"I have never cared tuppence ... for the modern child; they are pampered & spoilt with too many toys & books." - Beatrix Potter, in a May 29, 1919 letter to her publisher, Fruing Warne
My infatuation with Beatrix Potter began not long after my first child was born, when we received a gift set of her "little books": twenty-three enticing hardcovers each no bigger than my hand, in their own little box-bookshelf. Most of Potter's characters were as new to me as to my son: Jeremy Fisher who emerges from a trout's mouth with his macintosh in tatters; Tom Thumb and his dollhouse-ham-smashing tirade when the ceramic won't be cut; Samuel Whiskers, who steals Miss Potter's own wheelbarrow after trying to make Tom Kitten into dessert. Her humor is as delightful to adult readers as it is to children--as in the best of children's literature.
Potter began writing as a child, in a journal she kept in a complicated code that wasn't deciphered until years after she died. The earliest journal still in existence began when she was fourteen, but she is believed to have kept earlier ones that were destroyed. Her code writing continued for sixteen years--almost 200,000 words, which is about the length of two average novels. And even her closest friends never knew they existed. Imagine how different the world of children's literature would be if The Tale of Peter Rabbit had been written that way.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit began as a picture letter written to her old governess's son, Noel Moore. Several of her books have origins in letters to children of friends. The first Peter letter is dated September 4, 1893, and includes the now-famous line, "Flopsy, Mopsy & Cottontail, who were good little rabbits went down the lane to gather blackberries, but Peter, who was very naughty ran straight away to Mr. McGregor's garden and squeezed underneath the gate." The line survives in the final version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, with "bunnies" substituted for "rabbits," "under" for "underneath," and variations in punctuation.
Her charming illustrations come from years of examining the world and trying to duplicate it. Her earliest sketchbooks--beginning when she was eight or nine--include careful renderings of caterpillars, mushrooms, and moths. Her pet bunny appears on ice skates, wearing a hat and scarf. She studied and painted fungi in later years, eventually presenting a scientific paper that was dismissed at the time largely because of her gender. Her watercolors were so accurate that they are still used for scientific identification, and the conclusions she reached are now known to be correct.
She wrote and tried to publish at a time when young women of privilege like her simply did not. She kept at it, too, when many would have given up. A black and white version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was rejected by every London publisher to whom she sent it. Undaunted, she had 250 copies published privately on December 16, 1901, when she was thirty-five.
Between her commissioning the print and receiving the books, Frederick Warne & Co. agreed to publish a version of the book with color illustrations. Nonetheless, since Potter had already ordered them, she sold the black and whites--which were snapped up quickly, as was the entire second self-published printing. The 8,000-copy first printing of the color version--with Peter's blue jacket--sold out even before Warne published it in October of 1902. And there she was, an overnight success that was two decades in the making, and rejection-hardened to boot.
Potter bought a farm in the English Lake District with the money she made from that first book, and she turned to raising sheep--again, not something women of wealth did. Nor did she stop writing. She published more than thirty story and painting books while collecting trophy salvers and tankards and teapots with her champion ewes.
She was kind and attentive to fans, too. She never had children herself, and yet despite crusty quips to her editor claiming not to care for them when she was feeling pressure to write more books, she always replied personally to the many children who wrote her. She often corresponded in her characters' voices. "If there were a 'Mrs. Jeremy Fisher' she might object to snails" reads one letter signed "yr devoted friend Jeremiah Fisher."
Her "little books," of course, remain popular around the world. The Tale of Peter Rabbit alone has sold over 45 million copies. And they remain refreshingly undated more than a century after they were first published--and 150 years after Beatrix Potter was born, on July 28, 1866.
For more on Beatrix Potter, see 14 Fun Facts About the Savvy Sheepkeeper here on the Huffington Post.
Meg Waite Clayton is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including The Race for Paris and The Wednesday Daughters, a novel featuring Beatrix Potter