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“A refined and engaging biography, as beautifully wrought, in its way, as Bewick’s woodcuts.”—New York Times
“Uglow’s clear prose sparkles like Bewick’s River Tyne.”—Los Angeles Times
“This is a lovely book, not just in the quality and sympathy of the writing but in the care of its design and illustration. [Uglow] has turned a rich but undramatic life into a vignette as full of interest and details as one of Bewick’s own woodcuts.”—Sunday Telegraph
“A splendid biography. But it becomes an endearing one by the scattered presence of so many of Bewick’s woodcuts.”—Washington Post
“Another triumph for England’s most innovative biographer, and a marvelous treat for fans of Bewick’s beguiling work.”—Kirkus Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429998192 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/12/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Nature's Engraver
A Life of Thomas Bewick
By Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 Jenny UglowAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-9819-2
CHAPTER 1
THE BANKS OF THE TYNE
The Tyne has changed course often since Thomas Bewick was born here two hundred and fifty years ago. Swollen by floods, checked by salmon weirs, hemmed in by railway embankments, it has swung from side to side of its deep valley, cutting under wooded banks, baring strands of pebbles, tangles of roots and ridges of sand, creating smooth tables lush with grass where once the current ran swift. Across the years the river has flowed on, steely in February gales, glinting under August sun. We can trace its old path, like an individual life, from documents, maps and prints, signs of crossings, relics on the shore, broken walls and lost gates and stories – evidence and guesswork.
Some things we can say for certain. As a boy, Thomas Bewick was down by the river from spring until autumn frost and often in the winter snow. When he ran down the lane, past the Hall and the cottages and across the rough track, he could hear the rushing, tumbling of the water above the barking of the farm dogs. Some days the cottager who acted as ferryman rowed him grudgingly across in his old boat, or he tried to leap over on the thick poles holding the salmon fishers' nets, stepping-stones for reckless boys. Upstream to the west the horseshoe slope of Eltringham Common fanned down the hill: downstream the current surged round a second great bend, past the wood with its rookery, ash trees and oaks, on to meet the sea tides, on to swirl around the wherries and keels and colliery vessels of Newcastle twelve miles downstream, on past the quays and the glass works and mines to the perilous bars of Tynemouth and the grey North Sea.
At Eltringham, tree roots and willow branches dipped into pools and eddies perfect for fishing. As soon as the trees began to bud, Bewick got his tackle ready, his rods, his night lines and set-gads, the stakes for fixing a net or propping a rod. When dusk fell and the mayflies danced, he waited for the evening rise. In old age he regretted the uneasiness 'which my late evening wadings by the Water side, gave to my father & mother ... they could not go to bed with the hopes of getting to sleep, while haunted with the apprehension of my being drowned'. In his mind he could still hear his father's summons as he strode clear of the house so that nothing obstructed the sound, and 'whistled so loud, through his finger & thumb – that in the still hours of the Evening, it might be heard echoing up the Vale of the Tyne to a very great distance – This Whistle I learned to imitate & answered it as well as I could & then posted home.'
Home was Cherryburn, a couple of hundred yards up the hill in the hamlet of Eltringham – its 'g' so soft that it was sometimes spelt 'Elterjam'. It was a typical Northumberland farmstead of local sandstone roofed with heather thatch, surrounded by gardens and stack-yards, built into the contours of the land. Near the house two ash trees sprang from a single root, the top of one torn off by the wind. A third stood a little way off. At the top of the yard a well drew on a natural spring in the shade of a hawthorn bush, and a thick holly hedge divided the farm from the boggy stream and copse, and the cornfields and pastures beyond.
From the window at his bed-head Bewick looked out over the plum trees in the orchard and listened to the burn rushing down the hill.
Sometimes, when it was in flood, it roared so loud that he got up to peer out, then crept downstairs and cut a slice of black rye bread to eat in bed (only the quality ate wheaten bread). Every direction had its view, even Bewick's small window. The yards were like terraces running askew along the slope. From the cobbled farmyard he looked over the treetops and the chimneys of the hamlet, straight across the deep valley to the village of Ovington on the fell opposite, where new fields marked out by freshly laid hawthorn hedges criss-crossed the green hillside. From the yard gate Cherryburn gazed west across the Common, fine pasturage 'broken or divided indeed, with clumps of blossomed Whins, Fox-Glove, Fern & some Junipers & to the westward with hether in profusion sufficient to scent the Whole Air'.
The buildings stepped sideways down the hillside, the roofs a little lower each time. First and highest was the house, with a stone-flagged kitchen and parlour and rooms above where the family slept. Below them stretched the dairy and the byre, then the stables and outhouse. The ash-closet was across the yard, a chilly dash on winter mornings when the biting wind ripped and moaned through the thatch. But the kitchen, with its window shutters fixed tight, was always warm, heated by the open fire and the great bread oven in the wall. In these years, the empty flagged space that Bewick's son Robert would later draw was crowded, noisy, fuggy, thick with smells of cooking, coal, young children and old dogs, and wet clothes drying by the fire.
Bewick's father John had rented the eight-acre smallholding in 1751 for £4 a year and had moved in the next summer with his new wife, Jane. He was married before – his first wife, Anne, had died only a year before and there were no surviving children – and he was nearly forty when Thomas was born in August 1753 (he thought on the 10th or 11th, but the 12th was always celebrated as his birthday). A week later he was baptised at the Saxon church in Ovingham, across the river a short way downstream. Within a few years the house was full of children, as Thomas was followed by Hannah, Agnes, Ann, John, William, Sarah and Jane. But for seven years, until John was born in 1760, Thomas was the only boy, his father's hope and despair.
When he was old enough his first task on rising was to muck out the cowshed, and if the servant girl was late he tried his hand at milking: 'I was always particularly keen of being there in snow storms. When this was the case, within the Byer Door I snugly watched the appearance of various Birds, which passed the little dean below, & which the severity of the Weather drove from place to place in search of shelter.' In winter, too, he looked after the sheep on the fell, the old long-legged, black-faced upland breed. Part of the flock was given to him for his own, a tradition when a boy reached thirteen. He knew where the sheep huddled from blizzards, under a bank overhung with gorse, and trudged off to find them with hay on his back and oats in his pocket.
The winters then were long and fierce, and snow lay for months on the fells. In the spring came piercing easterly winds and weeks of drought, slowly giving way to mild west and southerly breezes and early summer rains that forced a burst of growth, a greening and flowering and shimmering of leaves. When the thaw came, Bewick was sent out before school, kitted out with an apron, an old dyking-mitten to protect his hands, and a sharpened broken sickle, to cut the shoots of gorse: in the evenings he mashed these with a wooden mallet in a stone trough to the texture of wet grass to feed the horses – those at Cherryburn were famously sleek, shedding their winter coat long before others around. The cows, however, disdained the gorse, and in harsh winters all hands set to work cutting ivy and ash twigs to add to their fodder.
Bewick knew every corner of the common and the moor, the woods and the pastures with their old names: Crook Wood, Toad Pool Field, Spetchins, Boat Hill, Loonces Shank, West Back of the Hills, High Low Field. The rhythm of his life was that of the farm. As the soil warmed his father sent him out to scale the meadows, spreading the fine tilth of the molehills to improve the pasture (countless molehills still dot these fields). This and working the allotment, he said, were 'very hungry work, and often made me think dinner was long in coming, & when, at last, it was sent to me, be what it would I sat down on the lown side of a hedge & eat it with a relish that neaded no Sauce'.
We do not need to know a river's source to appreciate its power but it helps to draw a map, to understand the flow, the shallows and deeps. So it is with families. Bewick's grandparents, Thomas and Agnes, had come down to the lush Tyne valley from the edge of the high moors near Kirkheaton, about twenty miles north. Here, in a gale-swept village of farm cottages at the end of a one-way lane, straggling around a heart-shaped common with the church and the manor at the top in medieval style, Bewick's father John was born. At one point, thirty or so years before Bewick was born, Thomas and Agnes had lived briefly at Cherryburn, when it was just a low cottage with the dairy behind, but they prospered and moved to Birches Nook – or Burches Neuk, as Bewick spelt it – a mile or so upriver at Stocksfield, near the village of Bywell. His grandfather, who died in early 1743, was one of the most resourceful farmers on Tyneside and was said to have 'got to be very rich' (although Bewick was more impressed that he was a great angler).
Bewick was a common name and several apparently unrelated families lived near Eltringham, from the grand folks of Close House – who added an 'e' to the end of their name – to a poor cottager on the common. But Bewick's own family were tenant farmers, a class that had breasted the tides of fortune for centuries. During the long border wars with the Scots, from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, Northumbrian lairds had granted long tenures in return for a body of fighting men. The farms had low rents and unusual rights of inheritance, passing first to the widow then to the sons or even the eldest daughter. And while this custom of 'tenant right' had long ago ended officially, the tradition remained: Northumbrian leaseholds were set for a long stretch of years, usually twenty-one, encouraging good practice by tenants who wanted to hand the lease on to their sons. Most of the moors above Cherryburn belonged to the Duke of Northumberland, an enlightened landlord praised by Bewick for granting small plots of land at cheap rates to mechanics and labourers, but the land around Mickley, where Cherryburn lay, belonged to the Fenwicks of Bywell. By the mid eighteenth century it had passed to a daughter of the family, Isabella Wrightson, now living in Yorkshire.
Northumberland was known for its progressive farming. The sandy soil on the Tyne's north bank was ideal for turnips, a newfangled crop, while the darker loam of the southern bank was good pasture land, limed and manured and enriched with clover, trefoil and rye. John Bewick employed local cottagers as seasonal labourers, paying the men their 10d. a day, and women 8d., and Jane was helped by her sister Hannah and by a girl from the village. But Cherryburn was only a few acres, while substantial farms could reach seventy or more: the Bewicks' real income came not from the land at all but from the mines. The banks of the Tyne were scarred by pits as well as grazed by cows, and from the start Bewick's was a double inheritance, of agriculture and industry.
Many farmers earned money from other trades: some worked as carriers or blacksmiths; some rented salmon fisheries, fixing wooden poles across the current and building weirs with stones and wickerwork; others, like the Bewicks, managed coalmines. Since 1715 Bewick's grandfather had rented collieries on Eltringham Common and at Mickley Square, by the crossroads above Cherryburn, and John took these over. On New Year's Day 1760, when Bewick was six, John was negotiating with John Batty, the Wrightsons' son-in-law, about renewing the leases. 'I'll give as Much for them as I can afford,' he wrote bluntly. He already had four children and Jane was pregnant again, and, he complained urgently, 'the Conveniences my Dwelling house affords, are too small for my family, and if you please to make any Reasonable addition to it, as to make it only commodious, I shall Esteem it a favour, as I Assure you their is a necessity for it'. John was a stout, square, strong and active man who never seemed to have a day's illness. He was known for his cheerful temper, broad humour and immense fund of stories, but he had a passionate temper and was fierce with anyone stealing his coals, like the young farmers scooping basketfuls under cover of night.
The Bewick collieries were shallow 'land-sale collieries', on the western fringe of the great coal field, selling only to people of the neighbourhood, who loaded carts or filled their panniers and carried off their coal on the back of a donkey. By contrast, the sea-sale collieries to the east, like those owned by the Humble family who ran a wagon-way near Prudhoe Castle, a mile or so downriver, loaded their coal from high staithes into flat-bottomed keels that carried it to the vessels at Newcastle Quay. The trade had been monopolised since Tudor times by the merchants of the Hoastmen Company, who controlled and collected the local tax on all the ships on the Tyne. These vessels sailed to London, Scandinavia, western Europe – in the early eighteenth-century it was said that most of French manufacturing depended on Newcastle coal. Over a hundred mining companies now worked here and small owners like the Bewicks were mere sparrows picking the crumbs from a great table.
In later life Bewick told his friend John Dovaston that he remembered 'lying for hours on his side between dismal strata of coal, by a glimmering and dirty candle, plying the pick with his little hands'. He may indeed have had to learn the hard way, although his father was more of a manager than a pitman, employing half a dozen hands. The pitmen were a breed on their own, with their own slang and songs. Many were immigrants from high valleys and moors, drawn down by the promise of work, like the 'Sinker', the man who sank the shafts at the Mickley pit (who later turned up often at Bewick's door in Newcastle), who thought nothing of being let down on a frosty morning into a flooded pit up to his chest, baling the water into buckets to be drawn up to the top. To let off steam he saved his wages for a month or so then headed for the town to blow them all on beer, which he called 'lowsening his skin'.
Mining was a risky business and even in the small pits there were frequent accidents. An entry in the Ovingham parish burial register tells a grim tale: 'William Scott of Prudhoe labourer, killed by horses running away at J. Bewick's pit 29 Aug 1763'. Such horror, so close to home, must have made a deep impression on a child. And one of the men Bewick most admired, a cottager from the common called Will Bewick (no relation), was famous for saving the life of a Mickley pitman lost in the coal-workings. As Will hunted for the missing miner in the twisting tunnels below, Bewick's mother, Jane, trembled at the pit side, and fellow miners, wives and children and neighbours crowded round the shaft, waiting to hear Will's thundering voice shout out that all was well.
Jane Bewick was not from this coal-rich land. She came from Ainstable in the Eden valley in Cumberland, a day's ride across the fells, one of eight children of a schoolteacher, Thomas Wilson, who allegedly taught his own children Latin. At his death he left little but learning: the eldest brother took over the house and few fields, and the rest had nothing. Jane and her youngest sister Hannah had stayed with a relation in nearby Appleby until 1747, when Jane crossed the Pennines to become housekeeper to a distant cousin, the Revd Christopher Gregson, the new Vicar of Ovingham. It was here that she met John Bewick.
After their marriage Jane's sister Hannah also came to live at Cherryburn, and when Thomas was born he was 'mostly intrusted to the care of my Aunt Hannah ... & my Grandmother Agnes Bewick – and the first thing I can remember was that the latter indulged me in every thing I had a wish for, or in other Words made me a great Pet'. Agnes was the daughter of a small laird, a landowner in Kirkheaton, and was clearly a grand old lady, not to be trifled with. She insisted that this cherished grandson was not to be 'snubbed' whatever he did, 'and in consequence of my being thus suffered to have my own way, I was often scalded & burnt, or put in danger of breaking my bones by falls from heights I had clambered up to'. But his doting grandmother died in 1756, when he was three. Jane was preoccupied with the toddlers, Hannah and Agnes, and baby Ann. Bewick was packed off to school very young, less, he said, with a view to learning than 'to keep me out of "harm's way"'.
Far from keeping him from harm, the small classroom up the hill at Mickley inflicted it, leaving a lasting image of oppression. It was run according to 'a senseless System of severity', he later said, 'where ignorance and arrogance were equally conspicuous, – conduct like this sours the minds of some Boys – renders others stupid & serves tomake all, more or less disgusted with Learning'. At first, because he was so small, no one took much notice of him, so he was slow in learning the alphabet and spelling simple words, but soon his schoolmaster – Shabby Rowns, as the boys called him – grew increasingly impatient.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nature's Engraver by Jenny Uglow. Copyright © 2006 Jenny Uglow. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,PROLOGUE: A PLAIN MAN'S ART,
I SOURCE,
1 THE BANKS OF THE TYNE,
2 NATURE AND DRAWING,
3 THE COMMON,
4 'BEILBY'S WILD LAD',
5 LIFE IN THE TOWN,
6 PRETTY HISTORIES,
7 'GOD GAVE THE EARTH TO YOU',
II STREAM,
8 NORTH AND SOUTH,
9 PARTNER,
10 'ESTO PERPETUA!',
11 WALKING,
12 BELL AND JOHN,
13 AMONG THE ANIMALS,
14 QUADRUPEDS,
III FLOOD,
15 FROM FUR TO FEATHERS,
16 'YOUR LADS',
17 'RED NIGHTCAP DAYS',
18 DAILY BREAD,
19 LAND BIRDS,
20 ON HIS OWN,
21 HOME AND FRIENDS,
IV TIDE,
22 WATER BIRDS,
23 'WITH BEWICK, I WAS THEN HAPPY',
24 BACK TO BUSINESS,
25 SHIFTING GROUND,
26 FAME, FABLES AND APPRENTICES,
27 TAKING STOCK,
28 SALMON AND SWALLOWS,
29 SORE TIRED,
EPILOGUE: NATURE'S ENGRAVER,
Also by Jenny Uglow,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
WORKSHOP APPRENTICES,
ABBREVIATIONS, SOURCES AND NOTES,
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS,
INDEX,
Copyright Page,