Bunnies don't get much more famous than Peter Rabbit. The escapades of this bob-tailed carrot rustler in Mr McGregor's garden have been a familiar feature of childhood for a century. Beatrix Potter's The Tale Of Peter Rabbit was first published in 1902, and was quickly followed by tales of kittens, piglets, puddle-ducks, more bunnies and assorted mice.
Throughout her life, Potter kept an eclectic selection of pets herself, among them frogs, lizards, pigs and hedgehogs, along with the more conventional cats and dogs and, of course, rabbits. Indeed, most of her fictional characters were based on real animals - Peter Piper and Benjamin Bouncer, for example, were immortalised as Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny. Pig-Wig (friend of Pigling Bland) was modelled on and named after Potter's devoted Berkshire sow. Mrs Tiggywinkle was also a pet - but the real hedgehog probably didn't wear a bonnet or do washing.
Potter was born in 1866 and grew up in London. Her parents were affluent, but stiff with Victorian probity. The young Beatrix had ample creature comforts and, no doubt, perfectly starched pinafores. What she didn't have was friends. Her main childhood companion was her younger brother, Bertram, and the pair spent much of their time in the schoolroom, where they kept a menagerie of animals and whiled away the hours sketching their pets.
The Potter family spent the summer on holiday in the countryside - compared with the oppressive restrictions of her London life, a release for Beatrix. And she would take her pets with her, travelling by train with Spot the spaniel and various other animals stuffed into boxes and hutches. Sketchpad always close at hand, the young Potter busied herself with drawings of flora and fauna. And her lifestyle remained more or less the same even after she'd reached adulthood - she continued to draw, and had a particular talent for accurate botanical illustrations, as well as for those images of cute animals in clothes with which we are so familiar.
Potter was on holiday in Scotland in 1893, accompanied by Peter Piper, when she settled down to write a letter to the five-year-old son of her former governess who had been ill and was in need of cheering up: "My dear Noel, 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... " And so began The Tale Of Peter Rabbit.
Generations of sticky fingers have eagerly pawed the pages of Peter Rabbit tales ever since, and it's easy to see why. Sentimental? Anthropomorphic? Rural life romanticised? Guilty on all counts. But Potter's exquisite watercolours and playful plots also brim with joy and humour.
And far from being a slightly dotty, posh Victorian lady who wandered around the Lake District talking to rabbits, Potter had considerable business savvy. In 1903, she patented a Peter Rabbit doll, making the bunny the world's oldest licensed character. She was also full of ideas for what she called "side-shows" - bunny board games, bunny slippers and bunny tea sets - and this marketing overdrive continues unabated to this day.
You'd think that creating Peter Rabbit, Tom Kitten, Samuel Whiskers, et al, would be enough of an achievement for one lifetime, but Potter had her fingers in many other pies, too. She was a sheep breeder, farmer, conservationist and defender of the countryside. When she died in 1943, she left to the National Trust a gift of 4,000 acres of farmland, along with her beloved Lake District home, Hill Top. In doing so, she ensured a home for generations of rabbits to come.
