Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866 and spent a lonely childhood drawing the animals she kept as pets and the plants she found on holidays in Scotland and the Lake District.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit began as a picture letter to a sick little boy. She printed it herself in 1901, and a year later it was published with her colour pictures. More than twenty little books followed. With the money from them she bought farms in the Lake District, where she bred sheep, and she left the land to the nation when she died in 1943.