Potter’s sketchbook and coded journal, and many of her other belongings, are on display at the V. “Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.” “I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things,” she wrote in her journal. She drew when she was unsettled, regardless of the subject. “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote. She drew compulsively, rapturously, from a young age, in a sketchbook that she made from drawer-lining paper and stationery. Mostly, it seems, she spent her days drawing. What was Potter doing all that time she lived at home with her parents? In childhood, she rarely ventured into the rest of London, and she had few friends besides her younger brother, Bertram. “But our descent-our interests and our joy was in the north country.” She called her birthplace “unloved.” “My brother and I were born in London because my father was a lawyer there,” she wrote. She hated the noise and grime of the city-“Why do people live in London so much?” she wondered-and longed to be in nature. She felt like an outsider much of the time. Born in 1866, Potter lived with her parents in a grand house in South Kensington, a rapidly growing community, until she was forty-seven years old. “She was quite a strong and determined personality,” Annemarie Bilclough, who co-curated an exhibition on her life at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, told me. In private, the journals suggest, she was forthright and opinionated, a budding artist, who delighted in the detail and humor of everyday life. In public, Potter, the author of “ The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and “ The Tale of Benjamin Bunny,” whose books have now sold more than two hundred and fifty million copies, was demure and perfectly respectable. Her journals remained a mystery until 1958, when a collector, searching through them, identified a passing reference to Louis XVI, and then painstakingly decoded years’ worth of Potter’s innermost thoughts. Perhaps to protect her work, Potter wrote in a minuscule handwriting using a code that only she could understand. Her parents, descendants of wealthy cotton merchants in the North of England, were rich and exceedingly proper. Between the ages of fourteen and thirty, she fastidiously recorded observations about her stiff Victorian world in several journals. Many teen-agers will go to great lengths to keep their diaries private-I kept a little key for mine in a wooden jewelry box, which I guarded jealously-but the children’s book author Beatrix Potter took it to an extreme. Born in London, Beatrix Potter felt drawn to the country.
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