Book-A-Day Almanac

July 28, 1866, one year after the end of the American Civil War, a baby girl was born into an affluent English family. She would eventually create the world’s bestselling picture book. Helen Beatrix Potter loved drawing as a child, both images of the natural world and of the multitude of pets her family kept—rabbits, mice, newts, and a hedgehog named Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

In 1893 she sent a letter to a sick child, telling a story about one of those rabbits, Peter. In 1901, at age of thirty-five, she decided to fashion that story into a small book for children. In this story, Peter disobeys his mother, loses his way, and nearly loses his life in Mr. McGregor’s garden. The English publishers she consulted turned the project down, so Potter drew on her family resources and self-published 250 copies. Because the book was immediately a hit in bookshops, one of the publishers who had turned her down, Frederick Warne, offered her a contract. As Potter and her editor worked on the book, it became tighter. At their insistence, every piece of art was printed in full color. When The Tale of Peter Rabbit was released in the fall of 1902, it sold 56,000 copies in England in the next year, a remarkable sale then—a good one even now. In exquisite artwork, Peter is portrayed as a real rabbit, one who goes “lippety-lippety” when he walks, and has strong hind legs and sensitive whiskers.

Potter would follow her success with other fabulous titles over the next few years—The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, The Tailor of Gloucester, and The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Almost the entire Potter canon, twenty-four books, has remained in print for around a century, a record that no other children’s book creator can even approach. One can study her books for so many things: animal behavior, realistic drawing, superb vocabulary, and concise writing. In Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book , Author Ken Follett discusses how The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit is the shortest thriller on record: “In just 141 words it presents suspense, crime, gunplay, and retributive justice….It still teaches me how to write.”

Potter grew up in a repressive Victorian household and had a difficult time gaining her independence. She eventually got engaged to one of the Warne brothers, certainly something good for both her and the firm. But he died before they married. In later life she married her lawyer and used her money from the books to preserve large portions of the Lake District in Northwest England. For those seeking more of the details of Potter’s life, Linda Lear’s Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature presents a well-written and well-rounded view of this amazing woman.

Happy birthday  to Beatrix Potter. It would be impossible to imagine picture books for children without the ones that she created.

Here’s a page from The Tale of Peter Rabbit: