Beatrix Potter

I am a huge fan of Beatrix Potter, and for a long time it was a dream of mine to do as she did: write children's stories and draw the illustrations myself. I'm quite sure that won't be happening, but I still admire her work, not only in writing, but also her conservation work for the National Trust. I visited her cottage in the Lake District last summer, and it was great to see so many locations from the stories in real life.

So it is only logical that one of my Postcrossing requests reads "Beatrix Potter" cards. This request was sadly ignored for a long time, only one Peter Rabbit card, send by a Dutch girl, found its way to me:

NL-1036952 received 13 February 2012

In the last month, however, more and more Beatrix Potter cards have been flowing in. Interestingly, two of these came from Taiwan (not really a Potter-country, I'd say):

TW-574861 received 9 June 2012

This card shows one of the great ironies of Beatrix Potter's rabbits: she did not like them so much anymore when she had drawn them thousands of times and more importantly when she was living in the countryside herself and realised how annoying they can be to anyone with a vegetable patch. So she wrote less and less about rabbits, and when she did write about them she drew them very small and in the distance (The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies is a good example of this), without the rich detail that you find in Peter or Benjamin:

TW-580249 received 20 June

I always liked Benjamin Bunny better than Peter Rabbit. I have no idea why.
He is not my favourite Potter character however, that is Tom Kitten, of whom I've not received a card yet. He features in his own story, but also in The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding, which equally scared and delighted me as a child, as all good stories do.
Finally, yesterday, the best Beatrix Potter card of all arrived, which shows how everything started:

GB-339849 received 4 July 2012

Yes, this is the letter with which it all started. Well, a copy, made into a postcard, of course. Not a lot of detail, not even any clothes, but still, it's great that this piece of paper has been saved, so that many years from now new Beatrix Potter fans can still see how it all began.