'My Dear Mother's ' Book of Common Prayer

In the normal course of events the Bewick Society would have held an Enthusiasms event at this time of year. This year's meetings have all been cancelled as we continue to fight the pandemic. Enthusiasms events allow us to share recent finds, often highlighting out of the ordinary publications, artworks or manuscripts. 

Here Nigel Tattersfield shares a rare item complete with a poem and an interesting inscription.

 

The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England. Also, the Companion to the Altar. With Notes and Annotations. Newcastle: Printed by M. Brown, at the Bible, Flesh-Market. M.DCC.XCII. 8vo, no pagination provided, as is customary. Page size 203 x 127mm. Contemporary full diced calf, replacement spine to match (c.1850) with raised bands and contrasting label, covers with broad gilt and blind-stamped borders.

TB’s family copy with his signature. ‘Thoˢ. Bewick, Forth’. 

TB’s beloved ‘cot at the Forth’ lay just outside Newcastle’s town wall; he had moved there in 1781, taking over the tenancy from the mathematician Charles Hutton, whose Treatise on Mensuration he had illustrated ten years earlier. Below TB’s signature of ownership is a later inscription in the hand of his daughter Jane, ‘My Dear Mother’s’, to the head of the title-page. Pasted to one of the front flyleaves is a contemporary MS ‘true copy’, signed by the vicar Joseph Middleton, 13 September 1759, of an extract from the register of the parish of Long Horsley recording the baptism of Robert, son of Edward Elliot of Lincolmfield, 17 October 1706. (Robert was later a farmer at Bill Quay on the Tyne near Heworth; he was TB’s wife Isabella’s father and the source for the naming of their only son, Robert Elliot Bewick. The family of Robert Ward, printer and publisher of Newcastle from 1845, could also claim descent from the Elliots.)
This prayer book, a staple in every respectable home at the end of the eighteenth century, with three copper engravings by TB’s erstwhile apprentice Abraham Hunter, was probably purchased on publication in 1792; a second edition appeared two years later.
 

This volume is not noticed by David Gardner-Medwin in his meticulously researched ‘Provisional Checklist of the Library of Thomas Bewick’ of 2010 (available on the Bewick Society’s website) suggesting it remained in TB’s immediate family after his death and with the Bewick Ward family thereafter (although it cannot be traced in any of the recent auction sales enacted on their behalf). The sole sighting of the volume in the last two centuries came in 1903 when it was exhibited as entry 159 at the Academy of Arts, Newcastle, as part of the 150th anniversary of TB’s birth and described as being in the possession of the Ward family.
 

 

Laid down on the front endpaper is an original MS poem by Richard Routledge Wingate (1779-1857), ‘Lines on the highly gifted Mr. Thomas Bewick, celebrated Inventor, Draughtsman and Cutter on Wood’. Dated 10 December 1851, it concludes with a brief obituary of TB and the recollection, ‘I had the solemn office to assist at his funeral’. Wingate  was a renowned bird anatomist and taxidermist, a close friend and neighbour of TB’s at the Forth, and acknowledged in TB’s Memoir for greatly assisting in the preparation of the 1826 edition of the Birds by advising on the difference between ‘doubtful Genera, species & varieties of Birds’. Wingate’s poem may have been presented to TB’s daughters in homage to their father and tucked by them into the volume for safe keeping; he was only eight years older than Jane, TB’s oldest daughter, and would have known them since they were infants.

Nigel Tattersfield