Purposeful Potter promoters

Nearly 90 years ago on Christmas Eve, a librarian at the New York Public Library sat before a group of children and read a story about a poor working man.

She began: “In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets — when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta — there lived a tailor in Gloucester.”

With a rapt audience before her, the librarian went on to tell the tale of how the man falls ill before he is able to complete work on the mayor’s cherry-colored wedding jacket by noon on Christmas. But little mice sneak into his shop to do the task for him, and finally make him “quite stout” and “quite rich” with success.

The children were among the first in America to hear — and to see — Beatrix Potter’s picture book “The Tailor of Gloucester,” which librarian Anne Carroll Moore, New York’s superintendent of children’s work and a leading figure in establishing children’s rooms in American libraries, had found in a package of books from England.

In reading the tale, Moore began a night-before-Christmas tradition that many Potter fans still practice each year. But more importantly, she began the national acclaim and widespread publicity for Potter’s books.

When Peter Rabbit, Potter’s first and best-known children’s book character, turned 100 last month, it was a celebration on both sides of the Atlantic. And in December, when aficionados mark the 50th anniversary of Potter’s death, Moore’s name is sure to come up in discussions of Potter’s place in American letters.

Moore’s name is also likely to come up in the lecture “Beatrix Potter: A Purposeful Life of Achievement,” given by Jane Morse, 3 p.m. Oct. 28 at the special collections room at the University of Maine Fogler Library.

Morse, a consummate Potter scholar and American liaison officer for the Beatrix Potter Society in England, first heard “The Tailor of Gloucester” when she was a child visiting the Bangor Public Library, where the reading was an annual custom. The children’s librarian there knew Moore, a native of Limerick, and had brought the tradition to Maine.

But Morse has come back to Potter’s work time and time again throughout her life and career — while raising her own child, while pursuing an avocation as a storyteller, and while writing for The Horn Book Magazine (a journal of children’s literature).

Eventually, she would join the Potter Society, which was established in 1980 to perserve Potter memorabilia and promote not only her works but her national character as artist, diarist, farmer and conservationalist. Morse also edited a collection of Potter’s cross-Atlantic letters, “Beatrix Potter’s Americans,” which opens with Potter’s first correspondence with Moore in 1921.

Each year, Morse travels to the annual Society meeting, which has often been held in England’s Lake District, where Potter owned 4,000 acres of land, including 16 farms (all of which was given to the National Trust after Potter’s death). And each week, as the American representative of the Potter Society, Morse receives several letters a week from Potter fans and collectors of books, figurines, dolls, and a wide selection of other Potter mementos.

“There are friendships being formed all over the United States because of Beatrix Potter. It’s extraordinary,” says Morse, who, in her own Potter collection, has two first-edition books.

A graduate of Mount Holyoke and UM, a former teacher at Boston University, and currently a writing instructor at UM, Morse is no newcomer to an academic approach to children’s literature, which has been at the center of her research for many years. Also, as a storyteller, Morse has shared literature with children and libraries throughout the world. The interest, she says, grew out of her own family traditons of storytelling, and childhood visits to the Bangor library, which she describes as the “cultural center” of Bangor during the Depression years.

Morse never met Potter, but her affection for the artist-storyteller is as real as is she were discussing a dear old aunt.

“There was more to Beatrix Potter than Peter Rabbit,” says Morse, whose small frame and gentle smile could have been lifted from a Potter illustration. “She was an unusual 19th century woman.”

She never met Moore, either, but because Morse is a library advocate, and has studied libraries in Japan, New Zealand and England, she has a particular interest in Moore, her contribution to library science, and her connection to Potter. Moore was, afterall, the first American to visit Potter in England, a distinction that was not easy to come by considering that Potter generally eschewed fans.

But Moore simply persisted until Potter became as interested in meeting Moore as Moore was in meeting Potter.

“Moore went to spend the day, and ended up spending the night, but Beatrix Potter says it’s nice to have company after you’ve already met them,” adds Morse, with a chuckle. “They were both straightforward women, and they got along well. They had high standards of perfection.