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Lot 146

POTTER (BEATRIX)

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

Sold for £5,250 inc. premium

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POTTER (BEATRIX)

Autograph letter signed ("Beatrix Heelis"), to the children's bookseller Bertha Mahony Miller, in America, written in the months before the outbreak of the Second World War: "Personally we are in no danger from aeroplanes amongst the mists and rocky valleys; but as regards good furniture and china and the comforts of home – we would in case of war be swarmed over by refugees from Barrow – the shipyards & docks are only 15 miles away... Still – that's nothing compared with the peril to this country. Unless America backs us up – we are done. It is fatal to give way to bullies... Dictators are ill neighbours; and Mr Chamberlain is no match for them. He did his best but he has been made a fool of"; Beatrix Potter also writes about their shared enthusiasm for antiques ("...the pleasure of collecting is in abeyance here, under the cloud that overshadows life... Young people think of nothing but motor cars and aeroplanes now. And if our 'antiques' go to America – perhaps they will be safer there!..."), and grumbles about the weather ("...Enforced leisure indoors does not reawaken literary inspiration..."), 4 pages, 4to, Castle Cottage, Sawrey, Ambleside, 11 December 1938

Footnotes

BEATRIX POTTER TO BERTHA MAHONY ON THE IMPENDING WAR: Bertha Mahony, doyenne of the American children's literature movement, was founder of the Boston Bookshop for Boys & Girls and of the influential Horn Book Magazine, the first periodical devoted exclusively to children's books and reading. She and Beatrix Potter formed a close epistolary friendship, one which came to public notice when she printed a letter by Beatrix Potter about her work in the Horn Book. In 1927, following an appeal by Peter Rabbit, readers of the magazine helped save a strip of land near Lake Windermere from being sold to builders. This letter also mentions the visit that summer of an equally influential pioneer of children's literature, Anne Carroll Moore, credited with introducing Beatrix Potter to the American public and editor of The Art of Beatrix Potter (1956).

This evocative letter was printed by Jane Crowell Morse, Beatrix Potter's Americans: Selected Letters (1982), pp. 89-90, although with the omission of the end of the final sentence and a possible misordering of pages.

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