Potter Exhibit Leaps Beyond Peter Rabbit : Literature: Display at Natural History Museum shows she was not only an author and artist, but also a dedicated 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 opening March 1 at the county Natural History Museum in Exposition Park.

The exhibit, “Through the Garden Gate: The World of Beatrix Potter,” 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.

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Visitors will enter the exhibit area through a 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 to 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.

The Cleveland Museum’s Laura Lee Martin said 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 was indignant at the thought. “Potter was infinitely more than just a spinster who dabbled in picture books,” said Martin, who cites Potter’s lesser-known achievements as an amateur scientist and pioneering conservationist. And Potter married at 47, after which time she concentrated on raising sheep rather than writing books.

A self-taught naturalist, Potter as a child began sketching whatever scurried or bloomed, 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.

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“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.

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,” said Cart. Potter put her imprimatur on dolls, wallpaper and even bedroom slippers based on her characters.

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.

“Through the Garden Gate: The World of Beatrix Potter,” Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 900 Exposition Blvd., March 1-May 15, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.