Potter left almost all the original illustrations for her books to the National Trust. The copyright to her stories and merchandise was then given to her publisher Frederick Warne & Co, now a division of the Penguin Group. On 1 January 2014, the copyright expired in the UK and other countries with a 70-years-after-death limit. Hill Top Farm was opened to the public by the National Trust in 1946; her artwork was displayed there until 1985 when it was moved to William Heelis's former law offices in Hawkshead, also owned by the National Trust as the Beatrix Potter Gallery.[87]
Potter gave her folios of mycological drawings to the Armitt Library and Museum in Ambleside before her death. The Tale of Peter Rabbit is owned by Warne, The Tailor of Gloucester by the Tate Gallery, and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies by the British Museum.[88]
Beatrix Potter was the first to recognise that content—as we now call the stuff that makes up a book or a film—was only the beginning. In 1903, Peter hopped outside his pages to become a patented soft toy, which gave him the distinction of being not only Mr. McGregor‘s mortal enemy, but also becoming the first licensed character.
— Erica Wagner of The Times.[5]
In 1903, Potter created the first Peter Rabbit soft toy and registered him at the Patent Office in London, making Peter the oldest licensed fictional character.[5][89] Merchandise of Peter and other Potter characters have been sold at Harrods department store in London since at least 1910 when the range first appeared in their catalogues.[90] Along with her writing Potter would continue to oversee merchandising and licensing opportunities for her characters.[6] On her legacy, Nicholas Tucker in The Guardian writes, "she was the first author to license fictional characters to a range of toys and household objects still on sale today".[91] In an article by the Smithsonian magazine titled, How Beatrix Potter Invented Character Merchandising, Joy Lanzendorfer writes, "Potter was also an entrepreneur and a pioneer in licensing and merchandising literary characters. Potter built a retail empire out of her “bunny book” that is worth $500 million today. In the process, she created a system that continues to benefit all licensed characters, from Mickey Mouse to Harry Potter."[4]
The largest public collection of her letters and drawings is the Leslie Linder Bequest and Leslie Linder Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. (Linder was the collector who—after five years of work—finally transcribed Potter's early journal, originally written in code.) In the United States, the largest public collections are those in the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton University.[92]
In 2015 a manuscript for an unpublished book was discovered by Jo Hanks, a publisher at Penguin Random House Children's Books, in the Victoria and Albert Museum archive. The book The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, with illustrations by Quentin Blake,[94] was published 1 September 2016, to mark the 150th anniversary of Potter's birth.[95] Also in 2016, Peter Rabbit was depicted on the reverse of a British fifty pence coin, and Peter along with other Potter characters featured on a series of UK postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail.[93][96]
In 2017, The Art of Beatrix Potter: Sketches, Paintings, and Illustrations by Emily Zach was published after San Francisco publisher Chronicle Books decided to mark the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter's birth by showing that she was "far more than a 19th-century weekend painter. She was an artist of astonishing range."[97]
In December 2017, the asteroid 13975 Beatrixpotter, discovered by Belgian astronomer Eric Elst in 1992, was renamed in her memory.[98] In 2022, an exhibition Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Research for the exhibition identified the man's court waistcoat c. 1780s, which inspired Potter's sketch in 'The Tailor of Gloucester'.[99]
