Beyond Peter Rabbit : New exhibit showcases the three Beatrix Potters: artist, children’s book publisher and pioneering conservationist.

It is writer Alison Lurie’s contention in “Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups” that many of the best-loved books of childhood are paeans to misbehavior.

The stories youngsters read when no adult is looming over them are filled with acts of rebellion, committed by small creatures who manage to escape all but the most trivial of the dire consequences their elders insist will befall them. Children love the literature of subversion, Lurie argues persuasively.

Few books fit as neatly into Lurie’s paradigm as those of Beatrix Potter, whose world is the subject of an exhibit that had originally been planned for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Burbank satellite, now closed temporarily because of earthquake damage. At press time, museum officials announced that the exhibit opening would be delayed until March 1 and moved to the main museum downtown, at 900 Exposition Blvd.

Called “Through the Garden Gate: The World of Beatrix Potter,” the exhibit includes enlarged story boards of Potter’s first and favorite story, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” first editions of her distinctive small-format books, family photographs, more than 40 of her meticulous watercolors of fungi and an original painting of one of the world’s best known frogs, Jeremy Fisher, in his lily pond.

Visitors will enter the exhibit area through a very Victorian trellis. Inside there’s a tunnel small children can crawl through just as an adventuresome bunny might. There is also a computer featuring a game in which players try to decipher phrases written in the secret code Potter invented when she was 14 and used for the journal she kept until she was 30.

The show was organized last year by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to mark 100 years of Peter Rabbit. Peter first appeared in 1893 as the rebellious protagonist of an illustrated letter Potter wrote to cheer up the ailing 5-year-old son of her former governess. In 1900, Potter borrowed the letter back, expanded it into a book with a drawing for every page and sent it to six publishers. All of them rejected it. A major stumbling block was the pint-sized format Potter insisted on. The book had be small enough to accommodate little hands and to be carried easily to the places children go, including to bed. In 1901, she finally had 250 copies of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” printed at her own expense.

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The Cleveland Museum’s Laura Lee Martin says the same question kept popping up when the museum announced it planned to do a Potter show.

“Didn’t she just write children’s books?” people asked. Martin is indignant at the very thought. “Potter was infinitely more than just a spinster who dabbled in picture books,” says Martin, who cites Potter’s lesser known achievements as an amateur scientist and pioneering conservationist. And, indeed, Potter married at 47, at which time she concentrated on raising sheep rather than writing books.

A self-taught naturalist, Potter began sketching whatever scurried or bloomed as a child and was soon dissecting mice, owls and foxes, then boiling their skeletons and reassembling them. A lover of mushrooms as well as ducks and hedgehogs, she was the first person in Great Britain to propagate certain fungi. She also theorized, correctly, that lichens represent the marriage of a fungus and an alga. But Potter was born (in England in 1866) into a world that thought that only the trousered could do science. When one of her papers was read before the prestigious Linnean Society, her uncle had to make the presentation. Women could neither belong nor attend.

“The exhibit presents the three Beatrix Potters in their own words and with their own images,” says Martin. “The young artist, who began painting as a lonely child. The woman who saw publishing children’s books as a way to achieve financial independence from her rigid parents. And the conservationist, who, before her death in 1943, managed to protect more than 4,000 acres of Britain’s fragile Lake District from development.”

Once Potter found a publisher, she became a phenomenon. In 1902, Frederick Warne & Co. published 8,000 copies of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” with watercolor illustrations. It had sold 50,000 copies by the end of 1903. Many of her 20-plus children’s books still sell briskly. First editions and other special copies are highly collectible. Books of Wonder, a Beverly Hills shop that specializes in children’s literature, is currently offering signed copies of two of her books, “Ginger and Pickles” and “The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies,” for $1,500 apiece. Uninscribed copies of the privately printed first edition of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” command $45,000 to $50,000.

Michael Cart, a Los Angeles-based expert on children’s literature, attributes Potter’s remarkable success to her genius and to the fact that she was the first English writer/illustrator to create books for preschoolers. But Cart also thinks clever marketing has fueled almost a century of Pottermania. “Peter Rabbit was probably the first so-called licensed character in children’s literature,” says Cart. Potter put her imprimatur on dolls, wallpaper and even bedroom slippers based on her characters. And Warne has been as assiduous as Disney in collecting its share of every bunny-bearing crib sheet and coloring book.

But savvy marketing isn’t everything. Something deeper and darker explains why children grow quiet time after time as they hear how Peter outwits Mr. McGregor and pays no greater price than having to swallow a dose of chamomile tea. Potter never patronizes her young readers. She always includes a difficult word in her stories. And her work is underpinned by her vast knowledge of nature. Nature is sometimes cruel in her stories, but it rings true, as do her illustrations. Like Maurice Sendak, she eschews the merely cute.

Potter probably turned to nature for the same reason that she turned to her own imagination--because her childhood was characterized by powerlessness, repression and aching loneliness. And whose is not? Potter created her tales with an acute understanding of what both nature and the imagination can do. They can give us surcease from the ache of self, if only for as long as it takes to plumb the mysteries of a mushroom or gobble a radish with a very plucky bunny.

Where and When What: “Through the Garden Gate: The World of Beatrix Potter.”

Location: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles.

Hours: Opens March 1. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Ends May 15.

Price: Free admission on opening day, March 1. From March 2-5, $5 general, $3.50 seniors 62 and older and students 13 and older with ID, $2 children 5 to 12, free for children under 5. Beginning March 6, with the opening of the special Genghis Khan exhibit, $8 general, $5.50 seniors and students with ID, $2 children 5 to 12, free for children under 5.

Call: (818) 557-3562 or (213) 744-3466.