Beatrix Potter loved the countryside and she spent much of her otherwise conventional Victorian childhood drawing and studying animals. Her passion for the natural world lay behind the creation of her famous series of little books. A particular source of inspiration was the English Lake District where she lived for the last thirty years of her life as a farmer and land conservationist, working with the National Trust.
Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes, published in 1922, is a sequel to Beatrix Potter’s first rhyme collection Appley Dapply’s Nursery Rhymes. Like the previous book it contains material she had produced and collected over a period of many years. The Cecily Parsley sequence of illustrations, for example, were first made into a little booklet twenty-five years earlier in 1897.