Beatrix Potter was to Edwardian Britain what Taylor Swift is to America today, a prolific talent and fearless merchandiser of her own brand. After her death in 1943, however, Potter gradually ascended to the higher order of literary-folkloric sensation, her stories and biography quizzed intently for meaning. It helped the posthumous spread of her fame that she had written her teenage diary in code, which was only decrypted by collector Leslie Linder in the 1960s, cementing her position in the annals of tortured poets.
Over time, Potterists have pondered the unknowables. Might there be a lesson in economics concealed in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck? And could the storytelling realm of dress-coated rabbits and their misadventures in vegetable patches in The Tale of Peter Rabbit in fact be a dystopia in disguise? Was she commenting subliminally on the morality of property boundaries? Was she a capitalist? Was Mr McGregor a sociopath? The Potter speculation industry, and book sales, are impressively evergreen.
One of the least-asked questions about her life is also perhaps the most unexpected. Namely, why was Beatrix Potter so obsessed with mushrooms? Or, more specifically, fungi and microfungi, of which the twenty-something Potter was an ardent private collector, student and painter. Scores of her fungi watercolours have survived, but they are light-sensitive enough to require most of their time in locked archives, further obscuring this aspect of her past. In turn, this obscures some of the strictures she faced, even as an intellectual woman of status and means in 19th-century Britain.
The recent opening of Perth Museum in Scotland gives her delicate fungi watercolours, and this chapter of her early life, a new public spotlight. Here, among a tableau of Perthshire flora and fauna, Potter’s still lifes are shown in the galleries of the former City Hall, refurbished out of its municipal past into a more welcoming design language of pale wood and natural light. Mark Simmons, senior collections officer at Culture Perth and Kinross, an umbrella charity for the region’s museums and libraries, says of their composition, “She’s being very particular, you can see they are very accurate. The gills and the colour enable identification.” Like her children’s book illustrations, the watercolours also show Potter’s deftness for capturing a lifelike but magical vision, as if the mushrooms are levitating on the forest floor.
But to understand why they belong in the same museum collection as the Scottish king- and queen-anointing Stone of Destiny, we must rewind more than a hundred years to the summers of Potter’s youth, many of which she spent in Highland Perthshire.
And here into the story steps a tall, shy and unmistakable man, missing all the fingers and thumb on his left hand. He has a long, grizzled beard and threadbare clothes, and he is a devoted reader of the natural world. In the mythology of Potter’s life, he is a surprisingly quiet figure, not least because the peak of his connection with “Miss Potter” was entwined with the beginning of her career as an author. Charles McIntosh was important to the tale of Beatrix Potter. And the dazzlingly complicated world of fungi was important to them both.
The hamlet of Inver, near the prosperous town of Dunkeld in Perthshire, comprises a scattering of old weavers’ cottages around the rivers Tay and Braan, so quiet you can almost hear the woodsmoke from the chimneys. McIntosh was born in a cottage just beyond the square. As a child, he was musical and intelligent. But he was in work by his mid-teens at the local sawmill. Here, his fate changed. One day, in a terrible accident, he suffered the loss of his left digits. The injury revealed his resilience — he carried on playing the cello, for example — but there was much else it altered. Were it not for a piece of wood catching in a blade and pulling him towards the saw, he and Potter might never have crossed paths.
After the accident, McIntosh became a postman, his finger stumps wrapped out of sight in black cloth. As the “postie”, he became well known not only to the locals but also to the tourists who stayed for the long summer seasons. He did not, by all accounts, put on airs for anyone. He had the postman’s defence: “Everybody knows me,” his niece recalled him saying, when asked why he didn’t groom himself.
The wage was 12 shillings for a six-day week, walking a 16-mile beat in all weathers. Along the way he became a close observer of the glens and forest floors, scooping up capercaillie pellets with microfungal spores and harvesting fungi from mossy underbrush for examination under his brass telescope at home. (Potter later called him a “first-rate field naturalist”.)
Rupert and Helen Potter had brought their young children, Beatrix and Bertram, from London for a string of summers around Dunkeld in the 1870s and ’80s, dwelling months at a time in a variety of grand sandstone houses. These were spoiling, idyllic times: Beatrix once even brought her pet rabbit Benjamin Bouncer on the train, a Belgian rabbit “very tame and clever”, she wrote, who posed on dewy Scottish lawns for her photographs.
Summer, too, created alleyways in the small Dunkeld economy where connections across social divides could be made. Rupert Potter, a former barrister, took a particular interest in the news that McIntosh was a keen naturalist, and gave him several books on fungal species. In dispatching the books via his Piccadilly bookseller, Rupert sent McIntosh a letter from the Reform Club in Pall Mall and wrote “Mr Potter & his daughter all hope to know that Mr McIntosh will find the books interesting.” (Any reply to this letter is lost.)
At Dalguise House, a favourite Potter summer residence, Beatrix had first caught sight of McIntosh, or “Charlie”, when she was sent to “get the letters” at the bottom of the drive. Recalling the moment much later on, she said she saw him “swinging up the avenue, with long strides and head down . . . on that first occasion I ran away — I don’t know which of us was shyest.”
By the time the Potter family returned to Perthshire in 1892, when she was 26, she was desperate to meet McIntosh, by then 53, properly. She attempted to set up the rendezvous “all summer”, according to her diary. Bouts of pleurisy had forced him to take early retirement from the postal service. But he was more interested in fungi than ever, as was she.
Finally, days before the Potters were due to return to London, a local photographer AF Mackenzie arranged for Beatrix and Charles to meet. She later described her impression, rather loftily, that he resembled a “damp lamppost”. Every difference of their circumstance, including his much greater age and knowledge of the natural world, did not alter the social power she seemed to command, even if benignly. She wanted him to send her Perthshire fungi by post to London for her to sketch, a proposal at which she said “his mouth evidently watered at the chance of securing drawings”. But perhaps, for him, saying no would have been almost impossible.
That summer of 1892, the Potters stayed at Heathpark, not far from Dunkeld, which had been advertised in the classifieds of The Scotsman newspaper as “nicely situated on an eminence; splendid view . . . every convenience”. It had nine bedrooms, a fruit and vegetable garden, a croquet green and a supply of pure spring water. (Beatrix, showing her privileged tastes, wrote in her diary that Heathpark was “more of a villa, well-built, but in disrepair”.)
A photograph taken in winter, towards the end of his life, shows McIntosh resting on a rowing boat on the frozen river Tay, gazing at his small black dog. He still lived in the stone cottage tucked up the slope in Inver. Potter, by that point, was living in the Lake District, tending her flocks of Herdwick sheep and farming her land, backed by the income that came from her bestselling children’s books. When she learnt of McIntosh’s death in 1922, she wrote: “It was a complete surprise to me to learn that ‘Charlie’ was living till last January — so little is left of old times that I thought he had died years ago.”
They had lost touch. But after that 1892 summer, Charles and Beatrix corresponded for five years. He obliged by sending hampers of fungi samples on the mail train from Perthshire to Euston, and in return she sent him drawings. The fungi kept growing, and their mutual interest held firm. There was plenty to talk about.
Do you think this is B versipellis? I got it in the same place last year . . . Do you think you could get me a fungus called Corticium amorphum? It grows on fir bark . . . Is not this Boletus granulatus? . . . Do you know anything about lichens?”
Potter’s letters to McIntosh, now stored by the National Library of Scotland, are full of questions about the world of fungi. But this was not a niche passion shared by two people alone. Fungi had a power to bring people together in 19th-century Britain that seems improbable today. From the mid-1870s, cryptogamic societies themselves began to mushroom, attracting clusters of naturalists and amateur scientists for regular expeditions in the forests and glens. These groups hoped for firsts — to discover new species and microfungi — but the pursuit often fitted into a larger Darwin-inspired awe for the workings of the natural world. Mosses, ferns, trees and rare birds were also of interest. Notebooks and cabinets filled with carefully recorded specimens at home, and the rarest finds were sent to Kew Gardens or other institutes for analysis.
The former postman replied attentively to Potter’s missives, but always to the point. He signed them off with “Yours when sent, Charles McIntosh”, as if the connection, held delicately, could drop at any moment. The correspondence is never personal, but even so it starts very stiffly, with Beatrix’s first letter referring to them both in the politest third person: “Miss Potter has sent off the drawings by parcel post, and hopes Mr McIntosh will think them sufficiently accurate . . . ”
McIntosh, who was also in correspondence with a number of fungi-interested clergymen around Scotland, was an associate member of the (still extant) Perthshire Society of Natural Science, which extended this membership tier to those of lesser means at a discount. “They were moving into a modern era of science and really looking to record all the nature and wildlife of Perthshire,” Simmons tells me. “They were keen to share that knowledge. When they could no longer afford to keep their collections, they gifted them to Perthshire town county council.”
In 1875, the Cryptogamic Society of Scotland organised a Fungus Show at Perth’s City Hall, draping the walls with dried mosses and ferns, and laying out tables of fungi, lichen and plants freshly gathered from local estates. One Professor Dickie from Aberdeen contributed a hat fashioned from the Transylvanian fungus Polyporus fomentarius, according to a notice in The Scotsman.
Eventually, Potter formalised her interest by writing a paper for the Linnean Society in London, where her father had connections. It was read to the men in her absence, as women were not admitted. “That’s the cusp of where she gets to in the scientific world,” says Simmons. “She gets rebuffed.” McIntosh, too, remained at the fringes, limited by society as a working-class man where she had been held back as a woman.
The storerooms of Perth Art Gallery, which also serve the museum, achieve a strange feat. Preservation in the name of science and history has given the minutely interconnected ecosystems of nature an almost eccentric appearance of miscellanea. There are at least three drawers of eider feathers, a rolling vault of taxidermied owls and kingfishers, spirit-pickled starfish, a dozen stag heads, and voles, ferrets, mice and rats stuffed in cabinet trays. A jar of large cupped mushrooms pickled on August 8 1903 by Charles McIntosh hides in a cupboard like an ancient vintage of summer jam, and drawer after drawer of gently pressed ferns and mosses (some of which also were also found by McIntosh), plus his extensive collection of microfungi, are ranged in wood casings. It feels like nothing short of a naturalist’s Lost and Found.
The museum also has a stash of photographs taken by Potter, many of which are portraits of animals, including Benjamin Bouncer. Nose and whiskers held still as if for the camera, he is impossible to see now without thinking of her famous character Peter Rabbit. Similarly, as Simmons and I shuffle past penny-farthings hung on a peg board as if through the hallway of a Victorian student flatshare, he points out McIntosh’s peat spade on the wall, which immediately brings to mind Potter’s gruff Mr McGregor.
The link between real postman and fictional gardener has been aired before, though it is not provable. But because she did her first drawings of Peter Rabbit in letters to her former governess’s son in 1893, the year after her first proper meeting with McIntosh, it is tempting to make the connection that the experiences of those years had galvanised something. “And Mr McGregor was a beardy Highland Scottish bloke . . . ” Simmons says wryly, of the likeness to McIntosh. Although taciturn bearded Scotsmen are not as hard to find as cock-in-the-woods fungi, for example.
Perthshire itself does undeniably seem to have been part of Potter’s enrichment of ideas. Kitty MacDonald, the washerwoman at Dalguise House, was another person who Potter befriended, and who she visited by pony in that same 1892 summer, stopping at the old woman’s house in Inver and mushroom picking around the rivers. MacDonald, like McIntosh, represented the “old times” for Potter, an era which, by the time McIntosh died, would slip further away as post-runners were phased out by the arrival of the motor car.
Regardless of whether MacDonald was the model for Mrs Tiggy-Winkle or McIntosh the model for Mr McGregor, his terse replies to her letters carry a hopeful message. Keep working, and keep looking, he seems to urge.
In one letter, dated January 10 1894, he writes: “Since you have begun to study the physiology of the funguses you seem to see your drawings of them as defective in regard to the gills, but you can make them more perfect as botanical drawings by making separate sketches of the sections.” The connection was still there. His letter ended: “Yours when sent, Charles McIntosh.”
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