Beatrix Potter: Sources of her Inspiration

Here are six papers given at the International Conference of the Beatrix Potter Society in 2006. They are the work of authoritative and enthusiastic scholars. The sources of Potter’s inspiration they examine include the Lake District landscape itself (John Cawood); the antecedents of her prose style (Peter Hollindale); and the value of her books as natural history (Katherine R Chandler). This slim paperback forms the twelfth volume of Beatrix Potter Studies, a collection which, taken together, might tell you everything you need to know about Mrs Heelis and her little books. One or two of the contributions, Brian Alderson on the books in Potter’s home library and Ann Stevenson Hobbs on how Potter’s drawings are transformed into book illustrations, suffer from a lack of illustrations in comparison to their original presentation as lectures. For me, not a Potter aficionado, the most interesting of the essays was Judy Taylor’s account of Potter’s menagerie of pets, which included, at various times, not only mice, rats, cats, rabbits and hedgehogs but also an extended family of snails, each with its own name; and, as Beatrix herself said, on the occasion of their death from drying up, each with ‘such a surprising difference of character’: an insight which she might well have exploited in a book (‘The Tale of A Snail of Surprising Character’?).