Beatrix Potter’s Perthshire
Beatrix Potter needs no introduction – her art and life have been extensively examined in books and film. Potter spent time in Perthshire with her family in 1892, where she met and befriended naturalist Charles McIntosh; The Tale of Peter Rabbit was written in Dunkeld the next year.
The following diary entries appear in The Country Diaries, edited by Alan Taylor.
2 October 1892
Wet, very weet.
6 October 1892
What an aggravating old person Mr Lowe the post master is! You go down in a hurry with two or three small affairs, say a postal order and three stamps. He says in a forbidding manner ‘let us do one thing first: haveyougotapenny’? He works out the change on his fingers, and after all has to carry on the halfpence to the next transaction, which you work out for him as he has collapsed into a state of imbecility. ‘I think that’s right’ says he, regarding you sideways with evident suspicion.
He is a fat, hunched old fellow, with little piggy eyes, a thick voice and wears a smoking-cap with a yellow tassel, and he has immense hands with which he slowly fumbles about for the stamps, which he keeps amongst the stationery in empty writing-paper boxes. He puts on wrong postage ‘shall we say tuppence? (!)’ and will sauce anybody who is unprovided with small change; he wants reporting.
12 October 1892
I have an unconquerable aversion to listening to accounts in the first person of supposed supernatural visitations.
16 October 1892
Up the road some flakes of snow, much crackling of withered leaves, no deer. Gathering moss on the way down did hear a noise which on a lawful day I should have attributed to the Gas Works, but being the Sabbath concluded it must be the Red King or a Rabbit snoring.
18 October 1892
I remember hearing old Dr Irving tell, when I was a child, that he had introduced safety pins to the civilised world. He saw a gypsy wife with her plaid fastened with an odd twist of wire, and thinking it ingenious, took it as a pattern to the Museum in Dunkeld. I remember his lamenting that he had not taken out a patent. – The same mistake that uncle Booth made with the yellow train-grease, both articles are in universal demand now.
The demand for the latter sprang into being with railways; but I should have thought unthinking, that safety pins dated from primeval times before the invention of dressmaking, when people of both sexes wore shawls and sheets. I believe, on reflection, the Romans are represented to have fastened their Togas with a kind of double brooch, in appearance rather like a chain sleeve-link. Brooches and buckles are Celtic and Greek. I suppose it was the application of the principle to wire which was a new departure. How old is wire? The spirit of enquiry leads up a lane which hath no ending.
23 October 1892
A perfect hurricane and driving showers of snow. Immediately after breakfast got over the wall to survey the domain of the McInroy’s [Mr McInroy of Lude, a neighbour], who yesterday departed back to Lude.
A nasty dirty place, no wonder the young man was always in the road. The five young ladies and the ‘dearling clinker’ and screeching voices may well have been audibly irritable if they were accustomed to a fine place and nineteen miles of deer forest.
It is the melancholy fact that the distinguished Mrs McInroy came from Stockport, and Mr McInroy, in spite of his kilt, is but a mushroom laird (his father bought it from the Robertsons forty years ago, which is but a grain in the hour-glass in a land where every other chieftain is descended from Fergus McFungus, though, for the matter of that, the kilt is rather a sign of an Englishman, or at all events town.)
31 October 1892
Standing on the Bridge, Dunkeld looked very deserted, nothing but stray dogs. Mr McKenzie, the Minister, came up the middle of the road, swaying his arms about and peering through his spectacles. I don’t think he recognised me till I had shaken hands. His viciousness did not appear, he has a particularly kind, fatherly manner, and is an indefatigable parish minister. He gets into ill-favour by taking sides with rather unchristian vehemence in the thousand-and-one squabbles of his large parish, and by the unpardonable sin of being unable to pay his debts.
October 10th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I fancy I shall start to apply myself to becoming a diarist. How simple and absorbing are these daily observations. And of a time.
November 23rd, 2009 at 8:06 am
[...] Rev Gilbert White’s journal of life at his famous home in Selborne, to Beatrix Potter’s holiday diaries from Perthshire. Elsewhere, the thoughts of Dorothy Wordsworth and John Fowles rub shoulders with [...]