Peter Rabbit's Mother

THE JOURNAL OF BEATRIX POTTER transcribed from her code writing by Leslie Under. 448 pages. Frederick Warne. $12.95.

Once upon a time there was a shy little girl and her name was Beatrix. She lived with her Papa and her Mama and her brother Bertram in a grand house at No. 2 Bolton Gardens, Kensington, London, England. Beatrix was not permitted to have any friends, but she did have a dog, a doll, a pet rabbit, a governess, and her own dear little nursery room with strong shiny bars over the windows.

She also had a small but genuine genius, which she poured into some of the best known children's books ever published. In The Tale of Peter Rabbit, one of the simplest, shortest and fastest-moving tales ever written, her pastel-tinted miscreant wiggled under a forbidden fence for a lawless day in Mr. McGregor's garden and wriggled forever into the lives of millions. That story was followed by a score of other children's books, tales of Squirrel Nut-kin, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mrs. Tittle-mouse, Mr. Jeremy Fisher, and--generally recognized by Potter connoisseurs as her masterpiece--The Tailor of Gloucester.

No one knows how many millions of Potter books have circled the world, but there are Peter Rabbits in many languages from Latin to Welsh, and the book still sells 40,000 copies annually in the U.S. Now, to mark the centenary of the author's birth, her English publishers have issued the massive private Journal that Beatrix kept from 1881, when she was 15, until 1897.

Jehovah in Granite. Unexpectedly unearthed in 1952, nine years after her death, the manuscript was written in a secret cipher that bright little Beatrix devised herself. The cipher took six years to crack, but Potterites fearful of unsettling revelations in the Journal can relax. What it contains is an always dutiful, occasionally delightful collection of anecdote, travelogue, history and plain gossip. What it shows, in text and illustration, is how Beatrix, bored and desperate in a self-imposed isolation, beat at the bars of her confinement with nothing more than a quill pen and a palette of paints.

Barrister-Papa Potter, who looked like a Jehovah chiseled in granite, had inherited so much money that he never bothered to practice law, spent his days at his club. Mama Potter, who looked like Queen Victoria, discouraged overnight visitors by keeping her spare rooms so dusty that they were uninhabitable. Beatrix' chief diversion lay in frequent trips to picture galleries, of which she candidly detailed her impressions: Sir Joshua Reynolds was "niminy-piminy," while "Raphael had never looked at a horse." She was occasionally malicious: "Miss Ellen Terry's complexion is made of such an expensive enamel that she can only afford to wash her face once a fortnight." Prime Minister William Gladstone was "a vain old bird ... I never saw a person so creased . . . that old goose." The Journal breaks off, with Beatrix earnestly pursuing the classification and painting of fungi, three years before the publication of Peter Rabbit. Looking back in later years, she remembered him unsentimentally: "At one time I almost loathed Peter Rabbit, I was so sick of him." She is probably the only one who ever was.

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