Enclosure and Childhood in the Wood Engravings of Thomas and John Bewick

In the second half of the eighteenth century, two artists, Thomas and John Bewick, became illustrators for a commercial genre of children's books. Although they were brothers, the demands of this market led them in very different directions. The elder, Thomas, worked, stubbornly, in Newcastle upon Tyne, achieving international fame as a wood engraver of children's books and natural histories. The younger, John, headed for London, where he illustrated for John Newbery's successors, the publishers of early children's books.¹ The second died tragically young without achieving his full potential.

The political and social attitudes of the brothers Bewick (particularly regarding the parliamentary Acts of Enclosure at the onset of the Agricultural Revolution),² together with their choices of books to illustrate, translate into a revealing contrast in styles of illustration;³ their joint work foreshadows both the romantic depiction of children as creatures living close to nature and the modern picture book in which image and text are integrated.

One of the techniques that contributes to the elder Bewick's influence on the romanticizing of childhood is, quite simply, the presence (or absence) of a frame, or enclosure, around his wood engravings. Although both brothers created unframed illustrations, Thomas invented and perfected the form of illustration known as the vignette, which, always unframed, follows many stories and fables that he illustrated. To examine the import of the choice of frame for the content of the illustrations is my focus here. For when, and when not, to use the vignette or the frame is a matter that depends on the depiction of childhood in the material being illustrated; this, in turn, both reveals and then generates contemporary attitudes toward children and children's books.

At the same time, the brothers' attitudes to landscape influence the choice of frame. The changing face of England, from expanses of common land to framed fields (the patchwork-quilt aerial view with which we are familiar) was being effected as these illustrators worked. And, while Thomas was a countryman, John had opted for city life.⁴ Thomas held, and expressed in his unabridged Memoir(edited by Iain Bain), strong opinions on the politics of Enclosure. John was involved in his work in illustrating for the contemporary children's book market and has left no written commentaries on his political opinions.

Enclosure and the Rural Idyll

Time, place, and socioeconomic factors coincided with talent and skill to establish the position of the Bewicks in children's literature; the political situation shaped an artistic response. Yet some editors and collectors of Thomas Bewick's work, such as Montague Weekley (1955) and Thomas Hugo (1866), are unsympathetic to his outspoken political statements in the Memoir and edit them out, feeling that they detract from the matter at hand, namely, the life of the artist.⁵ On the contrary, Edmund Blunden, in his edition of the Memoir (1961), recognizes a valid expression of political opinions from "within the social tradition of the Yeoman" (Blunden, introduction, pages unnumbered). The yeoman class of freeholders of land like Bewick's father, who had afforded Bewick the funds to become an indentured engraver and thus to gain the status of an artisan, was under much pressure from the parliamentary Acts of Enclosure against which Bewick writes at some length.⁶

This artist's concern for the changing landscape gives rise to nostalgia for a way of life symbolized by the hard-working but independent peasantry.⁷ Naturally, given his views, Bewick's engravings feed into the myth of an eighteenth-century domestic rural idyll. His vignettes, in particular, depict childhood memories of the farm at Cherryburn and his journeys along the rolling hillsides of the Tyne River valley from 1767 onward. Bewick's life and some of his illustrations, particularly those accompanying History of Quadrupeds, History of British Birds, and Fables of Aesop, typify the rural images of early to mid-eighteenth-century England that were to prove so persistent in the work of later poets and historians.⁸

Bewick's strongly held political opinion shaped the conventions...