Beatrix Potter

Writing in Code

M. Daphne Kutzer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135384074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Beatrix Potter was one of the inventors of the contemporary picture book, and her small novels published at the turn of the twentieth century are still available and popular today. Writing in Code is the first book-length study of Potter's work, and it covers the entire oeuvre, examining all facets of her work in relation to her private life. Daphne Kutzer reveals the depth of the symbolism in Potter's work and relates this to the issues of the author's own development as an independent woman and writer, and her struggles with domesticity, Unitarianism, and the socio-political issues in late-19th and early-20th century England. Weaving the subtle themes inscribed in Potter's own stories with the concerns and temperament of the author who wrote them, Kutzer exemplifies literary criticism as it can illuminate the breadth of allusion in children's literature.

1
Rhymes and Riddles: The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin

The Tailor of Gloucester (1903) was both Potter’s favorite book and her most unusual. She commented more than once in her letters that she preferred it to all her other books, noting in 1919 that The Tailor “has always been my own favourite” of her books, and again in 1923 that it was not only her favorite, but “it is a story that I received one of the few compliments for that I value one halfpenny,” a reference to a review in a tailoring journal.¹ She preferred The Tailor of Gloucester to Peter Rabbit (Letters, 283). This book has several characteristics placing it apart from the rest of her work. While a few of Potter’s books include human figures (most famously Mr. McGregor in Peter Rabbit), in none of them is the human a sympathetic protagonist. Lucie in Mrs. Tiggy Winkle is a sympathetic human, but she is far more passive, stiffer in both characterization and illustration than is the tailor—the hedgehog is the protagonist in that tale. The Tailor of Gloucester is also the only urban novel Potter ever wrote. She portrays village life in some of the novels set in Sawrey, and Pig Robinson has scenes in a busy seaport, but Tailor is the only novel to make a specific named city an important element of the tale and to illustrate it lovingly and in color. Here the novel is set in a recognizable Regency England, whereas the historical moment is less clear in her other novels.

Humphrey Carpenter, in his important essay on Potter, notes that Potter is a “subversive” writer who is “definitely on the side of the transgressor” in her books,² and also notes that The Tailor of Gloucester “was a crucially important book for Potter, a linguistic exercise, a study in establishing what she believed to be her grandmother’s voice” (286). But Carpenter has to some degree failed to connect the dots in his argument; Potter’s entire oeuvre is an extended complaint of repression and argument for expression of self, and her linguistic style is only a part of that rebellion. The Tailor of Gloucester is important not only because it helped Potter develop a distinctive prose style separating her from her own historical moment, but because it allowed her to banish both Victorian prose and parental authority: in fact to excise her father, mother, and even her brother Bertram and to go back to a period her beloved and rebellious grandmother Jessy Crompton would have known well. Only by so doing can she free herself enough to write her revolutionary stories, although the stories hardly appear revolutionary at first glance: small in size and pastel in coloration, they seem unlikely candidates for subversive texts. But in many ways these texts, and particularly The Tailor of Gloucester, are coded texts or palimpsests—narratives that read one way on the surface and another way beneath. What they encode are complaints against hierarchy, authority, and power.

Potter kept a coded journal from age fifteen to thirty-one, and although one might expect she used code as a way to write privately about family or personal discontents, there are few complaints in the journal. Instead the emphasis is on art, travel, and politics: not unusual topics for a Victorian journal keeper, but surprising in Potter, whose childhood and youth have generally been considered to be extremely circumscribed. Her letters to Norman Warne, much later in life, show the same reticence as the journal, always addressed to “Mr. Warne” and hardly ever alluding to personal matters. Shortly after her engagement to Norman Warne she writes to his brother Harold to say “You will not think me very cross if I say I would rather not talk much yet about that business? though I am very glad you have been told” (Letters, 124). This is her only comment upon her engagement. The reticence is due largely to Potter’s Victorian upbringing in an environment that valued understatement or nonstatement and frowned upon emotional excess of all sorts. Yet as feminist scholarship (starting with the influential Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar) has shown, many Victorian women writers did manage to encode rebellion or at the least discontent in seemingly straightforward domestic fiction. Dorothea Brooke’s more conventional marriage is a poor one, and the radical Will ends up a better choice for her; Jane Eyre rebels from childhood against authority and ends up as Rochester’s savior, rather than he hers; Margaret Hale in North and South has a domestic life far from the Victorian middle-class ideal.

Jane Austen, a writer much admired by Potter, provides some clues to Potter’s own techniques. On the surface, Austen’s novels (like Potter’s) seem concerned with the superficialities of village gossip and domestic concerns—but underneath there are more serious issues at stake. As Gilbert and Gubar pointed out, Austen’s heroines use “silence as a means of manipulation, passivity as a tactic to gain power, submission as a means of attaining the only control available to them” and finally “seem [sic] to submit as they get what they both want and need.”³ This description of Austen’s heroines could apply to Potter herself, who remained silent and passive in her parents’ presence yet kept a secret diary and wrote a scientific paper without her parents’ knowledge; who seemed passive and ladylike when approaching scientists at Kew Gardens but who took them on acerbically in her journal; and who only seemed to submit, being willing to stand up to her parents when her own desire to marry Norman Warne and, after his death, William Heelis caused much domestic drama. To the end of her life, Potter seemed to submit to her mother’s will, helping her close up Bolton Gardens and move to the Lake District after Rupert’s death—but Potter was careful to keep her on the other side of Lake Windermere from Sawrey and visited infrequently.

In her novels, Potter’s rebellion takes the form of rejecting almost out-of-hand the Victorian world, of banishing or criticizing family, of portraying troubled domestic spaces, and of harkening back to the time of her outspoken grandmother Jessy Crompton for inspiration. Furthermore, although her stories are often set in the Regency period or in a kind of timeless period, what McDonald describes as “no particular time, … yet every time,”⁴ the social and political undercurrents of the tales belong firmly to the late nineteenth century. It is as if Potter had to pull herself away from her own domestic and political world in order to critique it. The “code” of The Tailor of Gloucester is complex, depending partly upon family circumstances, partly upon larger historical events, and partly upon Potter’s’ Unitarian view of the world. To unravel the code, one must start with Potter’s grandmother.

Potter found much to admire in her grandmother Jessy Crompton and other Lancashire ancestors. Her grandmother claimed to have been mobbed for her beauty in Lancashire when she was young, and also claimed to have had a lover kill himself for love of her. She was a Unitarian and told Potter’s mother that “Great were the battles … which as a girl she had waged against her non-Unitarian schoolfellows, ‘for the faith’.” Potter’s biographer also tells us that “the Cromptons, despite their summary methods with social inferiors, were themselves great Radicals and individualists, and prided themselves on the amount of trouble they had managed to get into … in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”⁵ Late in life Potter wrote to an American friend that she was descended from generations of “obstinate, hard-headed, matter-of-fact folk” (quoted in Lane, 11). One of her ancestors (Abraham Crompton) befriended the traitor Thistlewood, who in 1820 had plotted to assassinate the British cabinet, set London on fire, and seize the Tower. Thistlewood was hung for treason and Crompton was removed from the bench of magistrates for his championship of Thistlewood (Lane, 11-12). These were exciting ancestors indeed, and grandmother Jessy Crompton was one of them, despite her gray curls and modest bonnet and shawl. Jessy was herself a kind of palimpsest, a kindly grandmother on the surface and a radical romantic underneath.

Compared to Beatrix Potter’s parents, these long-gone relatives and especially her elderly grandmother Crompton must have seemed enviably free—free-spoken and free-minded. Potter’s parents, on the other hand (despite Rupert Potter’s flirtation with photography and his friendship with the painter Millais and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite group), were locked into a life of propriety and routine.⁶ Whether or not Potter was as isolated in her third-floor nursery as Lane’s biography has it, the house must have been stultifyingly Victorian. Potter’s grandparents’ generation lived in a lively time of rapidly changing industrial culture, of a shifting and volatile class structure, of wit and sharpness, whereas Potter grew up when most of the volatility had settled (at least in her house, if not in society at large) into Victorian stolidity. Lane recounts for us the yearly rituals of Easter and summer holidays, the seasonal rituals of housecleaning, the daily rituals of calls and drives—a life that seems, even in the 1860s and 1870s, to have been unusually regimented and constrained. We can imagine this regimentation when we remember that at the time Potter was growing up in this household, George Gissing was prowling New Grub Street, Hardy was beginning to reshape the English novel into modern form, and the Pre-Raphaelites were shaking up art, poetry, and morals. (Rupert Potter may have been an acquaintance of some of these revolutionaries, but he hardly seems to have been affected by their outlook on life, remaining a political and social conservative.) At the same time Potter began to publish her children’s novels, we find E. Nesbit publishing her very modern-sounding Bastable books, Walter Crane illustrating children’s tales with Pre-Raphaelite and aesthetic flourishes, and Winsor McKay inventing the modern comic strip with Little Nemo in Slumberland. In this context Potter’s books certainly seem old-fashioned even for her own time, although as we shall see they often refer to Edwardian issues.

The Tailor of Gloucester is specifically set in a pre-Victorian period, “In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets,”⁷ and in a particular city, Gloucester. Details of clothing, crockery, and language specify (for the adult if not the child reader) that the story takes place somewhere during the Regency period and probably somewhere between 1785 and 1800, a hundred years before Potter sat down to write the story. The tricomered hat and cutaway coat the gentleman mouse wears, the crockery under which he is trapped by Simpkin, and above all the gorgeous waistcoat the tailor is making for the mayor’s wedding are all visual clues that we are in the Regency. For the child reader these details simply place the story “once upon a time” (for the child reader of a hundred years ago as well as the child reader of today), but if Potter had simply wanted to suggest “once upon a time” she could have mixed all sorts of historical periods together in her illustrations instead of so carefully reconstructing the Georgian world. The language of the story has the same effect: words like “lappet” and “paduasoy” and “pipkin” have a magical sound but were old-fashioned even in Potter’s day, and in the illustrated letter that formed the manuscript of the novel, Potter provides definitions for some of these outdated words at the conclusion of the story.

The details of clothing and crockery are quite specific in the novel, as is the setting of Gloucester, a city whose origins go back to Roman times and a city favored by the Plantagenet kings. In 1643 the city held out for a month against the Royalists and paid for its insurrection by having the city fortifications demolished after the Restoration. It is, in other words, not only a beautiful city but one with a history of insurrection, something that no doubt appealed to Potter, who herself first visited Gloucesteshire in 1894 to stay with her cousin Caroline Hutton in Stroud, close to the city. In her journal Potter wrote of the visit that “I used to go to my grandmother’s, and once I went for a week to Manchester, but I had not been away independently for five years. It was an event.”⁸ Potter was twenty-eight at the time. “It was so much of an event in the eyes of my relations that they made it appear an undertaking to me, and I began to think I would rather not go. I had a sick headache most inopportunely, though whether cause or effect I could not say” (Journal, 312). She went, and referred to her first visit to Gloucester as being “like a most pleasant dream” (312).

The trip to Gloucester was a turning point in Potter’s development as a writer, coming directly after the 1893 Peter Rabbit letter to Noel Moore and only a few years before her paper on fungi was presented to the Linnaean Society. It marked nearly the first time she had traveled on her own, and if not in direct defiance of her parents, certainly against their wishes. She had gone to visit her cousin, with whom the young Potter seems fascinated. She writes in her journal of Caroline that “It is well in this world to discover there can exist a young woman, clever, brilliantly attractive and perfectly well principled, although knowing her own mind” (313). She compares Caroline to Austen’s Emma, and says that “She is so completely self-possessed as to be a little unobservant of feeling in others, and may do mischief unwittingly like a kitten” (314). Caroline does not always observe social propriety and mildly shocks Potter by having “flopped” down in her chair before grace was said at dinner (314). Potter considers Caroline to be “a pickle,” a word she uses in her novels to describe characters who are mischievous but also somehow admirable (315). “I was once or twice shocked with that young person; at other times I thought her perfect. The prevailing impression was of freshness and extreme amusement. The keynote of her character is decision and complete absence of imagination” (315), and “she is absolutely fearless, strong in innocence as in triple-mail…. [S]he has in many respects a strong self-reliant disposition and plenty of commonsense” (316).

Caroline’s common sense extended far outside the family. Potter notes in the 1894 journal entry that “Caroline talked of labourers, their miserable wages of eleven shillings a week, their unsanitary cottages, their appalling families and improvidence. All with feeling and sense, and a refreshing unconsciousness of the world’s obstinacy and difficulties, always with common sense and courage” (316). Potter clearly admires Caroline and her impassioned interest in the laboring classes—an interest Potter to some extent shared and which is reflected in some of the books she was to write, including The Tailor with its sympathetic portrayal of a working man.

Potter’s characterization of Caroline Hutton and of her visit to Gloucester is the single longest entry in the journal, and further stands out because of the liveliness of the prose and the attention Potter pays to detail. The Caroline entries are full of life and energy—Potter’s life and energy, not only Caroline’s—for Caroline seems to have brought it out in Potter. Potter is both attracted to and taken aback by the very qualities in Caroline that she herself had but often repressed: forthrightness, honesty, fearlessness, humor. It was Caroline who had “carried off” Potter when her family had doubts about the wisdom of the visit, Caroline who pursued exciting discussions about Darwin, Huxley, Unitarianism, and other modern topics. Caroline, in many ways, brought to life the Potter who would write not only The Tailor of Gloucester but nearly two dozen other books for children that often had a streak of independence and subversion beneath their attractive surfaces—much like Caroline herself, and like Potter.

Not only Caroline but the city of Gloucester itself provided Potter with tropes of rebellion and subversion. Potter had ancestors who supported seditious activists, and here she was in a city that had stood against the Royalists and had paid a price for it after the Restoration. Furthermore, she was in a city that had strong links with the beginnings of the Unitarian Church in England. Gloucester had stood for Cromwell, one of whose first official acts in 1653 was to set forth an Instrument of Government in forty-two articles. Three of these articles spoke to religious freedom and guaranteed freedom of worship to all Christians who professed the fundamentals of Christianity. Although these fundamentals were not specified and led to later difficulties for Cromwell and the country, this Instrument of Government provided the first real protection dissenting Christians had experienced in England, and in fact provided some protection for the early practitioners of what was to become Unitarianism.⁹

Gloucester was also home to John Biddle, born in 1615 in Gloucestshire to a tailor and his wife and an important figure in the history ...