Rupert married a wealthy heiress, Helen Leech, whose family were also cotton mill owners. Potter’s grandfather, Edmund Potter, was a Manchester cotton mill owner whose wealth was inherited by Beatrix’s father, Rupert, a lawyer and photographer. It is therefore likely that her early contact with the Brer Rabbit tales (in comparison with the rest of the British public) was a result of her family roots in the cotton industry,” Zobel Marshall writes. “These stories had not been published in the UK when Beatrix Potter was a child. Linda Lear’s 2008 biography of Potter, A Life in Nature, notes that while her “first audience was British”, her work was strongly influenced by Harris – “whose Brer Rabbit stories she had loved as a child”.Ĭopies of Harris’s Brer Rabbit folktale collections, bearing her father’s bookplate, were found at Potter’s home in the Lake District after she died in 1943. The Uncle Remus stories, as they became known, thanks to the name of Harris’s fictional African American narrator, were familiar to Potter.
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