Beatrix Potter For the CSET

Are you busy studying hard for the CSET English or the CSET Multiple Subjects exam? Good. Add to your studies Beatrix Potter.

Helen Beatrix Potter was the author and illustrator of a popular series of children’s books that includes The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), The Tailor of Gloucester (1903) and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies (1909).

She lived a lonely life at home, being educated by a governess and having little contact with other people. She had many animals which she kept as pets, studying them and making drawings (she was an excellent illustrator who learned to draw by observing and sketching her environment and she most often did pencil sketches and watercolor drawings).

A typical Victorian family, the Potters lived in a large house with several servants. Beatrix was cared for by a nurse, and she spent long hours alone, only seeing her parents at bedtime and on special occasions.

Her parents took her on three month summer holidays to Scotland, but when the house they rented became unavailable, they rented Wray Castle near Ambleside in the Lake District. Beatrix was 16 when they first stayed here.

For the next 21 years on and off, the Potters holidayed in the Lake District, staying once at Wray Castle, once at Fawe Park, twice at Holehird and nine times at Lingholm, by Derwentwater, famous now for its rhododendron gardens. Beatrix loved Derwentwater. She watched squirrels in the woods, saw rabbits in the vegetable gardens of the big house and made many sketches of the landscape.

Frederick Warne published ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’ in 1902. In 1903 Beatrix bought a field in Near Sawrey, near where they had holidayed that year. She now had an income from her books, Peter Rabbit having now sold over 50,000 copies. In 1905 she bought Hill Top, a little farm in Sawrey, and the next 8 years she spent writing more books. In 1909 she bought another farm opposite Hill Top, Castle Farm. Seven of her books are based in or around Hill Top. Hill Top is now the most visited literary shrine in the Lake District.

Beatrix Potter married William Heelis and spent most of her time a Lakeland farmer, writing little.

When she died on 22 December 1943, Beatrix Potter left fourteen farms and 4,000 acres of land