Review: Nature's Engraver by Jenny Uglow (original) (raw)

Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick
by Jenny Uglow
458pp, Faber, £20

Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) was a large man who packed a great deal into a tiny space. He is famous for his vignettes, including his tailpieces which are sometimes no bigger than a postage stamp. Peer into these wood engravings and you find an entire world of fact and suggestion. But it is far from being a rural idyll. His tiny figures struggle against wind and rain. Battered soldiers, blind beggars, poor musicians and old crones wander through, sometimes victimised by dogs, geese or young boys. The more vigorous perform the physical necessities attendant on heavy drinking and over-eating. Elsewhere there is evidence of grim cruelties to animals. Alongside a sweet-flowing burn a desperate man has hung himself from a tree.

Bewick loved nature and recorded its face with knowing certainty, but his greatness as an artist, in the opinion of John Piper, lay in the fact that he "registered what he saw with precision" and had "that rarest of qualities - normal, unhampered, unclouded vision". For this he is greatly loved. Imagine a river, broad and gleaming, Charles Kingsley, instructs readers of The Water Babies, like one that "dear old Bewick" would have drawn. Though small in scale, his images ripple with life and enjoyment. Shown Bewick's Birds, the 12-year-old Charlotte Brontë held the book close to her face, partly because she was shortsighted. But she examined the illustrations so minutely and at such length that others asked what she saw in them. This same book she later gave to the young Jane Eyre, who hides from the bully at Gateshead Hall behind the curtains of a window seat: "With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy." Today his appeal helps to sell jam, greetings cards, posters and books, wherever designers harness his small images to their purpose. No wonder Jenny Uglow claims they have become "woven into our imagined version of a rural past".

The span of Bewick's life overlaps with that of the Lunar Men, the subject of one of Uglow's previous books. These provincial manufacturers, professional men and gifted amateurs were edging society and culture towards the threshold of the modern and away from old patterns and customs. Bewick, likewise, was caught in this tension and his life shaped by the currents of the day. In an era of enclosures, he mourned the loss of fells and wild spaces. His woodcuts put on record a fast-vanishing world. He was born not far from Newcastle, at Cherryburn, a smallholding in the hamlet of Eltringham. The farmstead consisted of three linked buildings that "stepped sideways down the hillside, the roofs a little lower each time". Nearby was the River Tyne which Bewick as a boy tried to cross by stepping on the thick poles holding salmon fishers' nets. His father, a farmer and owner of a small coalpit, returned each morning from his walk to the colliery with glowing reports of what he had seen in the landscape. Thomas caught his enthusiasm, becoming a fervent naturalist. But mostly he caused much anger. He slacked at Latin, played truant, fought, climbed the church tower for birds' nests and enjoyed reckless escapades. Sometimes he stayed out till dark and then crept home and slept in the hayloft, trusting his father's rage would cool overnight.

His only talent was for drawing which he did continuously, on any surface he could find: in the margins of his exercise books, on gravestones, in the church porch, with a nail on painted pews, on the flagstones of the kitchen floor and even the hearthstones, the fire scorching his face. When given pen, paper and ink, he began making his name among the cottagers with his drawings of birds, trees and hunting scenes. All this will be familiar to readers of his famous Memoir, but it is immeasurably enriched by Uglow's canny grasp of period detail. She can itemise the professions within a close-knit rural community, unfolds local traditions, stories and superstitions. As a boy, Bewick shared in the belief in the devil; became familiar with ballads celebrating the heroes of border skirmishes; danced reels, jigs, hornpipes; learnt politics, listened to pit gossip, discussed collective justice. Uglow discerns a darkness, a sense of loneliness and threat in many of Bewick's scenes and links it to his upbringing. His woodcuts, she insists, are "rooted in a particular place".

As in all her books, she makes us feel the life behind the facts. We experience the Tyne valley as it was in the 18th century, then follow Bewick to an unfamiliar Newcastle, a trim, compact town, diapered with gardens and orchards. Here Bewick was apprenticed to the silver-engraver Ralph Beilby. Uglow evokes the "inky, bustling, competitive milieu" of the workshop which belonged to a web of booksellers and printers. Bewick's designs for bar bills caught the attention of local tradesmen and his wood-engraving took off. He resurrected the medium from its lowest ebb, developing the "white" line technique (the equivalent in engraving of drawing with chalk on a blackboard). Eventually he attained such delicacy that, in his greatest books, A General History of Quadrupeds and the two-volume History of British Birds, he managed to suggest, not just the tone of fur or feathers, but also the direction of growth.

Nothing Uglow tells us detracts from the Bewick we encounter in his Memoir. Instead there is much here than enhances enjoyment of this man whose grand tour took him, not to Italy, but on a walk to Carlisle and into Scotland. There was an unhappy year in London where he felt himself dwindling to nothing. He joined debating societies and liked to vent his opinions, becoming a little garrulous. Not until his parents died did he leave off walking home each weekend to Cherryburn. Only then did he marry, choosing his wife, it has been said, as he chose the boxwood on which he engraved, "with an eye for present soundness and capacity for standing time and wear". This beautifully written, designed and presented book omits two poignant details: in his last illness he lay there devising in his mind subjects for new tailpieces, and he died babbling of Cherryburn and the countryside of his youth.

· Frances Spalding's Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections is published by Pimlico