Re-Noted: Beatrix Potter's Naturalist Notes
"I used to write long-winded descriptions...in a kind of cipher shorthand which I am now unable to read even with a magnifying glass…"
I’m in the midst of planning Noted’s two-year-anniversary post in early September! As part of the celebration, I’ve put out a call for notes.
I’ll select a handful of your notes to feature next month on Noted. I’m looking for note-taking practices that have been genuinely useful for you—for whatever reason! I’ve already gotten a bunch of wonderful responses. I can’t wait to share them with you!
To submit your notes for consideration, please send around 2-3 images and a description of your practice, including how it has been useful for you (around 150 words) and a brief biography (around 50 words) to notedbee@gmail.com with the subject line “Anniversary Post” (otherwise, your words might get lost in my inbox).
Please submit your notes by August 22nd!
And, now, let’s get to Noted’s most popular post of all time: Beatrix Potter’s Naturalist notes!
I expected Beatrix Potter’s (1866-1943) notes would be delightful. But I had no idea just how whimsical they would be.
She invented a cipher to write her journal—a code so well-crafted that it took scholars over a decade to crack it. She studied mushrooms and referred to them as “fairy fungi.” She tried to sedate her pet rabbit with hemp seeds so she could draw him. Instead, he got very high.
As Spring arrives in New York, I thought this was the perfect time to share Potter’s naturalist notes. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
Potter’s Journal
In 1952, a relation of Beatrix Potter’s found
a large bundle of loose sheets and exercise books written in cipher-writing.
This was Potter's journal, which she kept from 1881-1897. To keep her diary secret, Potter invented a coded language. It proved rather difficult to solve. The scholar, Leslie Linder took over a decade to crack it.1
And here is the code Linder discovered:
In her old-age, even Potter struggled to read her journal. She admitted:
I used to write long-winded descriptions, hymns (!) and records of conversations in a kind of cipher shorthand which I am now unable to read even with a magnifying glass…
Beatrix Potter depended on magnifying glasses and microscopes throughout her life. Before her eye-sight declined, she needed them to explore nature’s intricate details as she collected specimens for study—like the caterpillars she sketched at 9 years old:
Even Potter’s notebook for her history lessons became a vehicle for pressing ferns.
As her journal progresses, Potter becomes increasingly enchanted with “fairy fungi,” as she calls them. She writes of
little tiny fungus people singing and bobbing and dancing in the grass. Like the whistling that some people cannot hear of stray mice and bats, and I sitting up above and knowing something about them…2
Potter had learned the language of fungi, and she would try to make a career of it.
Potter’s Mushrooms
Mushrooms fascinated Potter for their beauty as well as their mysterious form of reproduction via spores. At the time, scientists had not come to a consensus on fungi reproduction. Potter believed that spores must germinate to form new mushrooms.3
Using a microscope she acquired in 1896, Potter observed spores and drew them. In fact, between 1894 and 1895, Potter made 73 fungi drawings.4 Note the uncolored spores, fallen from the central mushrooms in the image below.
In June of 1896, Potter visited her mentor, George Massee, at Kew Gardens, where he showed her mushrooms grown under glass. He boasted that one of them “had spores three inches long.” Potter then jokes that they are both turning into mushrooms:
I opine that he has passed several stages of development into a fungus himself—I am occasionally conscious of a similar transformation.5
Potter’s biographer, Linda Lear explains that the young naturalist, “never saw art and science as mutually exclusive activities.”6 She enjoyed the challenge mushrooms posed artistically and scientifically.
In April of 1897, Potter submitted a paper on fungi—“On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae”—to the Linnean Society. Because the society prohibited women from presenting their work, her mentor, Massee, read it instead.7
The Linnean society rejected Potter’s paper, which was, perhaps, a stroke of good fortune. Had they accepted it, Potter might not have turned her energies to illustrated stories. And she might never have invented her enchanting characters—Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Nutkin, among others.
Potter’s Animals
Of course, Beatrix Potter owned a pet rabbit. She called him Benjamin Bouncer, or “Bounce” for short. Wanting to draw Bounce, she fed the unsuspecting animal “a cup full of hemp seeds” in an attempt to sedate him. The result, however, was that
he was partially intoxicated and wholly unmanageable…I…lay awake chuckling till 2 in the morning.8
As was her custom, Potter drew sketches to better understand the natural world. The following sketches helped Potter create her most famous character: Peter Rabbit.
Peter Rabbit came into being when Potter’s friend’s son, Noel, fell sick. Beatrix, accustomed to writing “picture letters” to her children-friends decided to tell him a story about four rabbits: Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter:
My dear Noel,
I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were
Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter
They lived with their mother in a sand bank under the roof of a big fir tree.
It was not such a big step for Potter to anthropomorphize animals in her stories—she had long been writing of animals as human-like creatures in her journal. For example, in 1886, she writes about the death of “Miss Mouse”:
I was very much distressed because she had been so sensible about taking medicine that I thought she would get through, but asthma got over her one night, and she laid herself out in my hand and died. Poor little thing…I wonder if ever another dormouse had so many acquaintances…
As Potter prepared to illustrate her cast of animal characters, she would practice by making pages of sketches. Potter’s sketches of mice from various angles helped her create The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Two Bad Mice.
While working on The Tale of Pigling Bland, Potter admits,
I spent a very wet hour inside the pigsty drawing the pig. It tries to nibble my boots, which is very interrupting.9
These sketches of a real pig, transform into characters as Potter drafts illustrations:
Potter studied squirrels while preparing The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
These creations allowed Potter to bring some of her childhood imagination into her adult pursuits. She gave up writing in her journal at the age of 30. One of her final entries lingers on the “spirit-world of childhood” as a kind of heaven when brought into adulthood.
I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense…
Notes on Potter’s Notes
❀Find your cipher: I think all notes are written in a kind of cipher—one that only the creator can truly understand. We all have phrases or terms that carry specific meanings for us. Or abbreviations that no one else could parse. And, some of us have truly illegible handwriting.
❀Take out your magnifying glass: I mean this literately and metaphorically. All sorts of wonders surround us—a mushroom’s tiny spores, a butterfly’s wings, a bird’s nest.
❀Revise: Potter’s sketches show how she studied her subjects (mushrooms, mice, cats, rabbits, squirrels, etc…) from multiple angles. This was true for her writing as well. She tells a friend:
I polish! polish! polish! —to the last revise…
Potter was a “fastidious line editor."10 She spent a lot of time considering punctuation, especially exclamation marks and semi-colons
I’ll leave you with one more delightful quote from a corner of Potter’s notebooks:
‘tis my faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes.11
Noted is fueled by you. Your ❤️’s and comments inspire me. As always, I would love to know your thoughts.
Till next week,
Giaimo, Cara. “Beatrix Potter’s Greatest Work Was a Secret, Coded Journal She Kept as a Teen.” Atlas Obscura, 00:00 400AD, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/beatrix-potter-secret-journal-code-leslie-linder.
Potter, Journal, Nov. 17th 1896, p.518.
Lear, Linda. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2008, p. 88.
Lear, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, p. 102.
Potter, Journal, June 13th 1896, p. 508.
Lear, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, p. 78.
For more on Potter’s mushrooms, check out Maria Popova’s always delightful The Marginalian. “Beatrix Potter, Mycologist: The Beloved Children’s Book Author’s Little-Known Scientific Studies and Illustrations of Mushrooms.”
Potter, Journal, May 1890, p. 216.
The Art of Beatrix Potter: Sketches, Paintings, and Illustrations, p. 199.
Laws, Emma. “A Natural Storyteller.” Drawn to Nature, p. 123.
Potter, Beatrix. A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter: Including Unpublished Work. Edited by Leslie Linder, Warne, 1988, p.351.
Wonderful essay! Thank you! I had no idea about the ciphers. The Morgan Library in NYC has showcased her work intermittently for years, most recently this past winter. They do an extraordinary job capturing Potter's magic.
https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/drawn-to-nature
I’m *such* a Potter tragic. She’s an incredibly admirable figure on so many fronts: creative, kind, scientific, observant, and a saviour of natural landscapes!
Thank you for diving I to her notebooks 📔