England’s Original Woodlander

Since her excellent book on William Hogarth and his London, “Hogarth: A Life and A World” (2001), Jenny Uglow has been moving progressively northward, away from the hurly-burly of Britain’s capital and out into the provinces, chronicling the artistic and intellectual ferment of regional Britain during the Industrial Revolution. In “The Lunar Men” (2002), she explored the lives of an energetic and fiendishly eclectic group of inventors, craftsmen, and tinkerers — James Watt and Josiah Wedgewood, among others — who lived in and around the Birmingham of the mid-18th century. With “Nature’s Engraver” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pages, $30) she ventures on to blustery Northumberland and the life of naturalist, illustrator, and printmaker extraordinaire, Thomas Bewick.It doesn’t fizz like her “Lunar Men,” but Ms. Uglow’s new book is solidly researched and well written, a portrait of both a region and a man. Toiling away in his Newcastle workshop at the dawn of the Romantic Age, Bewick revived the art of wood engraving, endowing it with pungency and newfound life. Bewick’s tiny woodcuts, the visual analogue to the poetry of William Wordsworth and John Clare, mixed whimsy and harsh clarity, melancholy with celebrations of the natural world. “His woodcuts preserved the life of village and common, rooted in a particular place,” Ms. Uglow writes, and charted the cycles of rural life, “the passing of the seasons and the farming year, the flickering of light through the hedgerows, the wheeling of the crows over a bare field.”Ever enterprising, Bewick combined art with commerce. His intricately honed creations festoon the ephemera of his day — billheads and trade cards, column headings, and mastheads, as well as dozens of children’s books. He even provided the illustrations for an edition of Isaac Newton’s works. But his triumph came in the 1790s with his two-volume “History of British Birds.” A masterpiece of illustration and explanation, it’s an early example of a popular nature guide, which tutored generations in the avian life of the British Isles. “With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy,” enthused the young Jane Eyre.Tall, lumbering, partial to plain spun garb and chewing tobacco, Bewick was a rough-hewn man with an earthy sense of humor — one of his more offbeat woodcuts depicts a man relieving himself on a wall. Born on a Tyne River valley farm in 1753, Bewick was an ornery lad, “too wayward, and set on the ‘idle pursuits of art'” for farming. Through a family connection, he secured an apprenticeship at an engraving business in Newcastle, and his path was set. His minder, and eventual partner, preferred copper engraving, and let Bewick find his way in wood, which wasn’t much in fashion. Bewick found the medium liberating: “In this plebian craft,” Ms. Uglow writes, ” there were no models, no rules, no supercilious critics.” A virtuoso with his cutting tools, Bewick’s renown spread.Ms. Uglow situates Bewick in a humming network of booksellers, printers, apprentices, binders, and patrons that sustained him over the years. She also considers the roiling politics of the late 18th century, when Britain was constantly at war. A member of numerous political clubs, Bewick raged at Britain’s rulers for wanting to “put an extinguisher on the rights of man.” Yet Bewick was hardly a frothing Jacobin. Indeed, as Ms. Uglow rightly notes, his politics were essentially conservative; he sought to honor the traditions of the countryside and invoked the ancient British rights of liberty and property. He mourned the economic upheavals that drove peasants from the land and into the cities.Bewick devoted his leisure hours (such as they were) to collecting the material that would go into his major works of naturalism, first his “History of Quadrupeds,” then his magnum opus, “Land Birds” (1797) and its sequel, “Water Birds” (1804). Although Bewick kept current with the science of his day, he learned about nature in the field, profiting from the knowledge of diverse country people he knew from his compulsive walks along the Tyne.Ms. Uglow is a fine guide to the colossal labors Bewick put into his birds. When word spread that he needed specimens, he was inundated with boxes and crates from everywhere. He was grateful when a soldier sent “a fine Ash-coloured Shrike.” “Nature’s Engraver” is handsomely illustrated, which allow us to see the marvels of Bewick’s handiwork up close. With his subtle techniques, he crafted prints of astonishing subtlety, rendering his birds in different shades of black, white, and gray. As one critic would later write, “Bewick so often coveys 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.”The handsomely priced editions sold well, beguiling their readers with a quirky synthesis of up-to-date science and folk wisdom. A kind of mystical naturalist, Bewick looked at the world poised between both traditions.Mr. Price is a contributor to Bookforum and other publications.

England’s Original Woodlander

More from the New York Sun

Exclusive: FBI Staffers Fired for Role in Mar-a-Lago Probe Were Assigned to Espionage Unit That Investigated Iranian Threats in America, Sources Say

Magic of Mummies Is Resurrected at Brooklyn Museum

More from the New York Sun

Exclusive: FBI Staffers Fired for Role in Mar-a-Lago Probe Were Assigned to Espionage Unit That Investigated Iranian Threats in America, Sources Say

Magic of Mummies Is Resurrected at Brooklyn Museum

Transatlantic Divide: Epstein Files Take Heads of Europe’s Elite While America’s Hold Firm

Trump Says Iran Attacks Running Ahead of Schedule

Reported Ban of Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie From Royal Box at Prestigious Ascot Race Points to Deepening Epstein Crisis for Windsors

‘As Far as We Need To Go’: Hegseth Says More American Forces Being Deployed as Attacks on Iran Escalate

Welcome to Washington: Upcoming Midterm Cycle Will Be the Ugliest, for Both Parties, Since the Tea Party Wave

1973 Sci-Fi Film ‘Westworld’ Pioneered Digital Effects — and Warned Us About AI