Nature & Animals influenced The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter was a working naturalist before she was an author, and the drawing came first. She kept rabbits and drew them constantly from life, including a Belgian hare called Peter Piper who went about on a lead; the book began as a picture letter to a sick child in 1893. She also worked seriously on fungi, made hundreds of scientific watercolours of them, and wrote a paper on spore germination that the Linnean Society would not let her read in person. That training is why the animals work. Peter is drawn with correct rabbit anatomy and rabbit behaviour, and the comedy comes from a real animal being put in a jacket rather than from a person being drawn as an animal. The gardens, walls and fells are Lake District and Hertfordshire landscapes she had painted from life.