Fourth edition of Land Birds and third edition of Water Birds, and the first one-volume edition of A History of British Birds. Bewick (1753-1828) was the son of a tenant farmer in Cherryburn, Northumberland, and grew up in the Northumbrian countryside, where he became known among his neighbours for his artistic abilities. In 1767 he was apprenticed to the engraver Ralph Beilby (1743-1817), which entailed a move to the city in order to lodge with his master. After completing his apprenticeship in 1774, during which he developed the skills as a wood-engraver for which he became famous, Bewick spent some time working in Newcastle and then London. Finding the capital disagreeable, Bewick returned to Newcastle and on 17 September 1777 signed an agreement to enter into a partnership with his erstwhile master, Ralph Beilby. The following thirteen years saw the partnership produce a large number of illustrations for books and other purposes, in the course of which Bewick and Beilby planned the first of their works on natural history – A General History of Quadrupeds. In his posthumously published Memoir, Bewick recalled that, while he drew the animals and then engraved his drawings in order to illustrate the work, ‘Mr. Beilby, being of a bookish or reading turn, proposed, in his evenings at home, to write or compile the descriptions. With this I had little more to do than furnishing him, in many conversations and by written memoranda, with what I knew of animals, and blotting out, in his manuscript, what was not truth. In this way we proceeded till the book was published in 1790’ (A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself (Newcastle-upon-Tyne and London, 1862), p. 146). A General History of Quadrupeds was an immediate success, and it would reach seven editions, selling some 14,000 copies.

The success of their first collaboration encouraged the two partners to begin work in 1791 on a new book: A History of British Birds. The work was divided into two parts (dealing with land birds and water birds), and the first volume, Land Birds, was, once more, written by Beilby and illustrated by Bewick. The wood-engravings for the work comprised not only the illustrations of the species, but also numerous vignettes of daily life in the form of tail-pieces, since ‘as instruction is of little avail without constant cheerfulness and occasional amusement, I interspersed the more serious studies with Tale-pieces of gaiety and humour; yet even in these seldom without an endeavour to illustrate some truth or point some moral’ (T. Bewick, History of British Birds (Newcastle and London, 1826), I, p. [iii]). Land Birds was published in 1797 to great acclaim, but that year also saw Bewick’s dissatisfaction with the partnership reach a level which led to its dissolution (the book’s publication had been preceded by a last-minute disagreement about whether Beilby’s name should appear on the title-page as the author). Therefore, responsibility for the second volume, Water Birds, fell entirely on Bewick’s shoulders, who drew upon the books of Pennant, Willughby, Buffon, and other contemporary ornithologists. He was also assisted in writing the descriptions of the birds by the Reverend Henry Cotes and others, while the creation of the illustrations was undertaken with the assistance of Bewick’s apprentices.

Water Birds was published in 1804, thus completing A History of British Birds, and although ‘the text of the work contains little of originality or importance’, its ‘great popularity [arose] solely from the brilliance and fidelity of the woodcuts [...]. The success of the History of British Birds was immediate and complete; six editions were issued in Bewick’s lifetime [...]. The Birds marked Bewick’s high-water mark as an artist’ (Mullens and Swann, pp. 62-63). As Jenny Uglow notes, ‘Water Birds crowned Bewick’s achievement’ (Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (London, 2006), p. 306), and A History of British Birds was remarkable for its impact on British literary and visual culture over the following centuries; among the many influenced by Bewick were Wordsworth, who praised ‘the genius of Bewick’ in ‘The Two Thieves’ (1800); Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Kingsley, who were enthusiastic juvenile readers, as was Charlotte Brontë, whose Jane Eyre would open with the eponymous heroine reading A History of British Birds; and the young Beatrix Potter, who copied Bewick’s engravings of animals. Bewick’s fellow natural historians were similarly laudatory, and John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, or An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America (Edinburgh, 1835) includes ‘Reminiscences of Thomas Bewick’, which narrates his meetings with Bewick while travelling through England, and concludes ‘My opinion of this remarkable man is, that he was purely a son of nature, to whom alone he owed nearly all that characterized him as an artist and a man. Warm in his affections, of deep feeling, and possessed of a vigorous imagination, with correct and penetrating observation, he needed little extraneous aid to make him what he became, the first engraver on wood that England has produced’ (vol. III, pp. 303-304).

This present edition published in 1809 comprised 1,500 copies, and it was the first to be published in one volume, combining the fourth edition of Land Birds and the third edition of Water Birds, based on the texts of the preceding editions with minor revisions and editions. Roscoe notes that this edition was printed on ‘a very thin and rather poor paper’ which was, however, ‘from the point of view of an artist anxious to show his work to the best advantage, more satisfactory than most of the papers previously used – it took an excellent impression from the block’ (p. 88). Bewick had evidently taken great trouble over the book and was pleased with the results, writing that ‘the prints in that Edition, look better than any that were done before – but this would not have been the case, if I had not overlook’d the printing of the Book & insisted upon the pressman’s doing as I wished’ (quoted in Tattersfield). These efforts seem to have been appreciated by his readers, and Tattersfield comments that ‘[a]s evidence of its popularity, copies of this edition are comparatively scarce and rarely occur in fine condition’.

This copy is in a handsome Regency binding, executed between the book’s publication in 1809 and 1818, when a note of that date was written on the front flyleaf. Unusually, it has an eight-page catalogue of books published by Sharpe and Hailes of London bound in at the end of the volume. The bookselling and publishing partnership of John Sharpe and N. Hailes seems to have been established in c. 1806 and they gave their address as ‘opposite Albany, Piccadilly’ in the imprint of Thomas Secker’s Family Sermons, which they issued in 1810. On the evidence of other imprints, the partnership remained in Piccadilly until at least 1814, but the structure seems to have changed by 1818, when William Bingley’s Biographical Conversations on the Most Eminent & Instructive British Characters was published with the imprint ‘printed for John Sharpe, at Haile’s Juvenile Library, London Museum, Piccadilly’. Since Sharpe and Hailes are not known to have published any of Bewick’s books, it seems most probable that they were the booksellers who retailed this volume, raising the possibility that it was bound for them (the quality of the binding indicates that it was the work of a London binder rather than a provincial workshop). Certainly, on p. 7 of the present catalogue it states that volumes in the ‘Biographical Notices’ series ‘may [...] be had elegantly bound in Calf, or in Morocco Leather, of any Colour. And separate Authors are constantly kept in a variety of Bindings, at 186, opposite Albany, Piccadilly’.

Mullens and Swann, p. 63; Roscoe 20; Tattersfield TB 1.18.

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