Maggs Bros. Ltd.

1906 was the year Potter worked on The Tale of Tom Kitten and The Roly-Poly Pudding. Both works that were inspired by her newly acquired country home, Hill Top Farm, in Sawrey - Tom Kitten being more a tale of the garden, and The Roly-Poly Pudding more a tale of the house. This letter, being a combination of house, garden, and field, speaks to both, plus her love of the area in which she would eventually permanently settle.

A perfect Potter letter that illustrates many of the facets of the beloved children’s author – her love of the countryside, the working land, the house and animals of Hill Top Farm, Sawrey, which inspired some of her best-loved works. Amidst the vivid, almost lyrical descriptions of her garden in bloom, she references “kitten drawings” (undoubtedly sketches that would feature in The Tale of Tom Kitten), and she comments at length on the chimney stack (“4 foot thick & full of chaff & hay pulled in by the rats”), recalling a major plot-device in The Roly-Poly Pudding.

In an attempt to avoid his mother, Tom Kitten finds the perfect hiding place in the chimney, only to lose his way during the climb, and so falls prey to the rats Samuel Whiskers and Anna Maria, under the attic floorboards of the old house, where they try to roll him into a dumpling. Potter, in this letter, references ongoing work at Hill Top - “I am just in time to over-look the other chimney stack with great interest” - mentioning in a pleasantly vague way (so she could be talking about Tom Kitten himself): “He burrowed into the back of it this morning without any down-fall – thank goodness”. Commenting on the depth of the chimney ("4 foot thick"), the multiple flues, and the presence of rats, all evokes the descriptions and plot in her book, in a wonderful way that draws her art and life together, just as the illustrations in her books often do (illustrations featuring Hill Top that appear in The Roly Poly Pudding include: the doorway (the arrival of cousin Ribby), the dresser (as Anna Maria whisks by), the staircase (as Samuel Whiskers wrangles the rolling pin), the stove at the base of the chimney (as Tom Kitten climbs) etc). As Leslie Linder has written, "In The Roly-Poly Pudding Beatrix Potter expresses her love of the quaint old farmhouse at Hill Top, Sawrey, which she has taken as the setting for the story" (Linder, 1987, p. 191).

This letter is unpublished in Taylor’s selection of Potter letters (1989), although Taylor included another from the series to Millie Warne, which also mentions the rats of Hill Top: “I have had an amusing afternoon thoroughly exploring the house. It really is delightful if the rats could be stopped out!” (5 April 1906). Potter wrote and illustrated the manuscript of The Roly Poly Pudding in 1906 and gifted it to Winifred Warne, the young daughter of Fruing and Mary Warne, at Christmas that year. It was published in 1908, with The Tale of Tom Kitten appearing in 1907.

In addition to it being an evocative letter, recalling Potter’s published work; it is also a letter imbued with countryside activity and the warmth of the late summer sun. She commences, "I am enjoying the fine weather and the smell of hay-making", and records that she is “writing this sitting out in the garden”, describing the flowers: “The violas are very pretty, & there are a great quantity of poppies [...] & the roses are very pretty too.” She writes of “a good pink rose”, “neglected”, but “making new shoots”, and of the fig tree, with its “3 immense figs”, and the “water lilies” which “are all out on the lake” (which recalls The Tale of Jeremy Fisher, published earlier that year).

She mentions her friend Miss Woodward (“Miss Woodward has gone for an hour’s walk while I write some letters”), likely either Alice or Gertrude Woodward, who were both childhood and lifelong friends of Potter’s, daughters of Henry Woodward, scientist and Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum, London. They were both illustrators – Gertrude, focussed more on paleontological subjects, and Alice was a popular children’s storybook illustrator.

Potter writes of her recent illness, a consequence of which being that she is “not quite strong on [her] legs yet for long walks”. Even so she writes that she “walked this morning” and wants “to work a bit in the hay after tea”, mentioning the hay’s progress: “A lot of it is in the barn already, it smells very sweet.” She segues to what her tenant, the farmer [John] Cannon, has been working on: “Cannon has got a little strip of oats, the straw is about 6 inches high & the docs & weeds about 2 feet!” With her view that, “It is not a credit to the estate, it is useless to try to grow corn up here amongst the hills.” Potter’s interest in farming and the land surrounding Sawrey began when she purchased her first property there, Hill Top, in 1905, with the royalties from Peter Rabbit and her other books. "Over the next thirty [plus] years, Beatrix Heelis built up her Lake District property, improving the stock on her farms and becoming a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep [...] She also bought up extensive tracts of land to save it from development by builders, often working in close association with the National Trust” (ODNB).

A wonderful letter, evocative of a productive time in Potter’s life, written during a time when her life and art were particularly intrinsically linked.

Provenance: Private Collection of Thomas & Greta Schuster; Sotheby's, London, 30 November 1993, lot 281 (three letters).