Audacity and Adventure
“We must present ourselves to the world, and we must look upon it as an adventure.” – Miss Potter
Beatrix Potter, best known for authoring the Peter Rabbit children’s book series, was born in South Kensington in 1866. She was born into wealth. Her grandfather, Edmund Potter, was a successful businessman who managed to maximize his wealth and status during the Industrial Revolution. By the 1880s, he ran the world’s largest calico printing factory.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, fabrics had been printed using wooden blocks. It was a labor-intensive process as the fabrics were essentially stamped repeatedly and precisely until the entire bolt was covered in the desired pattern. After each stamping, dye would have to be reapplied to the block to ensure that each stamp was equally saturated and vibrant. Fabrics are still block-printed by hand today, particularly in India, but Edmund Potter’s printing machine helped him bring printed fabrics to the masses, in so doing, amassing himself quite a fortune.
Edmund went on to be a Liberal Member of Parliament in the House of Commons, and he became a champion of education – for everyone. He saw to it that even his factory workers had access to ample reading material. He was quite egalitarian in that way, especially in those days. Through today’s lens, perhaps someone like Edmund Potter could be seen as a typical capitalist in the unflattering sense that he was essentially pioneering what we know today as ‘fast fashion.’ He was engaging in mass production which helped to make something that would normally be expensive and inaccessible more easily attained. That has its good points and its bad. Was he cheapening artisanry? You could perhaps make that argument. However, I hesitate to condemn him as a man of ill-intent in his pursuits. After all, who could have foreseen what would come from such processes just a century later?
No, we forget sometimes that mass production is not always a bad thing. It didn’t always have the stigma it has today. The mass production we know now often boasts low costs and convenience, but it comes at such a large expense of quality. Chocolate barely has any cocoa in it anymore. Our clothes are made from plastic. Nothing feels as if it’s made to last, to endure, because it isn’t. The trend cycle, which is ever constricting, demands that we spend more money on bad products more often. Costs are cut so severely in the construction and manufacturing processes that if anything is too cheap, you just know that someone somewhere on the assembly line was not paid what they should have been paid.
In the case of Edmund Potter, he came from a line of textile workers. His grandfather was a flax merchant, but by the time he got into the trade, he chose to work with calico. Calico is a rough cotton material, and cotton does not grow in England. Don’t forget, though, that this was the 1800s. India was just another part of the British Empire at the time, and one of India’s major exports were their textiles, calico, specifically. England specialized in woollen and silk fabrics at the time, and the clothworkers in England did not take kindly to any threats to their industry. Throughout the 1700s, there were several pieces of legislation that banned the import of printed or dyed calicos from Asia into England. Instead, only plain calico was allowed in, which could then be dyed in England by the English. Before the Calico Acts, as you can imagine, there were cries from textile workers in England that these importers would take their jobs and cut into their own profits. Even though the printed calicos were largely still coming from within the British Empire, they still wanted to prioritize English output and English gains.
And so, Edmund Potter was allowed to become the most prominent calico printer in the world, thanks in part to his use of innovative industrial technologies, but also to the governing body he would later become a part of. He was able to grow his family business and afford a life of luxury for his down-line. Of his seven children, his son, Rupert, became a barrister, and his daughter was Beatrix.
Beatrix Potter was born into a life of relative luxury. Though her father had a profession, his work was not the primary source of the family’s wealth. Beatrix, and later, her younger brother, were educated at home and spent their holidays with the family across Scotland, Wales, and the Lake District in northern England. Though she was never expected to work, Beatrix had a keen interest in biology and mycology. In another time, she could very well have ended up as some sort of scientist or academic. In her youth, she would get lost in the wildernesses that surrounded her, documenting everything she saw in her sketch pad and then painting them with her watercolors. These drawings and paintings were the beginnings of what would become one of the most successful children’s book series of all time.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit was Beatrix Potter’s first published book. Of course, she wrote it and did all of the illustrations, but she also self-published it. Initially, the books were published with simple line drawings — no color. She did this to minimize printing and publishing costs so that small children and less wealthy families would be able to afford her books. Very egalitarian, much like her grandfather. It wasn’t until her books became undeniably popular that a publishing company decided to take her on as one of their authors, and it was at that point that her celebrated watercolored images were finally printed.
The rest is history, but I recently watched the movie that was made of her life, Miss Potter (2006), starring Renee Zellweger as Beatrix and Ewan McGregor as Norman Warne, her publisher and fiancé.
In the movie, there’s a scene where she’s leaving a meeting with the publishers after they had agreed to publish her “bunny book,” as they called it. Elated, she hops in her carriage and announces that she doesn’t want to go home. No, she wants to be taken through the park; all the parks. It’s a beautiful day and she’s celebrating.
As she gazes out the window, she holds her self-written, self-illustrated, self-published, and self-bound book in her hand, and she whispers to Peter Rabbit –
“We must present ourselves to the world, and we must look upon it as an adventure.” – Miss Potter
Beatrix would go on to become a wildly successful author who was incredibly wealthy in her own right, apart from her family’s wealth. Her children’s books are still popular today, but her legacy goes beyond these books.
Beatrix suffered the loss of her fiancé, Norman, in her mid-thirties, and though she did eventually marry, it wasn’t until she was nearly 50. She had no children, unless you count the sheep she bred, but she spent the later years of her life using her money to buy farms across the Lake District. She was a staunch conservationist and she was actively protecting the land from being bought up and exploited by industrialists, industrialists who were perhaps not unlike her own grandfather. Much of the land she preserved, in fact, now makes up a sizable portion of the Lake District National Park. Today, the Lake District is still a popular tourist destination as it is considered to be one of the most beautiful places in the country.
And Beatrix, perhaps because of her closeness to the land and its creatures, was keen on protecting that land and those creatures. She not only prevented the overdevelopment of the Lake District, but she restored the land of its native Herdwick sheep population, breeding thousands of sheep during her lifetime. As she bought up the farms around her – usually farms that were being foreclosed upon and sold for parts – she would restore both the homes and the land.
Her own home, a humble house on Hill Top Farm, was left to the National Trust, along with her original book illustrations. Now, the public can visit and walk through her farm house and farm, both expertly and diligently preserved just as she left it. I visited Hill Top Farm a few years ago, and it was easy to see why Beatrix had opted for this “simple” country life in the Lake District.
For all of her inherited wealth; for the heartbreak she endured with the death of her beloved Norman; for the opposition she faced for being an ambitious woman in the 19th century, Beatrix seemed to do the best she could with the money she had and the circumstances she was born into. And I know it’s just a line in a movie, but we really should present ourselves to the world, and we really must look upon it as an adventure. We’re not all going to be the next Beatrix Potter, but we might find a bit of happiness in this insane world we’re all living in.
And happiness is not overrated. It is everything.
We’re constantly trying not to get scammed these days. It’s too expensive to do anything. The planet is too hot. The wars are still happening and certain families are still getting rich off of said wars. The world is uninspiring – even downright depressing – if you look at it from a wide angle, but what are we to do in between fighting the good fight? We should celebrate each other. We should remember that we each have something to offer this world. We should – we must – do something for ourselves. And maybe we should put it out there for others. And whatever happens as a result will be such an adventure.
And so, I wrote this today, for you, but mostly for me. I have no expectations in writing this, nor in publishing it publicly. It’s just here for whoever needs or wants it because sometimes, that’s all something needs to be.
That’s all.