Thomas Bewick and Cherryburn

Apollo, April, 2003 by Mark Purcell

Cherryburn is a small farm house in the Tyne Valley, some miles west of Newcastle. Even today its immediate surroundings are remarkably unspoilt, but in the eighteenth century it was in remote countryside. This was the birthplace of the virtuoso wood engraver Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), though Bewick himself spent most of his life in nearby Newcastle, and had his workshop hard by St Nicholas's church, today the city's cathedral. The house came to the National Trust in 1991, having previously been set up by the Thomas Bewick Birthplace Trust as a memorial to one of northern England's greatest artists. Famous in his lifetime and ever since, Bewick was a great miniaturist, and his ability to conjure acutely observed images of his native county out of blocks of boxwood can seem almost miraculous. His works, perhaps more than any others, capture the essence of Northumbria, and yet Bewick himself was no self-taught Romantic, but was apprenticed for seven years to the Newcastle engraver, Ralph Beilby (1743-1817). His work continues to exercise an enormous influence on contemporary book illustration. (1)

Although not by any means well known, Cherryburn has some of the Trust's most exciting books. This is not a country house library, and while many books are on display, many more are out of sight, along with a collection of original wood blocks and drawings. But unlike the other Trust collections, this is no historic library, and is as much a monument to book production as to book collecting. Based on the personal collection of the New York dealer Justin Schiller, it was assembled from the late 1960s over a period of a decade and more, and was in part inspired by Schiller's friend, the Bewick bibliographer Sydney Roscoe. (2) Indeed some of the books came from Roscoe's library, among them his handwritten catalogue of his own collection. The three hundred or so books include a wonderfully representative selection of Bewick's works, and copies of just about every significant book published about him since. As Mr Schiller kindly explains, he set out to acquire 'the top Bewick material that surfaced on the market'. Schiller is widely regarded as one of the most perceptive antiquarian book dealers of modern times, and has exercised an incalculable influence on contemporary attitudes to early children's books. Though not as large as better-known Bewick collections--for example the Pease collection in Newcastle City Library--it is hardly surprising that the books acquired from him by the Thomas Bewick Birthplace Trust were extremely choice specimens.

There are examples of all the major genres of publications on which Bewick worked, and instances of his output from all stages of his career. These include the major set-piece works like The General History of Quadrupeds (1790), The History of British Birds (1797) and Aesop's Fables (1818), together with more ephemeral works (Figs. 1 and 3), ranging from chap books and nursery books to small books by local printers like William Davison of Alnwick (Figs. 2 and 4). (3) There are also many later books inspired by Bewick, at least one nineteenth-century forgery, and examples of the work of several of his apprentices, notably his precociously talented younger brother, John Bewick (1760-95). Many of the books are extremely rare, and several appear not to be included in either of the standard bibliographies. An initial investigation of the collection suggests that something like forty percent of the pre-1801 English books are not recorded in the English Short Title Catalogue, and are consequently not in any of the major national collections of the western world. The task of incorporating descriptions of the Cherryburn collections into the Trust's national union catalogue--which is still ongoing--is consequently an unusually complex undertaking.

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Bibliographers, of course, like rarities and complex technical problems, but Bewick is about more than variants and issues, and the Cherryburn books, often in their beautiful (and now very fragile) original coloured paper wrappers, are in every way wholly delightful. For anyone examining them, the physical format of many of the books is quite as entrancing as the illustrations which they contain. Looked at in the context of the other Trust libraries, that pleasure is redoubled because the collection is so rich in whole genres of books which hardly exist at all in any of the other properties. It is fitting indeed that Bewick's two hundred and fiftieth birthday has been commemorated at Cherryburn by the rearrangement of display facilities in a way which has both emphasised the native charm of the building, and allowed its remarkable contents to be shown more effectively. (4)

(1) For Bewick's life and work, the most useful source remains his own autobiography, written at the behest of his daughter Jane Bewick, and published as A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself, Newcastle, 1862. The guidebook originally published by the Bewick Birthplace Trust (Iain Bain, The Workshop of Thomas Bewick: A Pictorial Survey, revised edition, Cherryburn, 1989), provides an especially useful introduction to the subject and the voluminous literature attached to it.