The Society of Wood Engravers: A Founder’s book

 

This year, The Society of Wood Engravers celebrates one hundred years since its foundation in 1920. Of the small group generally acknowledged as founder members there is one woman, Gwendolen Raverat (née Darwin), granddaughter of Charles Darwin. This is her book.

Part of a mixed lot in a sale around 2011, the book entered a fine Darwin collection in Toronto, Canada. As might reasonably be expected, unlikely to be seen again. However, much later as chance would have it, an internet search found the book returned to market and offered by a relative of the collector, who it transpired, was tasked to sell the less valuable items, including Bewick’s Fables. Terms agreed, and to save the bother and cost of postage (the collector was CEO of a brokerage house), the book was brought to London in his care. In true story book style, it was handed over on the floor of a London saleroom, minutes before we watched his Darwin books and manuscripts go under the hammer. The 1st edition copy of On the Origins of Species 1859, alone fetching £162,500 (including premium).

Complete with an optional printed receipt signed by Thomas Bewick, The Fables of Aesop 1st edition 1818 is, with its association, an interesting copy. The untraced first owner, R [Robert] Charnley, is almost certainly related to the Newcastle bookseller Emerson Charnley; who subscribed for 82 Imperial paper copies such as this in 1815. In contrast to most first edition copies, within which the engravings were judged to be poorly printed, not least by Bewick, in this copy they are unusually sharp and clear. At the top of the receipt leaf, scrawled in faint but legible pencil, is the unsurprising bookseller notation: ‘This I consider the most perfect copy EC [Emerson Charnley].

Next in order of provenance is the Rev. Thomas Paley. His daughter Mary came to prominence as one of the first women to take the Cambridge Tripos examination in 1874, achieving top marks, but as the rules stood, not permitted to receive a degree on account of her gender. After sitting the examination in Professor Kennedy’s Cambridge drawing room, the only evidence of her pass with honours was a confidential letter from her examiners. Of the four men who delivered Paley’s papers, one was her future husband, Alfred Marshall. At 25, Paley in 1875, became the first woman lecturer at Cambridge. During the first years of their marriage Alfred Marshall was fully supportive of higher education for women. In later years however, he turned against the idea; supporting the university’s discrimination against women. Later still, as entrenched minds were beginning to change, he obstructed Cambridge’s move towards giving women degrees; despite the views of friends, colleagues and Mary Paley Marshall’s unacknowledged contribution to his books and papers.

Inscribed by Gwendolen, who married Jacques Raverat in June 1911, the book is almost certainly a wedding gift, perhaps given on 31st May 1911 at Newnham Grange, Cambridge; where a vast party of some 350, which surely included the cream of the Bloomsbury set, were there to celebrate the wedding that took place a week later. At the party Ralph Vaughan Williams, a Darwin cousin, gave a William de Morgan vase.

Had she lived, I wonder what Mary Marshall would have thought of Gwen’s never out of print book: Period Piece, A Cambridge Childhood, 1952. A wry smile at this passage perhaps:

'It was here, at No. 31, that I discovered Bewick, […] and wishing passionately that I could have been Mrs. Bewick […] it did not seem impossibly outrageous to think of myself as Mrs. Bewick. […] Surely, I thought, if I cooked his roast beef beautifully and mended his clothes and minded the children – surely he would, just sometimes let me draw and engrave a little tailpiece for him.'

Graham Carlisle