Unitarian connections brought him to Lincoln’s Inn and especially to association with another famous Unitarian barrister Henry Peter Brougham whose portrait hung for years in the Potter’s dining room until Beatrix gave it to the Society of Lincoln’s Inn in 1934.   Rupert was published and gained some standing in the specialized field of equity law and conveyancing.. (DunlopVJohnson, 1876) I have been tutored in the intricacies of this specialty by Libby Joy and her barrister husband, and I am persuaded it suited someone of Rupert’s turn of mind.   We do know that Rupert made frequent trips to Manchester area courts and that he was chosen as the executor or trustee for most of his extended family.   Unitarians were also the key to his early initiation into the Reform Club.  
	But this same dissenting tradition proved less useful to Helen Potter, who after all was left in isolation in the suburbs.  Bolton Gardens, I discovered was a popular address for certain government appointees and for men in science and the law. There were other Unitarian neighbors, but none that Helen seemed drawn to.  I emphasize again  that we have only one side of the story with regard to Helen.  Suffice it to say here that I know that by the 1890s the Leeches as a clan were not as observant as the Potters of such Unitarian traditions as the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day rather than Christmas.  The important exception was Grandmother Jane Leech who was deeply committed, and widely respected for her educational work in Stalybridge and the founding of the Stalybridge Unitarian Church.  
	 Helen had lost two sisters, (the eldest and youngest --Jane and Mary).  All the rest of her siblings stayed  in the North making Rupert and Helen the family rebels.  Harriet, her eldest living sibling, married the wealthy merchant Fred Burton.  It is doubtful that the Burton’s in distant Wales were observant dissenters.  Helen’s other sister, Elizabeth, everyone’s favourite, married Walter Potter who remained in Potter’s calico business until his death in 1871.  Elizabeth died after the birth of Edith,  leaving Helen the only sibling without an address of her own in the North.  In the absence of a Leech patriarch, Helen relied upon her mother’s social connections in London-- which as a widow were thin at best.   We simply do not know how deeply Helen was committed to her dissenting roots, ( but I can assure you there were no Christmas parties at 2 Bolton Gardens.)
	This brings me to the importance of Lucy Potter Roscoe and Sir Henry.  That Rupert and Helen Potter were extremely jealous of Lucy, and of the Roscoe’s social standing and success is quite clear.   Beatrix’s rare visits to the Roscoes at Woodcote and the necessity of her sneaking out to go off to Kew with her distinguished uncle are evidence of a certain antipathy. In her journal  Beatrix passes along unkind comments by her parents when Roscoe is elected to Parliament, and when he is knighted.  But it is in Uncle Henry, that Unitarian culture and intellect merge most spectacularly.   He was a very important scientist, a successful MP, and an advocate of public health with an international reputation.   As Beatrix’s scientific mentor, Roscoe carries a certain burden for pushing her into scientific realms where she could not hope to be accorded a hearing.   But he taught her how to write a scientific paper and how to prove a hypothesis, the tools of reasoned writing that she enjoyed all her life. 
	Beatrix once wrote that she would always be a Unitarian because of her father and grandmother.  But she was also a “closet” Unitarian because she enthusiastically embraced the ethic of intellectual independence and shared the Dissenters turn of mind – its driving curiosity, it passion for the truth as revealed in nature and science, its approval of experimentation and especially its moral imperative to do something useful with one’s life and to leave the world a better place for having lived.  This helps to explain  her willingness to experiment  in art, science and in trade (eg. Merchandising) and her lifelong curiosity of everything from animal vaccination against contagious diseases to human applications of penicillin.  Most of all, it influenced her natural ability to observe.
	 Beatrix produced some every fine scientific illustrations, when in 1895, she accepted a commission for a dozen entomological lithographs to be used in the science lectures offered at Morely Memorial College for Working Men and Women, then established in the Old Vic.  The commission came from Caroline Martineau who it was supposed was a daughter or sister Rupert’s mentor, James Martineau.  Caroline and her sister Constance, however, were relatively distant cousins of the theologian and of his famous sister Harriet, the agrarian reformer.  As an eighteen year old, Beatrix  had found the sisters  “dry and acid to a degree which is at once startling and amusing,”.  But in 1895 she discovered these Martineau sisters were in the forefront of education and workingmen’s reform.  Caroline was the principal of the Morley College  and was important in her own right as a scientist, the author of several books for children.  Her work at the College was in the best of Unitarian traditions of “improvement and uplift.” 
	 Additionally Caroline was a friend of Emma Cons, a pioneer advocate for the urban poor who had founded the community theatre project.  Both Martineau and Cons were lieutenants of Octavia Hill, the Unitarian housing reformer, who in turn was a close friend and inspirational associate of the young Hardwicke Rawnsley when he began his work among the poor of Bristol, and with him, a founder of the National Trust.  Certainly Beatrix had opportunity to meet Cons, perhaps even Hill,  but even if she did not, her association with these women was important to her growing self-confidence and to her determination to do “something useful with her life.”
	Although Beatrix seems never to have completed all 12 lithographs, she worked very hard at them - studying poorly identified specimens at the National History Museum and gaining artistic and business acumen in her negotiations with the publisher West, Newman at Hatton Gardens.  We know that Rupert approved his daughters efforts and we know that Beatrix changed her impetuous view of Caroline and Constance Martineau.  By 1896 she had expanded her horizons. Equally important, her abilities as an illustrator were more widely appreciated in Unitarian circles than her journal indicates.
	Although The Pagets, who lived across Old Brompton Road at The Boltons were not unitarians, they were widely acquainted in scientific and reform circles.   They were hospitable to dissenters and as well as to establishment scientists like William Flowers the unapproachable director of the Natural History Museum.    I could go on at length about the influence of their daughter, Rosalind Paget, later Dame Paget, on Beatrix’s later interest in District Nursing in the Sawrey community, but here I want to point out that it was through this same circle of friends that Beatrix met Dr. Henry Woodward, the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum, and his daughter Gertrude who became her lifelong friend, an associate in geology, and whose sister Alice was by 1894 a successful children’s book illustrator.   The Woodwards were an extremely important connection for Beatrix.  
	 I do not think it happenstance that these scientific associations coincided with her visit to her Hutton cousins at Harescomb Grange and to Mrs Sophia Hutton who certainly knew the Woodwards through her own impressive geological research.   I have commented about the importance of Unitarianism and geology in my recent note in the BPS Newsletter, but I’ll just say here that Beatrix’s contributions to scientific illustration and geology overlapped in 1894 and 1896 and that it all circles back to those important Unitarian connections.   While Beatrix could have been any sort of a natural scientist; entomologist, geologist, or mycologist, it is significant that 1896 is also the pivotal year for Beatrix’s experimental work on the germination of spores.
	Finally, I need to say a word about the American Unitarians who made their way to Sawrey some thirty years later, and who provided Beatrix with some of her most cherished “long distance” friendships.  When I started reading Jane’s letter’s to American’s I wondered what the glue was between the artist family of Charles  Hopkinson, the Field family of Milton, and the Coolidges.    And the answer once again is Unitarianism.   Although the correspondence between May Gill, the sister in law of William Field, headmaster of Milton Academy, is lost, I was able to talk to enough people and to read enough newspapers to piece together the connections between those well educated, well informed wealthy American Unitarians from the Boston area who flocked to Sawrey to find the “Peter Rabbit lady” .   These same dissenting connections underpin the friendship that developed between Beatrix, the Coolidges, Bertha Mahony, and even Marian Perry.
	  Beatrix’s friendship with women strikingly like herself in interest and background, and even late marriage, enabled Beatrix Potter as well as Mrs William Heelis to expand her domestic world in the 1920s, to enlarge her literary horizons, and to relate to women on a level she could not have felt comfortable doing with anyone in the village.   Although Marian Perry was not unitarian, (her stepson was none other than the Bishop of the U S Episcopal Church), she was just that sort of wealthy, liberal episcopalian who was involved in all sorts of charitable efforts including the those championed by the Unitarian founders of the Bookshop for Boys and Girls.
	With the time remaining I want to touch briefly on two other “discoveries found in the details.”  The British Society members have just been treated some of Bertram Potter’s remarkable artwork that has come to the V&A in the Duke collection, art that reveals what a fine etcher Bertram was.  When I first saw HT, I remember thinking that brother and sister must have been remarkably close for Beatrix to have hung his large landscapes in her sitting room, and in the “new room”, as there was certainly no lack of choice of artwork to decorate her walls.  I wanted desperately to find out more about Bertram.
	Happily two lovely women at Charterhouse School, the librarian and registrar, agreed to dig in the school archives for Bertram’s records.  My discussion of Bertram’s education, and his surprise election to the Athenaeum in 1906 occupies only  4 paragraphs in two chapters, but I direct your attention to the notes.  
	  Bertram had been sent off to Charterhouse in 1886, a school in Surrey traditionally favoured by the sons of barristers and solicitors, army men, and the civil service, and regarded as a pre-requisite to a place at Oxford.  Such were Rupert’s ambitions for his son.  Charterhouse was and is an excellent school, but probably a very poor choice for an artistic young man of undistinguished athletic abilities and interests.  Bertram was almost surely the victim of bullying.  He entered Hodgonsites House and stayed only two quarters leaving in the spring of 1887 before taking his exams.  Beatrix reported that Bertram was ill, perhaps a case of pleurisy, and suggests that someone else in his house had come down with it.   But the archivists records disputes both facts.   Bertram was not diagnosed or treated for pleurisy, and there was no epidemic at the school.  Beatrix also writes cryptically in her journal, “It is useless to speak more for the thing is done and can never be undone.”  I suspect from the Charterhouse records that Bertram developed a nameless illness probably one induced by alcohol.  But the records definitively show that he dropped out rather suddenly with some adverse standing.  He finished back at Eastbourne where he was apparently less miserable.   Bertram’s penchant for dissembling, most famously about his long secret marriage, began early.   Alcoholism we know is a family disease and William Leech, Helen’s younger brother, was so afflicted.  Beatrix expressed the fear that Bertram had “it” but never specified the object, but it seems obvious what she feared.
	Now here’s the unsolved mystery.  Bertram did go on to Oxford matriculating at Magdalen College in the autumn of 1890 to read classics.  I found the records of his tutor, Alfred Denis Godley, and his transcript which shows he took a Third in Classical Moderations in 1892.  He read only for a pass the following summer but stayed at Magdalen another year gaining his MA before going abroad.  Not surprisingly he preferred social life at Oxford to that at Bolton Gardens!!!!
	   The discrepancies appear in the records at Magdalen which list Bertram as coming up from Charterhouse, not Eastbourne, and those from Charterhouse clearly show he withdrew early in 1887.  His records from Eastbourne appear to be lost. 
	Just as soon as he matriculated at Oxford, Rupert proposed Bertram for membership in the Athenaeum, the most distinguished club in all London.  Rupert’s nomination of his son suggests something of the social pressure Bertram must have felt within the family.   His original proposers were all friends of his father’s; James Caird, the distinguished Scottish barrister, and John Millais the artist.  Sixteen years later, in 1906,  Bertram’s candidacy came up for ballot –(this was four years after his secret marriage to Mary Scott.)   Bertram’s ballot lists his address as 2 Bolton Gardens, and his profession as painter and etcher, no mention of farming in the Borders.   His substitute proposers were his Uncle, Henry Roscoe, and the Honorable Charles Booth, the Unitarian philanthropist responsible for the first sociological survey of the London’s working poor.  His ballot was signed by his father, by Charles Mallet, Margaret Roscoe’s husband, and by Lewis Morris the Potter family friend and poet.  It gained the requisite number of signatures.   Athenaeum records do not indicate when or if Bertram ever participated in Athenaeum Club after his election.  We do know that the poor man continued to deceive his family about his personal life for another four years, years in which his sister was certainly one of his few confidantes.
	Finally, I want to suggest what fun it was to become an amateur expert in Lake District land ownership practices and to be tutored by one of the best scholars on the subject, our very own John Cawood.   With copies of all the Potter family wills in hand, I was able to document once and for all that indeed it was a “legacy” from Harriet Leech Burton(the aunt who reminded her of a weasel)  which enabled Beatrix to buy Hill Top in 1905 – but it appears that gift came outside Harriet’s will.  In other words, it came as a personal gift from her estate not as a specific bequest, which is the reason it has been so hard to nail down.   Undoubtedly Harriet had made her desire to give Beatrix a little something known to her family, or perhaps it was something Uncle Fred Burton, her executor, decided upon himself.   We know Beatrix admired Uncle Burton, and continued to visit him into his old age.  We shall probably never know for sure how or who initiated the gift.
	With John Cawood’s guidance, I also discovered that Beatrix unwittingly paid a handsome premium for Hill Top, and that Frederick Fowkes, the seller, took advantage of the London spinster’s (and her London representatives) inexperience in north country land conveyancing to make a tidy profit.   There is also evidence that Norman Warne must have known, approved and even been a party to, the idea of buying Hill Top because Beatrix had begun negotiations for its purchase through her father’s London barristers well before Norman’s death.  Furthermore, it is clear from the documents that William Heelis had nothing to do with the purchase of Hill Top.  
	Beatrix paid £2805 for the farm giving Fowkes a profit of £1430  over what he had paid for the property a month or so earlier.   When Beatrix found out she had so seriously overpaid, she negotiated a lesser price from the rather embarrassed Fowkes for her subsequent purchase of Buckle Yeat Croft which was conveyed to her in December 1905.  
	I be-labour this point because it suggests that Beatrix and Norman’s planned to keep Hill Top as their country home, and also because her overpayment was the subject of gossip in the village.   Beatrix must have been horribly embarrassed  by her naivete and determined never to be taken advantage of again when buying land; and thanks to William she probably never was.  
	But just consider the change in the forty year old woman who needs her father’s approval and his legal team to buy Hill Top and the self-confident countrywoman and real estate entrepreneur who risks the purchase of the enormous Troutbeck Park Farm in 1923.  How far her life had come and how much she had changed!!   In 1923, with Willie’s crucial partnership, she deliberately foiled the local developers who planned to buy the rundown farm and build holiday houses all over the bottom land. Her purchase was not popular in the farming community.   She paid £8,000 pounds for the 1875 acres and instantly become one of the largest and most important landowners in the area.   The deed for Troutbeck Park includes twenty-five separately described parcels.  Its purchase was, I believe a significant turning point in her life.  With Troutbeck Park she became the owner of a large and important flock of Herdwick sheep, and she became passionately absorbed in the restoration of the farm and its animals.   It marked the beginning of her determination to preserve the culture and land of the Lake District, to take up the work begun by Hardwicke Rawnsley, and it began her serious association with the National Trust.  
	Finally, in the notes, I think you will also find further documentation of the depth of the partnership between husband and wife especially as it relates to Beatrix’s activities as land-owner and sheep-breeder.  The documents are found in what I will always think of as “the Treasure Box,” but which the Society now calls something much grander and less exciting.  They reveal not only Beatrix’s personal wealth but the enormity of administrative responsibility  that fell to William.  Stock sales and land taxes alone would have kept him busy most evenings of a year.  But the records and schedules of land conveyances, rents and collectibles, disbursements and payrolls were enormously complicated.   Beatrix could never have been the successful manager and land agent that she was, and certainly not the successful land purchaser, without William’s skills – his negotiations, and his most especially his meticulous record keeping.
	For a variety of reasons, we know Beatrix chose to keep much of her literary
dealings with the Warne firm private. Although William filed the tax schedules, he knew little of the details of her literary contracts, and Beatrix clearly did not enjoy the prospect of his oversight or his disapproval.  Beatrix negotiated for herself.   But outside this one area, the Heelis marriage was a splendid partnership.   Beatrix’s success as a countrywoman was AS dependent upon William’s skills as her own.  Without his pragmatic knowledge of country folk and the history of land conveyancing, his patience and legal acumen, her preservation vision would never have been realized.  Their marriage was not only an affair of the heart, but also a merging of talents and passions.
	One vignette will suffice.  Negotiations with James Aubrey Garth Marshall to buy the 4,000 acre Monk Coniston Park in 1929 were long, tedious, and unexpectedly difficult.  We don’t know, but I have reason to speculate, that her plan to buy the whole estate herself, keeping the potential partnership with the National Trust a secret, was the product of Willie’s personal knowledge of the seller, as well as his ability to put together a scheme that the cash-strapped Trust could accept.
	Among other inducements, Willie used the lure of lifetime fishing rights to cajole the childish Marshall into selling.   Beatrix gave Hamer a blow by blow of the secret negotiations clearly enjoying her insider role, while her husband did all the heavy lifting.   “Marshall is swayed by the hope of money paid down and the fishing.  Let him fish for Life!”  she wrote.   But her next letter warns: “we may all end in a lunatic asylum.” 
	One of my favourite illustrations of their domestic partnership comes from a letter to Trust Secretary Hamer in which Beatrix describes a visit Marshall paid to Castle Cottage one evening in late October 1929 with a new set of conditions.  Beatrix, the brave potential buyer, hid her rather portly frame behind the dining room door, so as not to miss a word of the conversation.  The “deal”, involving a scattered and staggeringly beautiful landscape, including Tarn Hows, an important group of farms, timber lands, and thousands of animals, would never have come off without Willie’s maneuvering, Beatrix’s money or their joint and dearly held philanthropic interests to save their beloved countryside from unimpeded development.  Willie was no mere country solicitor and I suspect he worked at maintaining this low public profile, but his outward demeanor masked a real brilliance as a negotiator.  How we all wish for some personal letters from Willie, to know his voice, something more than Beatrix’s few remarks, or John Heelis childhood memories, to suggest the depth of his personality.
	The “farming ledgers” as well as the voluminous correspondence we now have
between Beatrix and the Trust officials are crucial documents.  They reveal Beatrix in her myriad roles:  the exacting and the sometimes stubborn property manager, the real estate entrepreneur, park ranger,  forestry expert, sheep breeder, gardener, architect, country neighbor and village eccentric.  Her accomplishments are extraordinary and they are worth detailing for what they add to energy and entrepreneurial talent.
	Beatrix’s vision for the Lake District will surely be altered by time and economic pressures.  Her farms may not stand as long as her little books are read or her scientific illustrations are appreciated. But her vision was vital to the preservation of the English landscape and the modern environment of fell farming.  Her eye was as unerring in these matters as it was in the artistry that the world has come to celebrate. 
	 So I challenge you to have dessert: read the notes and be further amazed at the range of Beatrix Potter’s genius.  	
	
© Linda Lear 2007.  All Rights Reserved.