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Lot 145

POTTER (BEATRIX)

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£2,000 - £3,000

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POTTER (BEATRIX)

Autograph testimonial signed ("H.B. Heelis (Mrs. W. Heelis)"): a letter of recommendation for Benjamin Dawson, gardener: "He was nine years in the service of my mother, the late Mrs Rupert Potter at Lindeth How, Storrs, Windermere, and he has left in consequence of the house being closed. He has been accustomed to herbaceous border, some bedding out, green house, peach house, early vegetables, and the use of the motor lawn mower...Mrs. Potter had a high opinion of Ben's usefulness, he is a thoroughly reliable man and strong in health", 2 pages, black-edged mourning paper, integral blank, lightly foxed, 8vo, Castle Cottage, Sawrey, near Ambleside, 25 March 1933

Footnotes

RECOMMENDATION FOR A REAL-LIFE MR McGREGOR: Beatrix's mother, Helen Potter, had died on 20 December 1932. She had moved to the Lake District from London after her husband's death in 1914. In 1919, Beatrix had bought her Lindeth How which was "one of the large secluded grey granite Victorian houses on... Lake Windermere which the Potters had rented occasionally in earlier summers, and which required a sufficient number of servants for Mrs Potter, in her solitude, to feel at home... She lived in seclusion there until the age of ninety-three, with faculties unimpaired, and her way of life, with its punctuality and scrupulous observances, undergoing hardly any modifications' (Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter, 1946, pp. 149-50); see also Beatrix Potter's Letters, edited by Judy Taylor, 1989).

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