Nature writing, it seems, is more popular than ever. Books about getting back to the natural world, from which technology and modern urban living have estranged us, have dominated the non-fiction bestseller charts for the last couple of years, elevating writers such as Robert Macfarlane and Cheryl Strayed to near-celebrity status. Criticisms of the authenticity and motivation behind writing about nature has long been a part of its reception: John Clare accused Keats of an urban sentimentality towards the countryside, which caused him to portray “nature as she … appeared in his fancys & not as he would have described her if he had witnessed the things he describes”. The recent profusion and success of ‘new nature writing’ has similarly caused some to question its effectiveness in inspiring positive social and political change in attitudes towards the environment, fearing instead that it has the potential to be merely a form of “bourgeois escapism”.
Whatever their reception, contemporary nature writers inherit a formidable literary tradition which includes Gilbert White, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and the Romantic poets, whose audacious project was to write not of man’s relationship to man, but man’s relationship to the ground on which he stood. Not all nature writing is conservationist writing, of course. However, a more thoughtful relationship with the natural world, such as that which might be inspired by literature, does tend to lead to a more thoughtful attitude towards how human activity may negatively impact the non-human world. The writers in this list are those whose conservationist sentiments are not only evident in the pages of their books but often went beyond them, and who have helped to shape the face of modern environmentalism.
Beatrix Potter, Deluxe Editions (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1902) – SOLD
Few writers can be credited with having more directly shaped a landscape than Beatrix Potter. Not only do her “little books” continue to inspire generations of children to curiosity about nature through her anthropomorphic animal characters, but Potter dedicated the fortune she made from their success to conserving the little clutch of Cumbrian hills and valleys she came to call home.
Potter was a woman of many interests: natural history, mycology, botany, archaeology, fossils and farming all fascinated her. Since her childhood holidays in the Lake District and Scotland she recorded what found in watercolours and sketches. Her studies of mushrooms eventually numbered over 250, and in 1897 she presented a paper entitled ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae‘ to the Linnean Society. (There is a common misconception that this paper was rejected by the society. In fact, it was read on her behalf in April of that year, Potter being prohibited from attending the meeting in person because she was a woman).
Beatrix Potter by Charles G.Y. King (1854-1937) Hill Top Farm, Near Sawrey, Cumbria by Marion Dutcher
Hirneola Auricula-Judae by Beatrix Potter, 1898. Courtesy of the Armitt Trust, The Armitt Museum and Library, Ambleside.
Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, the first secretary and founding member of the National Trust, was Potter’s long-time friend and mentor. She shared his views on the conservation of landscapes and the protection of traditional Lakeland crafts and farming methods. She and her husband, William Heelis, became partners with the Trust in buying up farmland, forest and fell to safeguard them from developers. Potter was a shrewd business woman, often using her contacts and influence to acquire land before its sale was made public, which earned her a certain amount of criticism. Her legacy, however, has been instrumental in the formation of the modern-day Lake District National Park. The 4,000 acres of land in her possession on her death left to the National Trust, along with several farms, cottages and all her sheep and cattle.
Gene Stratton-Porter, photographed in the boots and breeches that so scandalised her neighbours
Gene Stratton Porter, Moths of the Limberlost (Garden City, New York Doubleday, Page & Company, 1916) – SOLD
Another writer of fiction firmly linked to the landscape she helped to protect, Stratton-Porter is best known for her novel A Girl of the Limberlost. Like Potter, Stratton-Porter was also a keen naturalist, specialising in the birds and moths of Limberlost Swamp which she called home for several years. She also became an early wildlife photographer, to better document the ecosystems of the swamp.
The popularity of Stratton-Porter’s novels brought financial success and notoriety and, like Potter, she used her fortune and position to emphasize her conservationist views, contributing articles and photography to wildlife magazines and publishing numerous books on natural history. She was destined, however, to witness the gradual ecological destruction of her beloved swamp by encroaching industry and agriculture, and the eventual draining of the swampland in 1912. Saddened by the destruction of the swamp’s natural habitats, Stratton-Porter and her family moved away. However, she journeyed the surrounding Indiana swamps extensively, collecting samples of wildflowers to preserve before they were destroyed by development, and it is her work that has ensured the endurance of many of these wildflower types. She also lent her support to the group which opposed the draining of the Mississippi Bottom lands for use a farm land, writing to President Coolidge to express the futility of the project from a scientific point of view.
Images from Moths of the Limberlost
Stratton-Porter did not live to see the restoration of the Limberlost Swamp which allowed water back onto the land and replanted many native trees and shrubs in 1997.
Rachel Carson, official photo as FWS employee. c. 1940.
Rachel Carson is perhaps one of the most influential figures in modern-day environmentalism. Silent Spring, her treatise of the harmful results of the use of synthetic pesticides, spurred a revolution in American policy on their use and led to a nationwide ban of DDTs and ultimately to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Carson first became aware on the negative impact humans could have on plant and animal life through her work as a marine biologist. Her books on the sea, The Sea Around Us (1951) and The Edge of the Sea (1955) we internationally successful, raising awareness about the environmental challenges which threated marine habitats. By the time she came to write Silent Spring, most of the facts about the impact of chemical pesticides we well-known amongst scientific communities, but Carson’s project was to bring these facts to the attention of the general public. The book didn’t only set out the case against the use of certain chemicals, however, but questioned the fundamental human assumption of mastery over nature, sparking a wave of grassroots environmentalism.
Rachel Carson conducts Marine Biology Research with Bob Hines — in the Atlantic (1952). By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
This copy bears a particularly interesting association, being inscribed to Dr. A D Pickett, a pioneer of alternatives to chemical pesticides who is mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.
Snyder’s career has been long and varied; he was connected with the Beat poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, and was influenced by his practice of Zen Buddhism and study of Native American tribes. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Snyder was horrified by the mass deforestation he witnessed. Believing that language and culture shape the way humans relate to the natural world, he has written extensively on the environment and has been called the ‘poet laureate of Deep Ecology’. Deep Ecology differentiates itself from what it identifies as ‘shallow ecology’ – viewing nature in the context of its utility to human life – by investing the natural world with intrinsic value. In his poetry, Snyder has explored the natural world extensively, experimenting with new ways of employing language in order to place nature, not man, at the centre of his work. The critic Richard Wallace wrote that Snyder’s poems gave voice “to the ferocious energy of nonhuman beings”. Snyder’s 1990 collection of essays The Practice of the Wild is considered one of the most influential environmental works of the last 50 years.
Of himself, Snyder wrote:
As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.
Regarding Wave, Snyder’s 1970 poetry collection, was heralded as a new achievement in his project to explore the interconnectedness of all things, both human and non-human. It brings together religion, ecological thought and Snyder’s personal relationships, putting the “precarious balance among forces and species” at the thematic centre of the collection.
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Vittorio Matteo Corcos, Dreams, 1896. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna
In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Lord Henry refutes Dorian’s claim that the infamous ‘yellow book’ he read in his youth was responsible for the onset of his moral dissolution, on the grounds that books can be inherently neither moral not immoral. ‘The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame’ says Henry.
This year’s Banned Books Week has brought the focus to the censorship of diverse reading materials, particularly of recent publications intended for children or young adults. The attempt to suppress books deemed to be inappropriate for one reason or another is, of course, by no means a recent phenomenon.
To mark Banned Books Week, we’ve delved into the shady (and sometimes not so shady) corners of our collection and dusted off some of history’s controversial printed works. While graphic content remains the favourite and most prevalent reasons for some books being classified as thoroughly objectionable, other, more obscure justifications have sometimes been cited for the suppression of a title.
Possibly some of the most innocent-seeming and beloved works of children’s fiction, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny were banned in London schools in 1985 by the Inner London Education Authority for their portrayal of exclusively ‘middle-class rabbits’.
George Orwell. Animal Farm. A Fairy Story. 1995. Illustration by Ralph Steadman, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of Animal Farm
Dwelling for a moment longer on the theme of anthropomorphised animals, these three novels were all, at some point, deemed exceptionable for their treatment of non-human characters. In 1932, the governor of Hunan Province in China stated that it was ‘disastrous to put animals and human beings on the same level’ in justification for banning Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Similarly, a group of parents at a school in Kansas objected to Charlotte’s Web on the ground that ‘humans are the highest level of God’s creation and are the only creatures that can communicate vocally. Showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God’. Less surprising, perhaps, are the numerous objections to Orwell’s Animal Farm, a thinly veiled allegory for the formation of the Soviet Union, in which his animal characters can be read as analogues for prominent political figures of the day. Fears that the book would harm relations between the UK and the USSR led to Orwell’s initial inability to find a publisher for it. Upon publication in 1945 it was immediately banned in the USSR, China and Cuba for its criticism of Communism. It was also banned more recently in the United Arab Emirates; the depiction of a talking pig was deemed offensive.
The Canturbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Illustration of The Knight’s Tale by Edward Burne-Jones from the Kelmscott Chaucer, 1896.
Everyone’s favourite category, books banned for naughtiness outnumber all others, and include some cherished favourites and important literary works: the usual suspects include Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Madame Bovary and Ulysses.
Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’, though certainly not lacking in naughtiness, is usually considered more important as a landmark of Middle English literature. However, its significance in the literary canon didn’t prevent it from being all but banned under the Comstock Law in the US in 1873, which prohibited the sending of offensive material by mail or over state lines.
Radclyffe Hall. The Well of Loneliness. 1928
Less well known currently, perhaps, is Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness, one of the first British novels to deal openly with the subject of lesbianism. While it initially received cautiously positive reviews, The Sunday Express soon began a campaign calling for the novel’s suppression, the paper’s editor stating that he ‘ would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’ The controversy prompted obscenity trials in both the UK and the US, and it was withdrawn from circulation in the UK until its republication in 1949.
John Gould’s illustration of Darwin’s Rhea, 1841 Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species. 1860 (Second edition)
The book which sets out Darwin’s theory of theory of evolution by natural selection was judged to have contravened Christian beliefs and created a storm of controversy in Victorian England. It was banned from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge – Darwin’s own college – immediately after its publication. The state of Tennessee banned the book from 1925 to 1967, and it was banned in Yugoslavia in 1935 and Greece in 1937.
The controversy surrounding the Harry Potter series persisted throughout the years of its publication and beyond. Despite their immense popularity, critical and commercial acclaim, and having been credited with inspiring a generation of readers, books in the Harry Potter series have appeared high on the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books since The Philosopher’s Stone appeared in 1997, and are now the most challenged books of the 21st century. Objections largely centre on the novels’ portrayal of magic, citing a promotion of occultism, paganism, Satanism and witchcraft as legitimate reasons for their suppression. Others have cited concerns over violent and dangerous incidents in the plots as potentially distressing to children.
Items featured in this blog are drawn from a remarkably complete Beatrix Potter collection displayed by Peter Harrington in 2016. You can still view the catalogue online here, as well as our Beatrix Potter items currently in stock here.
Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) grew up in Bolton Gardens, Kensington, just round the corner from our Fulham Road shop, where she and her brother Bertram built quite a menagerie in the schoolroom at the top of the house, occasionally smuggling in animals without their parents’ knowledge. In 1890, Beatrix had her first drawings published, in a piece of holiday ephemera titled A Happy Pair. It features six illustrations of her pet rabbit Benjamin (the forerunner to Peter). He was a “handsome tame Belgian rabbit”, very fond of hot buttered toast, who would run into the drawing room when he heard the tea-bell:
Also on display we have a superb original manuscript featuring nine ink and watercolour drawings by Beatrix, drawn around 1896. Titled La Chanson de la mariée, it’s an amusing set of cartoons of a wedding, accompanied by a poem in French, which Beatrix has written out by hand. She copied these drawings from work by Henri Gerbault, a French illustrator and watercolourist, to improve her figure drawing, which she always acknowledged was a weak point – she once said “they are a terrible bother to me when I have perforce to bring them into the pictures for my own little stories”.
Around the same time she drew these figures, Beatrix was also pursuing a very different type of drawing. She was an amateur mycologist and scientific artist, and in 1896 began to work on a scientific paper on spore germination. We have a fascinating copy of Peter Rabbit inscribed to a J. Squire who helped her acquire a specimen as part of her research on the fungal properties of dry rot. He delivered the specimen to Bolton Gardens in a brown paper bag, where she hid it under a stone in the garden, for fear of her parents’ disapproval (“How I should catch it, my parents are not devoted to the cause of science”, she wrote in her journal). Quite understandable – given its destructive properties! Beatrix’s paper “On the germination of the spores of Agaricineae” was presented on her behalf on 1 April 1897 to the Linnean Society, as women were prohibited from speaking or attending; she noted that it was “well received” but required amendments, and she withdrew the paper. It was never published, and no copy exists today.
Mycological illustration courtesy of the Armitt Trust
Beatrix’s life in Kensington was rather lonely and sheltered, with close friendships discouraged by her parents. She had only her brother Bertram for companionship until he was sent to boarding school at the age of 11. Her happiest time in Bolton Gardens was perhaps with Annie Moore, who was hired when Beatrix was 17 years old as her German tutor and companion. After Annie’s marriage, the two stayed closely in touch, and Beatrix often wrote illustrated letters to Annie’s children. Of course, the most famous of these was the first incarnation of Peter Rabbit, sent to the eldest, five-year-old Noel, when he was sick with scarlet fever, on 4 September 1893. A few years later, in 1900, Beatrix thought it might make a small book, and borrowed it back to expand the story into a book. A percipient businesswoman, she knew exactly how she wanted to publish the story: it had to be affordable for “little rabbits” and in a small format – just the right size and weight for small hands. Unable to find a publisher who would accept her proposed format, she published Peter Rabbit herself in a private edition.
The privately-printed edition was ready on 16 December 1901 in an edition of 250 copies. Within two weeks it proved so popular that she commissioned a second impression. Meanwhile, Warne rethought their earlier rejection, and undertook the “Bunny book” project, as they termed it. It proved so popular that the Warne edition of 8,000 copies sold prior to publication; the collaboration between Potter and Warne would last almost the rest of her life.
Perhaps surprisingly, though, Peter Rabbit was not Beatrix’s favourite book. That honour goes to her second book, The Tailor of Gloucester. Again, it started life as a story for one of the Moore children, and was a Christmas present for Freda Moore in 1901. Just as she had done with Peter Rabbit, Beatrix first had the book privately printed (Warne had not yet published Peter Rabbit and she did not think they would want a second so soon). It is unique in the series with its period setting (Potter drew the costumes from the collection at the V&A museum), and was based on a true story that Potter had heard while staying in Gloucestershire: an elaborate waistcoat had been commissioned for a grand mayoral occasion, but the tailor lacked the time to complete it and needed another packet of cherry-coloured silk – though more prosaically, it was his two assistants who had secretly finished the work.
Even less well-known is a sequel of sorts to the Tailor of Gloucester – Wag-by-Wall, about a lonely old woman. Beatrix thought the two would make a pair, but the second book had a somewhat chequered road to publication: it was first written in 1909 under the title The Little Black Kettle, but the manuscript was left unfinished. Potter picked up the story in 1929, before again dropping it, and finally finished it in 1940 for The Horn Book Magazine. The editor liked it so much that she decided to hold it back for the 20th anniversary edition, where it was finally published in May 1944. Sadly, Beatrix died in December 1943, aged 77, and never saw the story in print.
Another story which took a while to see publication was The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. The idea originated with a picture letter to Eric Moore on 5 September 1893, which began: “My dear Eric, Once upon a time there was a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and he lived in a little house on the bank of a river…”. These illustrations were sold to the publisher Nister in 1894, and appeared in 1896 in two collections by Nister – Comical Customers and the Nister Annual.
Beatrix was disappointed that Nister refused to publish them as a small booklet, telling her that “we certainly cannot make a booklet of it as people do not want frogs now”. Potter bought back the copyright and blocks for the illustrations shortly after publication of the Tale of Peter Rabbit, and resumed work on the story after the death of her fiancé, Norman Warne. Shortly after Norman’s funeral, she left London to sketch in North Wales and the Lake District, and, needing a project to work on, was determined to see Jeremy Fisher finally published. Nine years after she had conceived the idea, her frog book was finally agreed for publication.
The year that Norman died marked a huge shift in Beatrix’s life. She bought Hill Top, a working farm in Near Sawrey, in the Lake District, with royalties from her books and a legacy from an aunt. From then on, her books also began to reflect more of her life there. We have a fascinating letter written around 1909, accompanying a copy of Ginger and Pickles, written by Beatrix to the previous owner of another farm she’d just bought. Ginger and Pickles was based on the village shop in Sawrey, owned by John Taylor. In the letter, she explains the book’s connection to him: “You will see it is dedicated to old John Taylor, he took such an interest in it, when I was sketching in ‘the shop’, but he just died after the type was set up and before he could have a finished copy … Poor old John was put in the book at his own request, the dormouse in bed is thought to be rather like him.”
With her royalties from the series, Potter amassed over 4,000 acres of land in the Lake District which she bequeathed to the National Trust on her death, together with strict instructions on conservation and land management, without which the Lake District would be a very different place today.
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