Beatrix Potter Studies VII: Beatrix Potter as Writer and Illustrator (review)

The Beatrix Potter Society. Beatrix Potter Studies VII: Beatrix Potter As Writer and Illustrator. Papers presented at The Beatrix Potter Society Conference, Ambleside, England, July 1998. Text by Catherine J. Golden, Nicholas Tucker, and Joyce Irene Whalley. Edited by Enid Bassom, Marjorie James, Rowena Knox, and Irene Whalley. Trowbridge, England: Redwood Books, 1999.

There are many individual groups and societies that focus on individual authors of children's literature that are not often widely available in the more commercial world of children's book publishing. Such is the case with The Beatrix Potter Society and its slim, but elegant volume of essays, Beatrix Potter As Writer and Illustrator. Who would think that six scholars, two from America and four from England, would offer the reader, not esoteric pieces but highly informative articles, such as Potter as letter writer, illustrator, and story teller. Founded in 1980 by a group of people "professionally involved in the curatorship of Beatrix Potter material," the society promotes the "study and appreciation of the life" of Potter as author, artist, and naturalist. (96) The writers of the book are a mix of academics, teachers, librarians, museum curators, and ardent readers of Beatrix Potter. The society publishes the more important of the talks given at the International Study Conferences of the Beatrix Potter Society every two years. Scholars come from all over the world to meet and talk about Beatrix Potter. It is fitting that these essays should be more widely known to teachers and scholars of children's literature than to just those involved with The Beatrix Potter Society.

Teachers and scholars of children's literature will recognize Judy Taylor and Joyce Irene Whalley as well known authors on Potter and Victorian children's books. If the other four authors are less well known, this volume will correct that. The six essays begin with Nicholas Tucker's "Beatrix Potter's Fiction: Real Stories for Real Children" in which this child psychologist teaching at the University of Sussex sees Potter amalgamating two traditions, the written moralistic story and the oral fanciful fairy tale. In writing about "humanised animals," Tucker believes that Potter subverts adult morals in delightful and nonjudgmental ways. Potter "instructs and entertains" with "morals and adventures" in her "child-friendly home stories" that appeal directly to children because of her informal tone and her unerring choice of topics that readers find irresistible: food and home. Tucker notices Potter's preoccupation with the eighteenth-century speech of her grandmother, which, like her letters and stories, was short and concise. Tucker focuses on Potter's creation of separate worlds: small cottages, little farm houses, contained gardens, cozy burrows. These worlds comprise their own Garden of Eden where all creatures live in natural harmony. By mixing fact and fantasy in her clear language and by presenting her small stories in small sizes, Potter, according to Tucker, provides a "special sensitivity and understanding" to children that is apparent to this day (7-23).

In "Animal Stories Since Beatrix Potter and her Influence on the Genre," by Peter Hollindale of the University of York's English and Educational Studies, the author shows where Potter fits in with other writers of animal stories. Hollindale traces three lines of the animal story in the late nineteenth century: Kipling with his anthropomorphic animals; London with wild animals central to his stories; and Potter with her naturalistic animals that exhibit animal behavior with its ironic, comic, and satiric components. For Hollindale, Potter's genius is that her animals are real beasts, not humans in disguise. Potter would have known the Uncle Remus stories, The Jungle Book, and Black Beauty. Her direct descendants for animal stories he sees as Kenneth Grahame, Alison Uttley, Russell Hoban, Richard Adams, and Dick King-Smith among others. For Hollindale, Potter's animals are so natural that readers don't even notice the very narrow gap between them and the humans in her...