Beatrix Potter, a Victorian naturalist

Souvenirs from the Armitt Museum

My recent visit to Lake District was centred mostly around nature trails and dogspotting, as well as doing weird things such as scaring goldfish living in a telephone box next to a pub in Torver, and giving a traffic cone a tour of the Northern lakes (the latter was my companion's idea, and I swear we were not eating any funny mushrooms... although, after having written this down, I am not entirely sure). However, there was one cultural experience, and that was a visit to the Armitt Museum in Ambleside. It would have been just another local history museum but for one remarkable woman who lived in the area for for most of her life bequeathed to it her archives: Beatrix Potter.

Now, everyone knows that she is a highly acclaimed children's author, the writer who brought to us the tales of Peter Rabbit and his friends, in which charming and simple text is accompanied by beautiful illustrations. In my opinion, these illustrations are a major factor in the success of her books, as it is thanks to them that the stories and characters in them are really brought to life.

Illustration to "The Tale of Squirrel
Nutkin" (spot the mushrooms!)

What is not so well known is that before writing her first Peter Rabbit story she was a passionate amateur mycologist, and that her legacy includes hundreds of fungi drawings, so detailed and accurate that after more than 100 years they are still easily identifiable. She was also the first person to prove that fungi propagated by spores and managed to germinate them (among her drawings there are her observations of this process through a microscope). She also was the first (in Britain) to suggest that fungi and algae comprising lichens are symbiotic rather than parasitic. Altogether remarkable! She even submitted a paper to the Linnean Society on the subject of spore germination, but it was never published, almost certainly due to some power play of the people in charge. And, almost certainly, because she was a woman. Arrgh, Victorians!

It must have been a great disappointment for her, but there is something we have to thank those eggheads. I am sure that their refusal to publish her paper spurred her to try her hand at a different kind of publication, and a good children's book is much better than any scientific paper, especially one that actually has such significant educational value: her illustrations of plants and English countryside are extremely accurate, even though her description of animal habits is certainly not! I am deeply saddened though that one thing is missing from them: fungi. Except for one illustration to "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin", all she ever drew for Peter Rabbit was plants. Perhaps that experience at the Linnean cut deeper than her biographers thought, as after it she gradually stopped producing fungi drawings altogether.