It is probably inevitable that the Potter industry should be more interested in the nostalgic sheen of her drawings than the stories themselves, because as anyone who has actually read them will know, violence and death are everywhere in the books. What’s not to like, after all, about a picture of Peter Rabbit on a tea towel, Jeremy Fisher casting his rod on a scented notelet, or the venerable duck herself recreated as a china figurine? I love the Lake District and I spend as much time there as I can, but this aspect of it drives me crazy. Potter’s stories and the characters she created have become big business and her pretty illustrations have made marketing the brand easy. Now though the most visible aspect of the Potter legacy is soft-focus nostalgia, with an emphasis on a ‘ Beatrix Potter experience’ of cuddly talking animals and home decoration. She favoured conservation, but was also committed to the idea of the countryside as a living and working place. Potter herself was a practical and forthright woman whose abilities as a farmer and land manager helped invent the English Lake District as it exists today. In the year that Jemima Puddle-Duck turns 100, have we missed the point about her stories?īeatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck is 100 years old this year and to mark the occasion publisher Frederick Warne has released a special collector’s edition of The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck with a shiny gold cover. Beatrix Potter was always frank about the violence and amorality of the natural world.
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