Biography: When we first meet Jane Eyre, she is a little girl, taking refuge in the window seat at Gateshead Hall, clutching a copy of Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds. Curtains screen her from the bully who torments her, the windows behind her are shut against the rain. She can escape, at least in her mind's eye.
"Every picture told a story: mysterious often to my underdeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting . . . with Bewick on my knee, I was then happy." Charlotte Brontë and her sisters were but three voices raised in the enormous chorus of delight which greeted the publication of Bewick's General History of Quadrupeds and British Birds, books whose woodcut wildlife illustrations helped shape Britain's love affair with nature at the end of the 18th century and beyond.
Birds was the first field guide for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of extraordinary accuracy and beauty. In Nature's Engraver, Jenny Uglow has given us a wise and perceptive portrait of the Northumbrian Bewick, a splendid social history of a Tyneside undergoing vast changes in an age of enclosures and industrialisation, and of a society heavily engaged in the discussion and practice of radical politics.
This is also a beautiful book: paper, typefaces and design are all deeply sympathetic to the huge number of Bewick cuts used, and not one of these is mutilated by poor reproduction. Most of the tailpieces - his "tale- pieces" - for which Bewick was so famous, and so loved, are printed exactly to the size he cut them, so that as the book progresses and the methods of engraving are explained, the reader sits more and more in awe of the skill with which Bewick could put a whole story into an image the size of a postage stamp.
That he did them at the end of a working day while working under candlelight makes them even more remarkable.
As Uglow writes: "Their miniature intensity is, paradoxically, part of their greatness, and this way, too, they appear as their first readers saw them, the tail pieces floating without captions in the text".
And there are hundreds of these scenes: boys flying kites, sailing boats on puddles, tumbling off carts; women chasing geese; men mending nets; old soldiers in unheroic rags, with wooden legs a-plenty; fishermen tangling their lines in the trees; ghosts and devils and bogles on the fells under a gibbous moon. There is no false sentiment in these images.
Bewick's world was a tough one, and so was his art. As that fine artist John Piper said, Bewick's greatness lay in the fact that he "registered what he saw with precision . . . he had that rarest of qualities - normal, unhampered, unclouded vision".
Bewick was born in the Tyneside village of Eltringham, 12 miles upstream of Newcastle, in 1753. The family farm, Cherryburn, is there still, stepping sideways down the fellside, roofs of house, dairy, stables a little lower each time. Bewick's father John had rented the eight-acre smallholding in 1751 for £4 a year, and rented collieries nearby, employing half a dozen pitmen. The young Thomas was a tearaway: "he slacked Latin, he fought, he played truant, he climbed the church tower for birds' nests . . . he persuaded his friends to crowd on to a huge piece of ice, which they steered downstream opposite the parsonage garden, enjoying the sight of the Revd Gregson raising his hands in despair."
But his abiding interests were nature and drawing: he crammed the margins of his books with drawings and rough rhymes. When the books were full he drew on every available surface: on gravestones and the church porch with chalk; on the backs of pews with an old nail; on the flags on the kitchen floor and on the hearthstones, scorching his face. Everything he saw, he tried to draw.
THROUGH FAMILY CONNECTIONS he became apprenticed to William and Ralph Beilby, brothers who ran a jewellery, enamelling and engraving business in Newcastle. Bewick got the best training: he did the lot. He put his hand to every kind of work: "the coarsest of steel stamps - pipe Moulds - Bottle moulds - Brass clock faces - Door plates - Coffin plates - Bookbinders Letters & stamps - Steel, Silver & gold Seals - Mourning Rings - Arms crests & ciphers on silver & every kind of job from the Silver Smiths - writing engravings of Bills, bank notes, Bills of parcels, shop bills & cards".
The Beilbys got a lot of cheaper jobbing work which was cut in wood rather than the more expensive copper.
This work was given to Bewick, and right from the start he found his own niche. And there was room for fancy and for play in his work. His strong, youthful designs caught the eye of local merchants and traders: orders rose and takings had tripled by his second year, Bewick's skills were now honed at just the right time to profit from the surge in the publishing of books for children, and he worked on emblematic blocks for, among others, A New Lottery Book of Birds & Beasts, Moral Instructions of a Father to his Son, and A Pretty Book of Pictures for Little Masters & Misses, or Tommy Trip's History of Beasts & Birds, first written by Oliver Goldsmith in the 1760s.
At 22, Bewick boarded a London-bound collier, and worked for some months in the capital until homesickness got the better of him. Uglow points to a great might-have-been moment: "not far away, William Blake was coming to the end of his apprenticeship . . . in the streets of London, two very different young engravers crossed without knowing it. Both were radicals, firm believers in the art of the particular, the light in the mundane detail. But Blake was seeing visions, while Bewick was rooted to the Tyneside world he knew and yearned for".
He went into partnership with Ralph Beilby, walked home to Cherryburn every weekend (walking was his great escape), married in the year his parents died, and after many years of research and labour, the Quadrupeds was published in 1790, just two years after Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne.
BY ALL ACCOUNTS Bewick was a "plain no-nonsense man", who worked in a brown silk cap to hide a bald patch, wore worsted stockings, spoilt his children and went to the pub in the evenings. Bluff and direct, warm to his friends and often generous to the point of foolishness, he was a shrewd businessman, brisk with apprentices, cussed in quarrels, stubborn in holding a grudge. But he also possessed an extraordinary talent and his skill has never been surpassed.
He had a passionate empathy for nature: "the great table of nature is spread out alike to all", he said.
In his finished woodcuts, Bewick managed to convey precisely the characteristic of the species, while showing an individual, living bird. John Rayner, a fine exegetist of the artist, has written: "Bewick so often conveys the character of birds . . . the clownishness and self-confidence of the starling, the self-consciousness of the yellow-hammer, the alert aggressiveness of the robin, the modesty of the wren, the apprehension of the quail".
By the way, aficionados of Patrick O'Brian will rejoice in the mention of one of Bewick's apprentices: Henry Fulke Plantagenet Wollocombe Hole. He was the son of a feckless soldier disinherited for marrying a Newcastle butcher's daughter. Young Henry was "of a poetic and romantic turn of mind", wrote Bewick, "is unsettled and does not know where to cast Anchor and moor in Safety". But Henry FPW did well as an engraver, inherited his grandfather's estate and ended his days living the cheerful life of a Devon squire.
Huzza! This is a grand book. Peter Ackroyd has called Jenny Uglow the "most perfect historian imaginable". On the strength of Nature's Engraver, he could well be right.
Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick By Jenny Uglow Faber & Faber, 458pp. £20
Andy Barclay is an author and journalist
