The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Novel places to book a holiday
Two of English literature’s great female figures are commemorated with anniversaries this year. Nicholas McAvaney learns more about Beatrix Potter and Charlotte Bronte
Wandering around the Lake District’s World of Beatrix Potter Attraction, I quickly forget I’d ever grown up.
Children and parents are lost in Potter’s delightful imaginary world, so perfectly illustrated in her books.
I traipse through a reconstruction of the Peter Rabbit garden with glee, spying Jemima Puddle-Duck and a bronze statue of three children unveiled by Renee Zellweger in 2006.
The Windermere attraction is gearing up to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Potter’s birth with a series of events.
Continuing my journey across Windermere, I stop at the Beatrix Potter Gallery in Hawkshead, where originals of her intricate watercolour illustrations are on display.
I take time to examine her careful brush strokes and spy some mistakes and corrections. The artwork is wonderfully preserved, especially given much of it was stored in damp basements and next to water heaters.
A display of Benjamin Bunny’s pelt strikes me as somewhat morbid, although it serves as an insight into Potter’s brilliant scientific study of animals, which informed her drawings.
The inspiration for many of her stories was her beloved home Hill Top, in nearby Sawrey. Here I learn some intriguing facts about the author, who I had always presumed was a kind old lady, fond of children and animals.
She was in fact a shrewd businesswoman and her books were merely a revenue stream to acquire and maintain a sizeable real estate portfolio in the Lake District. She eventually bequeathed a number of the properties to the National Trust in her will.
Copies of Potter’s stories have been carefully placed around the house, bookmarked at pages where a room or items in it feature. Staff members even explain how The Tale of Samuel Whiskers was the result of Potter’s 23-month battle to eradicate rats from the building.
Returning to the grown-up world, my journey ends at the adjacent Tower Bank Arms, a pub owned by the National Trust but managed independently. The manager gives me a lengthy spiel about the wide range of ales available. I go for a tipple of the Loweswater Gold, brewed just down the road, before considering
A display of Benjamin Bunny’s pelt strikes me as somewhat morbid, although it serves as an insight into Potter’s brilliant scientific study of animals
my lunch options. Thankfully and perhaps not without forethought, rabbit is not on the menu.
Meanwhile in Haworth, Yorkshire, while strolling along its main street, I stop every few metres for a photograph of the quaint stone shop fronts and postcard-worthy views over the Yorkshire moors.
I find it hard to imagine the village was once a crowded industrial town and a cesspool of death and disease during the early 19th Century, when English literature’s great Bronte sisters lived here.
The girls’ father, Patrick, played a pivotal role in helping clean up the village’s water supply, the main cause of high infant mortality rates, disease and other deaths but his own children failed to benefit, as they passed away before he was buried in 1861.
His valiant efforts are documented at the Bronte Parsonage, the Bronte’s former family home, now a museum. I visit to find out more about the tragedy-tinged lives of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell.
The Parsonage illustrates a picture of three women who resisted social convention and expectation to realise their unbridled ambitions.
It is 200 years since Charlotte was born and a special exhibition curated by author Tracy Chevalier aims to further explore that contrast between her constrained life and furious determination.
Some of Charlotte’s books and toys are on display, along with examples of her writing and coded letters which scholars believe were attempts by the sisters to disguise their – often outrageous for the times – work.
Charlotte’s life was especially sad towards the end as she outlived each of her siblings, before dying on March 31, 1855 only nine months after marrying curate Arthur Nicholls.
She was pregnant at the time, further adding to the tragedy, although the Victorian pre-nup on display suggests her marriage may not have been the happiest. Letters she had sent to Constantin Heger, a school master she met in Belgium, reveal to me a heartbreaking insight into her unrequited love for the man, which no doubt fuelled her writing.