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Peter Rabbit is one of the most recognisable fictional characters in the world. The blue jacket, the white whiskers, the tension between the garden and the danger — the story has been translated into 36 languages and sold over 45 million copies since its first commercial publication in 1902. It is also, quite specifically, a Lake District story.
Not all of it. The original Peter Rabbit letter was written in London, in Kensington, and sent to a child in the south of England. But the visual texture of the published book — the walls, the gates, the vegetable garden, the specific quality of the light on the plants — is the texture of the Lake District landscape that Beatrix Potter had been drawing and painting since her first summer holiday there in 1882.
In September 1893, Beatrix Potter wrote a long illustrated letter to Noel Moore — the five-year-old son of her former governess, who was ill in bed. The letter began: I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.
The letter contained 42 pen-and-ink illustrations and told the complete story of Peter Rabbit's adventure in Mr McGregor's garden. She sent it. Noel kept it, as children keep things that matter to them.
Eight years later, in 1901, Potter borrowed the letter back from Noel Moore and used it as the basis for a privately printed edition of 250 copies — the first version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which she sold or gave to friends and contacts. Frederick Warne & Co saw the private edition, were interested, and the commercial version followed in October 1902.
The garden in Peter Rabbit is not an imaginary garden. It is a composite of specific gardens Potter had drawn and observed during her Lake District summers — the vegetable gardens of the farmhouses, the walled enclosures of the larger properties, the cold frames and cucumber beds of the Victorian productive garden.
After she bought Hill Top in 1905, the garden she created there became the primary visual reference for the illustrations in the books that followed. The lettuce in The Tale of Peter Rabbit — the particular way the leaves curl, the spacing of the rows, the soil colour — is the lettuce of a specific Lake District kitchen garden in a specific season.
Mr McGregor's garden, for all its fictional setting, looks like a Lake District garden because Beatrix Potter had been looking at Lake District gardens for twenty years.
Potter kept rabbits throughout her childhood and early adult life — first a rabbit named Benjamin Bouncer, then the rabbit that became Peter, named Peter Piper and acquired in 1893, the same year as the first letter. She drew Peter from life, repeatedly, in the way that she drew everything she was interested in — with the accuracy of a natural historian and the affection of someone who paid genuine attention to the specific animal rather than a generalised rabbit.
The sketches of Peter Piper — some of which survive in Tabitha Twitchit's Bookshop in Hawkshead — show a real rabbit with a specific character: curious, slightly reckless, larger than the common domestic rabbit because Benjamin Bouncer had been a Belgian hare and some of that size had passed into how she drew them. Peter Rabbit is a portrait as much as an invention.
After the first three or four books, set in relatively generic English countryside, the books begin to anchor themselves specifically in the Lake District. The farms, the hedgerows, the dry stone walls, the Esthwaite shoreline, the Hill Top farmyard — these are the settings of the later books.
The rabbit in these books is the same character, but the world he inhabits has become specifically the world of the southern Lake District. The tension between the garden and the danger — between the cultivated and the wild — that structures the original Peter Rabbit story is the tension of the Lakeland farm: the productive enclosed land and the open fell above.
For children who love the Peter Rabbit books, the Lake District is extraordinary. Hill Top is the farm. The garden is the garden from the books. The lane from Near Sawrey to Hawkshead is the lane that the characters walk. The Esthwaite shoreline is the shoreline in the illustrations.
The gap between the picture book and the real place is smaller here than for almost any other children's literature location in Britain. The illustrations are based on close observation of this specific landscape, and most children who know the books well recognise the places with a satisfying immediacy.
On our Beatrix Potter tours we bring the books — the pages, the illustrations — to the locations. The combination of the picture in the book and the view in front of you is consistently one of the finest moments of any tour we run.
Peter Rabbit's world is explored on both our Beatrix Potter Hidden Country and Beatrix Potter Hill Top & Windermere Cruise tours. Maximum seven guests. Children are very welcome.
Part of our complete guide to Beatrix Potter in the Lake District.