Beatrix Potter and spinning wheels

Most of the pictures below will enlarge if clicked on.

Many of us remember loving Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddleduck and the other wonderful characters Beatrix Potter created. I certainly do.

She was a true animal lover. She was also an artist from an early age, and in the late 1800s made a remarkable series of illustrations of different species of fungus. During most of her life she drew and painted an enormous range of subjects. She must have carried a sketch book with her, and she recorded plants, animals, buildings (both outside and inside), scenes, whatever caught her eye, in careful detail.

She began her writing career with amusing anecdotes in letters to the children of a former governess, which she would illustrate with pen-and-ink sketches. These stories were the beginning of her little books.

So where do spinning wheels come in? Here’s her earliest picture of one that we have:

This exquisite little watercolour, just 12cm tall and dated 1890, was sold at Sotheby’s in 2008 to some lucky person or institution for £39,650. Any spinner (or mouse) trying to use that wheel, though, wouldn’t be at all lucky. The footman/conrod as it’s connected would scrape on the table, and for effective spinning it needs to be vertical or close to it. This one just wouldn’t work the crank. The path of the spun thread doesn’t make sense either, appearing to go directly from the mouse’s right hand/paw to wind onto the bobbin, without passing through any orifice.

Admittedly a mouse might prefer a different-shaped treadle from those we use, but I don’t think any creature could make this wheel work.

Why a picture of a spinning mouse, anyway? There’s an old nursery rhyme, ‘Three (sometimes six) little mice sat down to spin …’ In the early 1890s Potter was planning a little booklet of it, which sadly was never produced. This undated drawing may have been a preparatory sketch:

Now there is a conventional treadle, but the way it’s connected to the drive wheel is still unworkable.

She used this version of the rhyme:
Three little Mice sat down to spin
Pussy passed by, and she peeped in
‘What are you at, my fine little Men?’
‘Making coats for Gentlemen’
‘Shall I come in, and cut off your threads?’
‘Oh no! Miss Pussy, you’d bite off our heads’

Her illustrations, one for each line of the poem, are in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Here is the first:

The wheel we can see is just like the one in the sketch. The mouse has its little foot on an actual treadle but it’s not going to work well. Presumably the mice will use the loom on the right to weave their linen thread into fabric for making coats.

The second picture shows that wheel even more clearly (Potter has avoided complicating the pictures by obscuring two of the wheels, though we can just see part of a leg or two of each).

A sketch for the cover shows the mice with spindles.

It looks as though they are wondering how they can possibly control the spindles, with one hand/paw holding the distaff and the other needed to pull down the fibre. The distaffs (distaves if you prefer) need to be secured in some way, perhaps with stands or tucked into belts. Maybe such a change would have been made, or perhaps the spindles wouldn’t have made it into the final version (which was probably never created).

All the illustrations for the proposed booklet can be seen by searching the V and A collections (see Sources, below). As we’ve seen, Potter was careful when recording detail in her multitude of drawings. So how come she pictured unworkable spinning wheels?

Perhaps it wasn’t till later, when she was living at least some of the time in the Lake District, that she had an opportunity to see a spinning wheel in use? Unfortunately this sketch is undated.

Is it an upright or a horizontal wheel? The mother-of-all looks too close to the drive wheel if it’s an upright; I think it’s horizontal, but foreshortened. Is the unobscured drive wheel positioned at the end of the table nearest the viewer and the distaff at the far end of the table? If so, something doesn’t feel quite right, but it’s hard to tell. Let’s try flipping it:

That feels more comfortable – it’s easier to interpret it as the traditional orientation of spinning wheels that we are all used to. But now we have the lady using her left foot to treadle, which is unusual. Also, the bottom detail now has her right hand drawing down the fibre and her left hand drafting it. The fibres, incidentally, don’t look like wool, but flax – more usual on a distaff though distaffs are sometimes used with wool.

I really don’t know what to think about this drawing, except that it does show that the artist has observed somebody making yarn on an actual wheel.

Another spinning wheel drawing Potter made is interesting, and very different. The National Trust website for Melford mentions a spinning wheel in the ‘Blue Drawing Room’ but there’s no photograph of it. Potter stayed there several times, visiting her cousin Ethel, Lady Hyde Parker, and there she made this drawing.

It is inscribed ‘Melford Hall, Suffolk Nov 23, 02’ and is included in the contents photographs of both Melford Hall and Hill Top. Even without a photograph of the actual wheel, I’m fairly confident in identifying it as a ‘boudoir wheel’ possibly made by John Jameson of York in the late 1700s (Baines, pp.158-160).

The last glimpse of a spinning wheel that I have found in Beatrix Potter’s work is in Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes (1922), one of her last books.

The rhyme on the opposing page is:
How do you do, Mistress Pussy?
Mistress Pussy, how do you do?”

I thank you kindly, little dog,
I fare as well as you!”

Here’s an enlargement of the spinning wheel –

It looks like a fairly standard, probably antique, workable saxony-style wheel. It could well be the same wheel depicted in the sketch of the woman spinning.

Potter had certainly seen real spinning wheels by this time. Indeed, several wheels were among the items she collected in her beloved home, Hill Top, near Sawrey in the Lake District. She had bought it in 1905, using royalties from her publications, and spent as much time as she could there, which wasn’t much at first because of the needs of her parents. She furnished it appropriately with old things that she loved, including a chair exactly like the ones the three mice in the pictures above are sitting in. The house and garden and the surrounding countryside form the background for many scenes in her later books.

Hill Top, now owned and managed by the National Trust, contains no less than four spinning wheels. The first one is either a Picardy style wheel with the flyer in front of the maidens (Baines 112-115) or more likely a spindle wheel or a winder. It is hand cranked by a knob on a spoke and the maidens are too close together to accommodate a flyer.

Like the rest, the next one lacks its flyer:

and the third, an upright, is also missing conrod and treadle.

The fourth still has its mandrel (flyer shaft) and even a bobbin but no flyer arms, to say nothing of no legs. There is a hole for a distaff.

It’s impossible to be absolutely sure but I don’t believe this was meant to be a table-top wheel. I think it once had legs. Possibly its flyer arms are the pair at the bottom of this picture:

– and I wonder whether the mandrel, bobbin and whorl and the single flyer arm above them might once have belonged to the second or third wheel. Spinners all know how hard it can be to prevent people from playing with our wheels, and Hill Top hosts crowds of visitors in season (or the damage could have been caused in Potter’s time or earlier). We can just see in the photos above that the National Trust have sensibly secured each drive wheel to an upright with a length of soft dark cloth, so it can’t be turned.

None of the Hill Top wheels we’ve seen looks as though it was the model for those used by the mice. And I can find no other spinning-related implements in the Hill Top inventory.

It seems unlikely that Beatrix Potter was a spinner herself, even an occasional one. In fact after reading about her life, it’s hard to imagine when she would have had time!

Wool would have been available to her, of course. In her later years she became a noted breeder of Herdwick sheep, a hardy breed native to the central and western hills of the Lake District. Herdwicks naturally live in hefted flocks – that is, the ewes know their own area and pass the knowledge on to their lambs. So the flock stays in its home range, without needing to be fenced in, and if a farm is sold the sheep are sold with it. The ewes don’t mingle with neighbouring flocks (I’m not sure whether this applies to rams).

A Herdwick ewe, hollidaypics, Herdwick ewe1, CC BY 2.0

Herdwick lambs are born black. At one year old their heads and legs are nearly white and the body dark brown; the adult fleeces are grey becoming paler with age. They are double-coated, with coarse hairy wool and a staple length of 15-20cm (6-8 inches). This is quite unlike the wool most of us are accustomed to spinning these days, but it makes excellent tweed, and there are photographs of Potter wearing a suit of tweed woven from Herdwick wool (see for example Lear’s book, illustration 56).

In her later years Beatrix Potter bought a number of farms, and worked to improve the health of the land and the sheep. Her sheep won prizes at local shows, and in 1943 she was voted president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association. She died in December 1943 before taking up that office. She left all her farms and their Herdwick flocks to the National Trust, adding over 4,300 acres to its holdings and setting conditions for their management and care. Her legacy is still with us, in the preservation of so much of the beautiful Lake District as well as in the delights of her little books.

Main sources:

Many books have been written about Beatrix Potter. The most informative I have found is Beatrix Potter, a life in nature by Linda Lear (New York 2007).

The wonderful collection of Potter’s work held by the Victoria and Albert Museum can be perused by going to https://collections.vam.ac.uk/ and entering Beatrix Potter in the search field.

The contents of Hill Top can be searched here:
https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/, then enter Hill Top in the search field. 
Entering Melford Hall Beatrix Potter provides drawings and paintings she made there.

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/beatrix-potter-gallery-and-hawkshead/features/beatrix-potter-the-farmer

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/celebrating-beatrix-potter-and-the-drawn-to-nature-exhibition

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/between-naturalism-and-fantasy-the-art-of-beatrix-potter

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2008/english-literature-history-children39s-books-and-illustrations-l08411/lot.192.html

Patricia Baines, Spinning Wheels, Spinners and Spinning 1977 and 1982

Website of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association: http://www.herdwick-sheep.com/

Current enterprises creating products from Herdwick wool: https://www.herdwick.co.uk/