Apparently, an updated movie version of Peter Rabbit recasts the mischievous fellow as a comically sadistic brute.
Beatrix Potter, it’s safe to say, would not approve.
The prolific author of a series of children’s “little books” wove charming illustrations, imaginative storytelling, and a gentle way of life into her hand-sized tomes.
That world is blown apart by a gyrating, loud-mouthed fool of a rabbit and a doltish human, both of whom vie to destroy each other.
How sad.
I grew up on Potter’s visions of country life, based on her own experiences living for months of the year in bucolic settings like Dahlguise in Scotland and England’s Lake District.
t’s in the Lake District where she eventually settles and writes the majority of her 19 children’s books, and establishes her own garden at Hilltop Farm, near Sawrey.
It’s also in the Lake District that she soothed her broken heart after the sudden death of her fiancé, Norman Warne, her publisher at Frederick Warne & Co.
“Gardening eases grief,” says Marta McDowell in her wonderful book, “Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life,” that examines her life through a horticultural lens.
At Hilltop, Potter grew vegetables, flowers, fruits and shrubs in a walled garden featured in several of her books, most generously in “The Tale of Tom Kitten.” Entirely self-taught, she received many plants from neighbors, although she complained of their eagerness to pass on huge quantities of saxifrage.
A local nursery, Mawson Brothers, attracted her frequent visits. She embraced the hard, slogging farm work required to keep up the garden and expand her herd of sheep.
Married in 1913 to William Heelis, the lawyer who arranged her acquisition of Hilltop in 1905, Potter found a sympathetic soul. Together, they would increase their landholdings to almost 4,000 acres in the Lake District, a popular tourist destination already in her day.
They eventually moved to Castle Cottage, across the way from Hilltop, where they lived in modest comfort raising cattle, turkeys and chickens.
A forthright, uncomplicated woman, Potter moved in groundbreaking directions with little fuss.
n 1916, shorthanded from the First World War, she advertised in the Times for employment opportunities in farm labor for women. That advertisement was answered by Louise Choyce, who would come to Hill Top for several summers to help in the garden. The two remained lifelong friends.
She became the first woman president of the Herdwick Sheepbreeder’s Association. And her dedication to preserving the beloved countryside found fruition upon her death in 1943 with the transfer of her entire holdings in the Lake District to the National Trust.
Above all, Potter understood little animals and country characters.
Her Mr. McGregor, the farmer bedeviled by pilfering rabbits, was admittedly a type, a composite of gardeners hired to tend the many properties where she spent time as a child and young adult.
The rabbits, mice, and squirrels she drew (so much more naturally than cats, dogs, or horses, which she found difficult) were real-life pets. Her stories take place in gardens and small towns, for the most part, on farms and in the woodlands.
These were familiar and fond settings for Potter, who preferred drawing outside, even if it meant spending a rainy afternoon in the pigsty doing studies for “Little Pig Robinson.”
The adversarial stance between man and beast never reaches the fever pitch of modern entertainment.
In her sweet “Tale of Peter Rabbit,” she sends shivers with the image of a hobnailed boot, inches from Peter’s backside as he leaps through an open window sending a trio of potted geraniums tumbling from the windowsill.
More than that we don’t need.
Moira Sheridan is a Wilmington freelance writer and gardener. She is a graduate of the University of Delaware’s Master Gardener program.