In
1866, Helen Beatrix Potter was born. She was a first born
child, and everybody called her Beatrix instead of Helen.
Her parents were very strict, and her best friend was her
younger brother, Bertram. Her parents were also rich, so
they didn't have to work. Beatrix
spent most of the time on the third floor nursery. Miss
McKenzie, a nurse, took care of Beatrix and Bertram. Miss
Hammond taught her, using the nursery as a classroom. Miss
Cameron taught drawing and painting. Her first drawings were
all of animals and birds. She also wrote lots of stories as
a child. When Beatrix was seventeen and Bertram was twelve,
they collected all the plants and animals they could find.
They collected beetles, toadstools, dead birds, hedgehogs,
caterpillars, minnows, and snakeskins. Beatrix
had a friend named Annie Moore, who had once been her tutor
and now had a family of her own. Beatrix often visited Annie
and sometimes brought a cage of white mice and invented
stories about them to entertain the children. But one day in
1893, Annie wrote a letter saying that her oldest child,
Noel, was sick and he would have to stay in bed and learn to
entertain himself. Beatrix did not know what to do, so she
wrote a letter to him starting like this: My
Dear Noel, I
don't know what to write so I will tell you a story about
four little rabbits… Six
months later she wrote to Noel's brother, Eric, and wrote
many other letters to the Moore children. When one of her
friends asked her to make books out of them she found out
the Moores had kept all the letters safe and sound. After
she copied The Tale of Peter Rabbit and added a few things
here and there, she sent it to seven different publishers.
Within weeks, all seven let her down. So, she decided to
publish it herself. In 1901, she received 250 copies of
Peter Rabbit. The books were all gone soon. Then Fredrick
Warne & Company, a publisher that had turned her down
only months earlier, decided to publish it. She agreed to
let Warne publish it and in the meantime, she published
another one, The Tailor of Gloucester. She was now 36 years
old. The little books sold well. Fredrick Warne &
Company encouraged her to make all her letters into books.
For the next 12 years, that's exactly what she did. Children
everywhere got to know Hunca Munca, Mrs. Tiggle-Winkle, and
all the others. Her
work with Fredrick Warne & Company required that she
visit the office a lot. In 1905, Beatrix announced that she
wanted to marry one of the publisher's sons, Norman Warne.
Her parents were offended and refused to give their consent.
But that same year, Norman died because of his poor health.
Still wanting to find a life of her own, she bought a farm
in Scotland. Then in 1913, she married William Heelis, a
lawyer that helped her buy the farm she called Hill Top. By
that time, she had already written over twenty books.As she
grew old, she settled into a country life. By the time she
died in 1943, her books were already a part of the life of
children.