Still a Sucker for Peter Rabbit

It was the kind of drizzly Sunday afternoon that makes you want to stay home all day. Ed and I tried that on for size for the whole morning and some of the afternoon, but soon cabin fever drove us out and to the Morgan Library. Regular readers will recall that the Morgan is one of my favorite buildings in the world. It houses the jaw-dropping manuscript collection of J.P. Morgan and rotates its exhibits frequently. I first went to see a collection of handwritten manuscripts by Charles Dickens. This time, I giddily viewed Beatrix Potter's famous picture letters.

A letter about Peter. The rabbits at the bottom are throwing snowballs.

I listened to, and eventually read, Potter's stories again and again growing up, but I'd never thought much about their author. Ms. Potter was a bit eccentric, as are most people I like. She lived during the Victorian era, and despite the codes of propriety imposed on her by this period of history, kept a series of outlandish pets. Over the years, she played host to cats, dogs, newts, hedgehogs, bats, frogs, various birds, and, of course, mice and rabbits. The rabbits were her favorites. She wrote frequent letters to Noel, the son of her former governess, to entertain him, as he was sickly and often confined to bed. The story of Peter Rabbit came, almost word for word, from one of these letters. Potter drew illustrations around the text of the letter using her own pet rabbit, Peter, as a model. Later, in preparation for publishing, she added some content to the original story but otherwise changed little. Letters to children were the genesis of most of her stories; she believed that writing with a single child in mind was what made her work so fitting for young readers. I was delighted to read the words to the stories I knew so well in Potter's own handwriting, and to see beloved characters like Benjamin Bunny (Potter's pet was named Benjamin Bouncer), Jemima Puddleduck, Jeremy Fisher, Squirrel Nutkin (Potter's real Nutkin was so badly behaved that she took him right back to the pet store), Apply Dapply, and others. It's hard to know how long it took her to come up with the stories for these letters; it seems that she just dashed them off. Her drawings and paintings, however, were the product of decades of practice. Potter was passionate about the natural world, and grew up sketching the animals and plants around her. She had particular techniques for capturing sunlight falling on leaves or the delicate fur at the tips of rabbits' ears that makes her work stand out. Her talent for drawing animals that are at once personified and incredibly realistic is still just about unparalleled, in your humble blogger's opinion.

The inspiration for Apply Dapply

Mostly, it wasn't too hard to read Potter's handwriting. We had lots of trouble with other writers, though. In the Potter exhibit, several picture letters from other authors, like William Makepeace Thackery, were on display for comparison, and it was nearly impossible to make out their scrawls. I thought I'd seen it all as an English teacher, but at least my kids mostly printed instead of writing in cursive... Whew. It's a miracle anyone managed to communicate, what with overly sloping, sometimes tiny letters confounded further by splats and blobs from dipped pens.

Downstairs, Ed became glued to a letter written by George Washington on Christmas Day asking Congress for more supplies for his soldiers. I was similarly enchanted by an award-winning story by a sixth-grade Truman Capote. It was written in pencil on lined paper and was full of the kind of flair that characterizes his adult writing. Thoreau's diary was also opened for inspection. Thankfully, some thoughtful curator had arranged for a portion of it to be typed out and displayed in the case, too, but it was nearly impossible to read his messy scrawl, even when I knew what words I was looking for. We saw a letter from Napoleon to his new bride Josephine, handwritten sheet music by Mahler and Schubert, and a book of coats of arms and family histories from perhaps the 1400's (the uncertainty is mine, not the Morgan's) that was neater than Thoreau's diary but just as unreadable. Dickens's handwritten Christmas Carol manuscript was out again, and so were some early printings of Christmas songbooks.

I will be sorry to see Potter's letters go back into the archives, but I'll be waiting for their replacement with baited breath.