Beatrix Potter and America: The Special Relationship You Never Knew About

Here is something we love telling our American guests, because nobody expects it: Beatrix Potter had a soft spot for Americans. Not a polite, commercial soft spot – a genuine, documented, lifelong warmth. She published one of her books in Philadelphia before it ever appeared in Britain; she welcomed a stream of American librarians, publishers and children to her farmhouse door while turning English journalists away; American money helped fund her land conservation; and today some of the finest collections of her work anywhere on earth live in the United States. If you are travelling from the US to the Lake District, you are not just visiting her world – you are continuing a friendship she started a century ago. Here is the story.

It began, oddly, with piracy

The American connection opened with a blunder. When Frederick Warne & Co. published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, the firm failed to register the book's copyright in the United States. The result, from 1904 onwards, was a flood of unauthorised American editions – pirated Peters in every shape and quality, for which Beatrix and Warne received not a cent. She was understandably furious (it sharpened her formidable business instincts for the rest of her career, including her pioneering merchandise licensing), yet the piracy had an unintended consequence: cheap editions spread Peter Rabbit across America at extraordinary speed, creating a vast readership that grew up loving her work. America came to her, uninvited – and, in time, she decided she rather liked it.

The Fairy Caravan: an American original

The clearest proof of her trust came in 1929. Beatrix had a longer, more personal book in her drawer – The Fairy Caravan, a rambling, affectionate story of a travelling animal circus wandering the Lakeland countryside, full of her own farms, fells and even her own pets. She judged it too personal, too local, to hand to the British public and critics. Instead she gave it to Americans: The Fairy Caravan was published first – and for many years only – in the United States, by the Philadelphia firm David McKay Company. She said, in effect, that American readers understood her; her English publisher had to wait decades for a domestic edition. For US fans, the book remains a special badge of ownership: a Beatrix Potter that was theirs first.

The Americans at the farmhouse door

From the 1920s a remarkable procession of American visitors made their way to Near Sawrey, and – against all her reclusive instincts – Mrs. Heelis let them in. The pattern was set by Anne Carroll Moore, the pioneering superintendent of children's work at the New York Public Library, who visited in 1921 and became a lasting correspondent. Through her and others came a network of American librarians, editors and educators – among them Bertha Mahony Miller, founder of the Boston-based Horn Book Magazine, the great American journal of children's literature (still publishing today at hbook.com), for which Beatrix wrote articles late in life when she would write for almost no one else. Young Henry P. Coolidge of Boston, who visited with his mother in 1927, so charmed her that characters and material connected with his visit found their way into The Fairy Caravan.

Why Americans? Beatrix herself was direct about it: she felt American visitors appreciated her books as literature and were genuinely interested in her countryside and her farming, whereas the British press mostly wanted celebrity gossip about a famous recluse. American guests took her seriously as Mrs. Heelis – farmer, conservationist, thinker – and she repaid the compliment with tea, conversation and remarkable candour.

American dollars, Lakeland acres

The friendship turned practical in 1927, when a stretch of Windermere's shoreline at Cockshott Point came under threat of development. Beatrix – by then deep into her land-saving partnership with the National Trust – hit on a very modern fundraising idea: she offered fifty signed, hand-coloured Peter Rabbit drawings for sale at a guinea each, specifically to her American admirers, through her US contacts. The appeal succeeded, the land was saved, and the episode captures the relationship perfectly: American affection for Peter Rabbit converted directly into protected English landscape. When you walk the lakeshore at Bowness today, part of the view is, quite literally, an American gift.

Where to find Beatrix Potter in America today

The transatlantic story continues in US collections of world importance. The Free Library of Philadelphia holds one of the greatest Potter archives anywhere – original drawings and watercolours, letters, rare editions and some of her earliest dated artwork – fittingly in the city that first published The Fairy Caravan. Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library likewise holds superb Potter material. For American families, these collections make a wonderful prologue at home before the pilgrimage itself; and once in England, the trail runs through the V&A in London to Hill Top, Near Sawrey and the fells she saved.

Completing the circle

Nearly every week of the season, we welcome American guests who tell us Beatrix Potter is the reason they crossed the Atlantic – some clutching childhood copies, some fresh from the Philadelphia collections, some simply raised on Peter Rabbit and curious about where it all came from. We like to tell them they are part of the story: heirs to Anne Carroll Moore and Henry Coolidge, continuing a hundred-year friendship that Beatrix herself began. Our small-group Beatrix Potter tours depart from Windermere and Ambleside with a maximum of seven guests – much like a farmhouse tea party, come to think of it – and take you through the villages, farms and landscapes she trusted Americans to love as she did. She was right about your great-grandparents' generation. We suspect she would be right about you, too.

This article is part of our Beatrix Potter guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.