Correspondence and papers of Thomas Bewick and his circle

Item author: Thomas Bewick and others
Item date: 18th-19th century
Grant Value: £10,000
Item cost: £100,000
Item date acquired: 2013
Item institution: Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage
Town/City: Grasmere
County: Cumbria

This substantial collection of manuscripts relating to the artist, engraver and naturalist Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) was amassed over a lifetime of research and scholarship by Iain Bain.  It includes working drafts and notes, correspondence, posthumous letters and documents, and invoices, accounts, notebooks and other papers.

The Wordsworth Trust’s interest in Bewick is as a Romantic figure, and particularly one with striking parallels with Wordsworth, his contemporary and admirer.  To his contemporaries, Bewick was `purely a son of nature’; both were great walkers, and Bewick the artist, like Wordsworth the poet, combined a Romantic sensibility with a detailed attention to the common man and his relationship with the natural world.  Both Bewick and Wordsworth were also active in the far north of England at a time when political and social change was threatening traditional ways of life in their native rural communities.  While Wordsworth and Coleridge were revolutionising poetry, with lyrical ballads that were radically democratic in both their language and subject-matter, Bewick was depicting lowly rural scenes in self-contained vignettes whose earthy realism, wit and poignancy still resonate today.

Item Provenance
Collection of Iain Bain