‘A SERMON IN EVERY VIGNETTE’

Turnbull Library Record, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 March 1968, Page 12

‘A SERMON IN EVERY VIGNETTE’

Bewick and Brontë

Joan Stevens

Several recent writers upon Jane Eyre have commented briefly upon the book which Jane is reading in chapter 1, withdrawn into her secret world behind the window drapes in the hostile household of Mrs Reed of Gateshead. The book is Thomas Bewick’s British Birds. To an account of it Charlotte Bronte devotes a full page, first to its words in a blend of paraphrase and quotation, and then to seven of its vignettes. Q. D. Leavis, introducing the Penguin edition of Jane Eyre, 1966. notes that the ‘detailed descriptions of some of Bewick’s text and woodcuts’ provide the child ‘with images of storm, shipwreck and disaster, Arctic desolation and Alpine heights, death and mysterious evil.’ (p 14). David Lodge, in a chapter in Language of Fiction, 1966, suggests that Charlotte Bronte finds in the four elements and in the weather of their landscape what may be called ‘objective correlatives’ for ‘the interior landscape of Jane’s emotions’; he notes that we meet these elemental phenomena first in the opening scene with Bewick. In addition to these, there are passing comments here and there, but, to my knowledge, there is only one piece devoted solely to the topic, a short article by Jane W. Stedman in the Bronte Society Transactions, 1966 (vol xv, no 1, pp 36-40).

While it has always been obvious that much of the imagery in Jane Eyre has a visual basis in art, it has not perhaps been appreciated how much of this derives from the words and pictures of Bewick’s Birds. These establish a scaffolding which is to support Charlotte Bronte’s exploration of the psychology of the sub-conscious. This is not the place for the full investigation which the topic invites, but some necessary preliminaries may be dealt with. Two questions need to be decided: which are the pictures which Jane is looking at, and where are they?: and, to what extent could Charlotte Bronte expect her references to have, for her readers of 1847, any specific visual content? How well known, that is, was British Birds when Jane Eyre was published? To take the second question first. Bewick’s work was very well known indeed in the mid-nineteenth century. An extract from the British Quarterly Review for 1845, which devotes twenty pages to his work on the occasion of a reprint, shows the esteem in which he was then held.

‘The name of Thomas Bewick is a “household word”; and his works are to be found in every region where the language of England is spoken, or her literature cultivated. There are few works which have been so universally diffused as those of Bewick, and it would not be

easy to name many for which there exists a more continuous demand. They are read, studied, admired, and appreciated by intellects of every grade, and by persons of all ages - by the young, by the middle-aged, and by the old. They are the food of minds occupied in pursuits the most opposite. The natural historian pores over them. The artist studies them. The general admirer of nature or of rural life and pursuits loves them; and the poet dotes upon them.’ (Vol 11, p 554).

This is no isolated opinion, but part of a chorus that had begun in the early years of the century, and was still sounding in Ruskin and Kingsley in the 1860 s. 1 It may have been this very review which drew Charlotte Bronte’s attention once again to the well-thumbed Parsonage copy of Birds ; the Haworth family had owned Bewick since at least 1829, and probably earlier. It was in June 1825 that Mr Bronte brought Charlotte and Emily home from Cowan Bridge School to save them from the fate of their elder sisters, and inaugurated the period of home education. Charlotte was then nine. That Bewick was early among the books studied is shown by several references. In 1834, Charlotte gave Ellen Nussey a list of books for self-improvement, saying ‘for natural history, read Bewick’. In 1832, at the age of sixteen, she had written some memorial ‘Lines on Bewick’ which derive from loving attention to his work (see Appendix). We have her copy of Bewick’s figure ‘The Mountain Sparrow’, dated 16 March, 1830. Earlier still, we have Emily’s drawing of the Whinchat, also copied from a Bewick figure, and dated April Ist, 1829, when Emily was ten. Significantly, for Emily, the Whinchat is described by Bewick as ‘a solitary bird, frequenting heaths and moors.’ 2

Apart from other evidence, the laudatory references to Bewick in their favourite magazine, Blackwood’s, make it probable that the Brontes would know British Birds by at least 1826, when an enlarged and definitive edition appeared. Blackwood's had carried a substantial appreciation of Bewick’s achievement the year before, in July, 1825: ‘Take his British Birds, and in the tail pieces to these two volumes you shall find the most touching presentations of nature in all her forms, animate and inanimate. . . . This is far beyond the mere pencilling of fur or feathers... a man of genius.’ 3 x

Another tribute appeared in the number for June 1828: ‘Have we forgotten the “Genius that dwells on the banks of the Tyne”, the Matchless, the Inimitable Bewick? No. His books lie on our parlour, bedroom, dining-room, drawing-room, study table, and are never out of place or time. Happy old man! The deligh of childhood, manhood, decaying age! - A moral in every tail-piece - a sermon in every vignette.’ 4 ■ ; - Thomas Bewick, then, was a ‘household word’ in England in the years up to iB6O, so that Charlotte could rely on the implications of

her references, both verbal and visual, being understood. Nor is the reference in Jane Eyre the only one the Brontes made. In Villette, it is probably Bewick which young Graham Bretton delighted to show to the six-year-old Paulina, entrancing her by telling her ‘all about the pictures’ (chapter xxv). And in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte also refers to such a book, ‘a natural history with all kinds of birds and beasts in it, and the reading as nice as the pictures’. Helen Huntingdon’s little boy Arthur is looking at it in chapter liii. These Bronte references have in common, it will be noted, the book’s appeal to a child. 5 In this connection another contemporary tribute may be cited. Bewick’s old friend Bowman has recorded, ‘that I was... in very early life .. . allured by his fascinating wood engravings ; my own children were passionately fond of them and never weary of examining them, but that this was an indulgence only granted as a reward for good behaviour’. 6

British Birds was the work of Bewick’s maturity, and his finest. Thomas Bewick was born in 1753 at Ovingham, on the Tyne, in Northumberland, the son of a small farmer and collier. After a boyhood dominated by his love for the outdoors and for drawing, he was apprenticed in 1767 to a Newcastle engraver, Ralph Beilby. The firm’s miscellaneous trade offered the boy wide experience, but only with Select Fables of 1784 did his talent find real scope. This book revealed him not only as an engraver of great technical dexterity, but as a creative artist, equally Hogarthian and poetic in his vision. Both aspects found fuller expression in The General History of Quadrupeds, 1790. The difficulty he found in this of suggesting life when drawing only from specimens led Bewick to determine in his next venture to ‘stick to nature as closely as he could’. For Birds he worked almost wholly from life, for both the bird and its setting, so that we have a priceless record, not only of the birds themselves, but of house and farmyard, moor, copse and stream, sea coast and estuary, even of the ‘coaly Tyne’ itself, as these were at the close of the eighteenth century. As Charlotte expressed it in her “Lines”, Bewick’s woodcuts are ‘true to the common Nature that we see/ In England’s sunny fields, her hills and vales’. (See Appendix).

A History of British Birds, volume I, Land Birds, was published in 1797, and its companion volume, Water Birds, in 1804. In both, Bewick arranges the birds in the classification of his day, giving each a page or two of technical description. Almost every entry is given a heading illustration, or ‘figure’ as Bewick called it, consisting of a woodcut about one-third to one-half the size of the page. (Jane Stedman’s reference to this figure as a ‘large ornithological plate’ is misleading, for the figure is a woodcut, printed integrally with the text, not a dissociated plate.) Each figure shows a bird in some appropriate natural

setting. At the end of almost every entry there is a vignette, as tailpiece. This, though usually tiny, is no mere finial ornament, but an engraving of exquisite quality. Sometimes it will be a feather, or a floral scroll, a bird’s head with eager eye, or a jug, a bucket, a spade; it may be a naiad by a fountain, or a memorial stone. More often, and more importantly, it is a rural scene or seascape embodying some anecdote, and offering a wry or macabre insight into human behaviour, the ‘moral’ and ‘sermon’ of Blackwood’s eulogy. It is these vignettes which Bewick’s first readers so loved, his ‘talepieces’, as he christened them. In the cutting of them he took great joy, turning from the task of the ‘figures’ and flying ‘to cut an ornamental tailpiece with avidity; for in the inventive faculty his imagination revels.’ 8 Asked upon his deathbed what he had been thinking of during a doze, ‘he replied with a faint smile, that he had been devising subjects for some new tailpieces’. 9 Tailpiece woodcuts such as these are almost Bewick’s own invention, appearing first in Quadrupeds', their subsequent development is all his own. Its extent may be gauged from the numbers in the last edition of his lifetime, that of 1826. Land Birds of that date had 157 figures and 161 tailpieces, while Water Birds had 157 and 145. Bewick died in 1828, at his home at Gateshead, now a twin town with Newcastle. Perhaps the name Gateshead came to Charlotte’s attention from some Bewick obituary.

All the pictures which the ten-year-old Jane describes are tailpieces. The range of Bewick’s subjects in these goes far beyond that of the birds themselves, and surprises the modern reader, who is expecting merely an ornithological treatise. But to Charlotte’s readers of 1847, the name Bewick called up a realm of ‘nature . . . truth . . . humour and keen satire .. . powerful morality’, as well as ‘the poetry of creation.’, to quote the British Quarterly again. lo Not having these mental images himself, today’s reader may well miss the emotional significance of Jane’s absorption in her book. But the first readers of Jane Eyre could be expected to get the point. Now for the second question to be settled; which are the pictures concerned, and where can today’s reader see them? As has been noted, an article which attempts to be specific about this is Jane Stedman’s, in Bronte Society Transactions, 1966, but it is not illustrated, and does not state to which edition of Birds its references apply. This is unfortunate, because the bibliography of Birds is a complicated story, especially for the vignettes; Roscoe’s otherwise exhaustive study does not include information on their whereabouts. 11 What follows, therefore is an attempt to identify, and locate for a modern reader, the words and vignettes to which Jane Eyre refers, and to indicate something of their significance. By checking the repro-

ductions offered here in whatever edition may be locally available, readers should be able to capture something of the visual and symbolic context which Bewick provided for the novel. First, an outline of the bibliographical history of the book. The first volume, Land Birds, appeared in 1797, in four styles, imperial, thick royal, thin royal and demy Bvo. A second edition, still dated 1797 on the title page, appeared in 1798. Though Bewick ‘regarded this edition as no more than an additional reprinting of the first’, 12 there are revisions throughout, in text and typesetting. Both editions seem to have been out of print by 1804. 13 Water Birds was published in the same four styles in 1804. Enough copies were printed to match Land Birds so that purchasers could complete their sets. In 1805, Bewick issued both volumes together, announcing them as available in imperial, royal, and demy Bvo. The imperial and the royal Bvo versions of both Land Birds and Water Birds have revisions in text, figures, and vignettes. Over the demy Bvo, however, there is a difficulty. The demy Land Birds, printed in 1805, and in all respects similar to the revised 1805 imperial and royal copies, bears instead the title page date 1804; while the demy Water Birds, also printed in 1805, and likewise bearing the title page date 1804, is merely ‘an exact reprint of the first edition’ of 1804, and has, therefore, no revisions.

It is these complications which make it difficult to accept Jane Stedman’s very general reference in her article to ‘Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds, the 1804 edition of which was owned by the Reverend Patrick Bronte.’, and its footnote, ‘this would seem to be the demy issue of 1805, which was dated 1804’. This remark fails to distinguish between texts; in addition, no documentation is offered for the statement that the 1804 edition is the one which the Brontes owned. The evidence as to what copy theirs was is very slight, and unreliable. Hanson 14 says that the edition of 1797 is ‘now’ (1950) in the Bronte Museum, but of this the present Librarian knows nothing; nor, of course, was Water Birds, the key volume, available at all in 1797. Gerin 15 says that a copy of British Birds ‘published in 1804’ was ‘eventually sold at the parsonage sale after his (Mr Bronte’s) death’. This, which also takes no account of the bibliographical difficulties, I have been unable to substantiate.

In 1809, a combined volume of Birds, demy Bvo, was published, but may be disregarded for our purposes, since Jane Eyre is using an issue in two volumes. (‘I could distinguish the two volumes of Bewick’s British Birds occupying their old place on the third shelf.’) 16 Land Birds appeared again in royal Bvo in 1814-16, with the title page date of 1804, while a demy issue of both volumes appeared in 1816. In 1821, there was a major reissue, enlarged and with substantial

revision, and with supplements. 17 This, the seventh of Land Birds and the fifth of Water Birds, was offered in imperial, royal and demy Bvo. In 1826 appeared the last edition of Bewick’s lifetime, in the same three styles, further revised and greatly enlarged. The order of the birds is altered, there are many new entries, with new figures and new vignettes. Some birds are transferred from one volume to another.

It should be clear, then, that the bibliography of Birds is no simple matter of a list of reprints. Jane Stedman, after her unsatisfactory reference to the 1804/5 demy edition, goes on to suggest identifications for the vignettes which Jane describes, indicating each as to be found with some particular bird. As, however, she does not state which edition she is consulting, and as the placing of the vignettes varies considerably in different editions, it is not possible to use her references. A new table of locations has therefore been constructed (see Appendix). As for establishing which edition Charlotte herself had in mind, this has not proved possible. That she had a text before her is clear from her quotations; that she was drawing in at least part on other Bewick texts is also obvious. 18

To proceed, then, to the use which she makes of these words and pictures from Bewick. Jane, aged ten, escapes one drear November afternoon from the displeasure of her aunt, Mrs Reed of Gateshead, into the small breakfast-room adjoining the family sitting-room. ‘lt contained a bookcase; I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures.’ (p 39). Mounting into the window seat behind the curtain, and so ‘shrined in double retirement’, Jane looks out at the wintry afternoon, with its ‘ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.’ (p 40.) She takes refuge in her book, British Birds. Here is established what will be the three-fold pattern of the novel; in the centre is Jane, secluded and secret in herself; outside, beyond the protecting glass of the window (and how often that recurs), is the literal landscape, wintry in this instance. Within, there lies ready the ‘inner world’, the landscape of Jane’s consciousness, to which the reader is given access through the medium of books, of Bessie’s fairy tales, and of Jane’s own feverish dreams and paintings.

it is the consistent pressure of the imagery derived from this pattern that gives the novel its unity of tone. Later, the details that compose the pattern will widen out, until the four elements themselves (the earth and air (Eyre) of the moors, the fire, the rain and snow), and the sun, moon and skies will be full of thematic resonance. Windows, mirrors, and locks will recur, to reiterate the contrast of within and without, and to stress the thinness of the wall that divides them. It is with these leit-motifs that, without such conventional narrative devices as diarykeeping, letter-writing, or authorial exposition, Charlotte Bronte

enables us to enter fully into Jane’s inner life. The method was, in 1847, strikingly original. Jane reads her book. It is one volume, it seems, and of some weight and size, for when John Reed throws it at her, he has to ‘lift’ and ‘poise’ it, and it knocks Jane down (p 42). (The weight of one volume of the 1821 edition, in boards, imperial Bvo is just under 2|lb.) That the book is volume 11, i.e. Water Birds, is established by the quotations and paraphrase given from ‘certain introductory pages’. These are by Bewick himself, and express with the elevated rhetoric of his time, and with a genuine Romantic impulse, the wonder of created life and the glory of the ‘Author of Nature’. 19 His most striking paragraphs deal with the migrant sea birds of the north.

The ‘nations of the feathered race,’ he writes, hold the ‘northern extremities of the earth ... as their peculiar heritage - a possession which they have held coeval with creation. There, amidst lakes and endless swamps, where the human foot never trod, and where, excepting their own cries, nothing is heard but the winds, they find an asylum where they can rear their young in safety.’ But after the summer has gone, ‘as soon as the sun begins, in shortened peeps, to quit his horizontal course, the falling snows, and the hollow blasts foretell the change, and are the signals for their departure.’ Others of the ‘multifarious host’ of sea-fowl pierce the air ‘with their harsh shrill cries, screamed forth in mingled discord with the roaring of the surge. Grating as their cries are, these birds are often hailed by the mariner, as his only pilots, while he is tossed to and fro, amidst solitary rocks and isles, inhabited only by the sea-fowl.’

No wonder that young Jane could not pass those pages by ‘quite as a blank’! What a feeling they evoke of loneliness, cold, suffering and endurance! At this point in Bewick’s text Charlotte begins to blend paraphrase and quotation. Her ‘solitary rocks and promontories’ (p 40) is a conflation of solitary rocks and isles’, above, with Bewick’s next phrase, ‘rocky promontories’. She quotes the essentials from succeeding lines, as comparison will show, but even what she omits - Bewick’s Frozen Ocean’, for instance, has left its sediment in her mind. Here is the text of Bewick at this point. ‘The greater part of them hatch and rear their young on the rocky promontories and inlets of the sea, and on the innumerable little isles with which the extensive coast of Norway is studded, from its southern extremity - the Lindesness, or Naze, to the North Cape, that opposes itself to the Frozen Ocean. The Hebrides, or Western Scottish Isles, are also well known to be a principal rendezvous to sea-fowl, and celebrated as such by Thomson.’ Bewick then quotes nine lines of verse, the first four of which Charlotte uses (omitting those which stress bird life); she picks up his

text again at Other parts of the world the bleak shores and isles of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, etc., with the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, are also enlivened in their seasons by swarms of sea-fowl, which range the intervening open parts of the seas to the shoreless frozen ocean.’ After a sentence on scientific enquiry, Bewick continues, ‘ln these forlorn regions of unknowable dreary space, this reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold; even here, so far as human intelligence has been able to penetrate, there appears to subsist an abundance of animals in the air, and in the waters.’

Of all this, Jane s recollection offers a heightened summary, not uninfluenced by Bewick’s later phrases about ‘drifts of ice’, ‘the midsea deeps, etc., and omitting as irrelevant Bewick’s note of the abundance of animals. It is this Polar landscape that Jane is possessed by, while the long and lamentable blast’ of a real November dusk sweeps by outside the window. ‘Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float through children s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes.’ (p 40).

Jane then describes three sea vignettes which complete these images of desolation, and to which Bewick’s words ‘gave significance’, the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray’ ‘the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast’ the cold and ghastly moon glancing through the bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.’ Since Bewick has many such scenes, one cannot be positive about these tailpieces. The most likely candidate for the ‘rock alone’ is shown in Plate A. The broken boat is probably the tailpiece shown in Plate B, which in most editions has the added prominence of being the final

vignette of Water Birds; Plate C, however, is also possible, and there are others, such as the vignette numbered 1 in the subsidiary location table (see p 19). Plate D shows the ‘cold and ghastly moon’ and wreck. Reproduction of this is difficult but in some variants which I have seen of this vignette, it is possible to make out a sinking hull at the foot of the rock. Other sea vignettes which present similar themes are those numbered 2,3, 4, and 7in the location table. In connection with number 4, one recalls that Cowper’s ‘The Castaway’ was a favourite poem of the Brontes.

Next Jane gives an extended account of a fourth vignette, this time in its own paragraph. ‘I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard, with its inscribed headstone; its gate, its two trees, its low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent, attesting the hour of eventide.’ This vignette is shown in Plate E. Note the inscription of the headstone: ‘Good Times and Bad Times and all Times get over.’ As for the gate, it reappears, surely, as the ‘gate .. . opening into the meadow, between two stone pillars crowned by stone balls’ which is the back entrance by which Jane approaches the ruined Thornfield Hall in chapter xxxvi (p 449). That moon, too, crescent or full, is a key image in the novel, as Lodge and others have shown. 20 The indefinable emotion roused by this vignette is reinforced, for those who know their Bewick, by his many other churchyard images, which reveal a ‘marked morbid strain’, as Austin Dobson says. There is in Bewick’s work, he writes, ‘a section which may be said to deal with the lachrimae rerum - the sad contrasts and mutabilities of things - minute pictorial homilies . . . the old man reading Vanitas Vanitatum on the crumbling tombstone . . . the church on the shore, where the waves are rapidly effacing the records of the dead.’ 21 These two vignettes are noted as numbers 5 and 6 in the location table. After this deliberately emphasised tailpiece, Jane comes to the three mysterious ones which suggest to her the ‘profoundly interesting’ world

of the supernatural, the world of apparitions, conscience, sin, punishment, and the doings of the devil. The first, of‘two ships becalmed on a torpid sea’, which she thinks of as ‘marine phantoms’, is probably that shown in Plate F. Next comes the ‘fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him’, which Jane passes over quickly as ‘an object of terror’ (Plate G). Finally, and equally terrifying, there is the ‘black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows’ (Plate FI). Of these last two vignettes the ‘devil’ always appears in Land Birds, and the ‘fiend’ usually does so. That Charlotte transferred them to Jane’s volume of Water Birds is an indication of their value for her purpose.

Jane passes quickly over the ‘fiend’; why is it ‘an object of terror’? The answer lies in her individual interpretation of the picture. To the adult eye, the fiend, black, horned, winged and tailed, is levering at some traveller’s bundle to help him hoist it to his back. Whatever the contents - Stedman suggests a body - it is soft and heavy. One should compare the vignette, I am sure, with another of similar tone, in Bewick’s Fables of Aesop, 1818. 22 In this, shown in Plate J, a poacher carries on his back a bundle which casts a shadow in the shape of a devil like this one with horns, wings, and tail. The child Jane, however, thinks of her picture as showing the fiend’s grasp upon some thieving sinner, ‘pinning down’ on him the burden of his crime. The ‘black, horned thing’ on the rock is even more haunting. It puffs at a pipe as it flies past the rock - ‘the Devil’s Pipe’, Ruskin called it. 23 Did Bewick intend such a pun? Clearly, this devil is ‘piping’ for, or watching for, someone. For whom? For the criminal dying on the distant gallows? For the crowd enjoying the spectacle of his execution? Or, perhaps, for all sinners, whether found out in their sins or not? In the Calvinistic context that is soon to be made plain to Jane by Mr Brocklehurst, the devil is always abroad on business that bodes ill to naughty little girls. Says the servant Abbot in chapter ii, ‘lf you

don’t repent, something bad might be permitted to come down the chimney and fetch you away.’ (p 45). And again, ‘All said I was wicked and perhaps I might be so . . . was I fit to die?’ (p 48). No wonder that Jane faints when she imagines a ghost returned from some ‘church vault’ or grave to revisit the Red Room. ‘Little girl,’ says Mr Brocklehurst, ‘here is a book entitled the Child’s Guide ; read it with prayer, especially that part containing an account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G , a naughty child addicted to falsehood and deceit’ (P 6 7). The struggle between good and evil, the pressure of conscience, and the possibility of devilish possession which are imaged in these two vignettes of Bewick’s are remembered throughout the novel. Moreover, there is, in fact, ‘one real fiend’ in the book; in the ‘narrow stone hell’ which is Thornfield Hall, lives Bertha the mad wife, ‘worse than a legion of such as we imagine ... a hideous demon:’ (pp 328, 342). And both Rochester and Jane have moments of infernal temptation. It is obvious, then, why these two Bewick vignettes should be given such emphasis as ‘objects of terror’. Jane is to become a woman very sensitive to strange ‘presentiments . . . sympathies . . . signs’, to that ‘mystery to which humanity had not yet found the key . . . whose workings baffle human comprehension,’ (p 249). That there are good spirits abroad however, as well as bad, is the lesson which Helen Burns tries to impart to Jane at school. ‘Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to guard us’ (p 101). Prepared in this way for the intervention of the unseen, we can accept as psychologically possible those non-rational elements of Jane’s experience, those strange manifestations of abnormal powers, which occur at key points in the story. 24 This world of ‘strange’ concepts - ‘strange’ is a constant adjective in

this novel, chiming some fifty times or more - this inner world, then, is the one we, like Jane, are introduced to through Bewick’s pictures. Many of these are surprisingly macabre. (See numbers 8 and 9 in the location table.) They are linked in Jane’s memory with Bessie’s tales, which cannot be discussed here. It is enough to say that John Wesley’s Henry, Earl of Moreland (p 41) is a hair-raising but moral tale, not unlike those which the Brontes devoured among Aunt Branwell’s Methodist books, ‘full of miracles and apparitions, of preternatural warnings, ominous dreams and frenzied fanaticism’. 25

Jane, then, is happy in her way, with Bewick on her knee, until John Reed hauls her into the outer world and knocks her down with the book itself. The ‘objective correlatives’ set up by these Bewick references are touched upon constantly through the rest of the novel, in the supernatural material already noted, in the bird imagery of the lovers’ exchanges, in the polar imagery for sexual suppression, and in many other ways.

One further Bewick item may be given to complete this part of the record. This is Charlotte’s poem, ‘Lines on Bewick’ (see Appendix). It is dated November 27, 1832, four years to the month after Bewick’s death, when Charlotte was sixteen. Looking back from the ‘riper age’ to her ‘childhood’s days’, she remembers the ‘rapture’ with which she had then studied his ‘enchanted page’. She has already been impressed by the same sea vignettes as appear in Jane Eyre, those depicting the ‘lone rock . . . dashing billows . . . wan moon’. The traveller who ‘stands alone on some desert heath’ and may have to find a bed, like Jane, ‘on the wild moor’, may be seen in Plate I. The ‘marble Naiad placed beside a fountain’ is noted as number 10 in the location table. Doubtless, too, the poem’s ‘great eagle, with his lightning eye’ and ‘tyrant glance’ played its part later in the creation of Rochester, who is spoken of as the ‘caged eagle’, the ‘royal eagle’, (p 456, 464), and has a ‘falcon-eye’ (p 301). Introducing the falcon species Bewick writes,

‘The eyes of the Eagle have the glare of those of the Lion .. . they are equally fierce, bold, and intractable’, and he devotes a large heading figure to the Golden Eagle. 26 In Charlotte’s words, it ‘looks on the gazer, life-like, free and bold’. These, then, are the illustrations which ten-year-old Jane Eyre is absorbed in, that drear November afternoon, as the Bronte children and so many others in that century had been at much the same age. Every reader will find his appreciation of the novel deepened by an acquaintance with the words and the visual images which Charlotte Bronte had in mind, and which, though hidden from our day, were in hers matters of ‘household’ knowledge to a very wide range of the reading public, ‘the young, the middle-aged, and the old’ of the

British Quarterly Review in 1845.

APPENDIX LINES ON BEWICK The cloud of recent death is past away, But yet a shadow lingers o’er his tomb To tell that the pale standard of decay Is reared triumphant o’er life’s sullied bloom. But not the eye bedimmed by tears may gaze On the fair lines his gifted pencil drew, The tongue unfaltering speak its meed of praise

When we behold those scenes to Nature true True to the common Nature that we see In England’s sunny fields, her hills and vales, On the wild bosom of her storm-dark sea Still heaving to the wind that o’er it wails. How many winged inhabitants of air,- : How many plume-clad floaters of the deep, The mighty artist drew in forms as fair As those that now the skies and waters sweep; From the great eagle, with his lightning eye, His tyrant glance, his talons dyed in blood, ! A-,tv To the sweet breather-forth of melody, The gentle merry minstrel of the wood. Each in his attitude of native grace Looks on the gazer life-like, free and bold, And if the rocks be his abiding place , Far off appears the winged marauder’s hold. But if the little builder rears his nest In the still shadow of green tranquil trees, And singing sweetly ’mid the silence blest Sits a meet emblem of untroubled peace, ‘A change comes o’er the spirit of our dream,’ ; Woods wave around in crested majesty; We almost feel the joyous sunshine’s beam And hear the breath of the sweet south go by.

Our childhood’s days return again in thought, We wander in a land of love and light, And mingled memories, joy and sorrow fraught Gush on our hearts with overwhelming might. Sweet flowers seem gleaming ’mid the tangled grass Sparkling with spray-drops from the rushing rill, And as these fleeting visions fade and pass Perchance some pensive tears our eyes may fill These soon are wiped away, again we turn With fresh delight to the enchanted page Where pictured thoughts that breathe and speak and burn Still please alike our youth and riper age. There rises some lone rock all wet with surge And dashing billows glimmering in the light Of a wan moon, whose silent rays emerge From clouds that veil their lustre, cold and bright. And there ’mongst reeds upon a river’s side A wild bird sits, and brooding o’er her nest Still guards the priceless gems, her joy and pride, Now ripening ’neath her hope-enlivened breast. We turn the page: before the expectant eye A traveller stands lone on some desert heath; The glorious sun is passing from the sky While fall his farewell rays on all beneath; O’er the far hills a purple veil seems flung, Dim herald of the coming shades of night; E’en now Diana’s lamp aloft is hung, Drinking full radiance from the fount of light. Oh, when the solemn wind of midnight sighs, Where will the lonely traveller lay his head? Beneath the tester of the star-bright skies On the wild moor he ’ll find a dreary bed. Now we behold a marble Naiad placed Beside a fountain on her sculptured throne, Her bending form with simplest beauty graced, Her white robes gathered in a snowy zone. She from a polished vase pours forth a stream Of sparkling water to the waves below Which roll in light and music, while the gleam Of sunshine flings through shade a golden glow. A hundred fairer scenes these leaves reveal; But there are tongues that injure while they praise: I cannot speak the rapture that I feel When on the work of such a mind I gaze. Then farewell, Bewick, genius’ favoured son, Death’s sleep is on thee, all thy woes are past; From earth departed, life and labour done, Eternal peace and rest are thine at last.

C. Bronte, 27 November, 1832

This poem was first printed under the tentative title of ‘Lines on the Celebrated Bewick’ in The Times Literary Supplement, 4 January, 1907.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The following books held in the Rare Book Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, were the basis of this study. THOMAS BEWICK. History of British Birds. Vol. 1, Land Birds, 1797 (ie 1798), 2nd edition. Roscoe 15A (imperial 8vo). Vol. n, Water Birds, 1804, Ist edition. Roscoe 17A (imperial 8vo). Land Birds, Water Birds, issued two parts in one, 1809. Roscoe 20 (demy 8vo). Vol. 1, Land Birds, and Supplement, 1821. Roscoe 24-258 (royal 8vo). Vol. 11, Water Birds, and Supplement, 1821. Roscoe 26-278 (royal 8vo). The Fables of Aesop, and others, with designs on wood by Thomas Bewick, 1818. Roscoe 45A (imperial 8vo), 45c (demy 8vo). CHARLOTTE BRONTE Jane Eyre, an autobiography, by Currer Bell, 3rd edition, 1848. Wise 5. Shirley. A tale by Currer Bell, 1849. Wise 6. In addition, the National Library holds: Bewick, History of British Birds, Vol. 1, Land Birds, 1805, 3rd edition. Roscoe 188 (royal 8vo). History of British Birds, Vol. n, Water Birds, 1805, 2nd edition. Roscoe 198 (royal 8vo).

REFERENCES 1 See: Annual Review, Vol. m, 1805, p 733. John Ruskin, Works, 1904: Vol. xv, The Elements of Drawing, p 223; Vol. xx, Aratra Pentelici, pp 355-356; Vol. xxn, Ariadne Florentina, pp 360-368. 2 Bewick’s figure of the Whinchat is at p 175 of Works, Memorial Edition, 1885, Vol. 1. Emily’s copy of it is reproduced in Bronte Society Transactions, Vol. xn, part xrv, no iv. The figure of the Mountain Sparrow is at p 248 of the Works, Memorial Edition, Vol. 1; Charlotte’s drawing is in the Bronte Museum, Haworth. 3 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. xviii, July 1825, pp 1-5. 4 op. cit. Vol. xxm, June 1828, p 873. The quotation is from Wordsworth, ‘The Two Thieves’, Lyrical Ballads, 1800.

‘O now that the genius of Bewick were mine And the skill that he learned on the banks of the Tyne!’ 5 Charles Kingsley notes ( Letters and Memories, 9th edition, 1877, p 222) that he was ‘brought up ... on Bewick’s Birds’. Kingsley puts Tom’s river in the Water Babies, 1863, in Bewick country, thus describing it: ‘lt was such a stream as you see in dear old Bewick; Bewick, who was bom and bred upon them. ... You must look at Bewick to see just what it was like, for he has drawn it a hundred times with the care and love of a true north countryman.’ The reference is further evidence of the continuing familiarity of Bewick. (Chapter III). 6 Quoted by Reynolds Stone, The Wood Engravings of Thomas Bewick, 1953, p 30. 7 Bewick’s Works, Memorial Edition: Vol. v, Memoir, 1887, p 162.

8 Reynolds Stone, op. cit, p 29. 9 Memoir, op. cit, p 315. 10 British Quarterly Review, Vol. n, 1845, pp 560, 555. 11 S. Roscoe, Thomas Bewick: A bibliography raisonne, 1953. 12 Roscoe, p 56. 13 Roscoe, pp 77, 80. 14 L. and E. M. Hanson, The Four Brontes, 1950, p 354. 15 Winifred Gerin, Anne Bronte, 1959, p 55. 16 Jane Eyre, Penguin edition, 1966, p 256 (chapter xxi). Subsequent page references in text are to this edition. 17 Roscoe, pp 107-109.

18 See later remarks on the two ‘devil’ vignettes. 19 Bewick’s Works, Memorial Edition: Vol. n, Water Birds, 1885, pp ix-xv. 20 David Lodge, Language of Fiction, 1966, pp 114-143. Robert B. Heilman, ‘Charlotte Bronte, Reason, and the Moon’, N.C.F., Vol. xiv, no iv, March i 960. 21 Austin Dobson, Thomas Bewick and his Pupils, 1899, p 123. 22 Fables of Aesop, 1818, p 74. See also vignette Number 9. 23 Ruskin, Works, 1904, Vol. xxx, pp 283-288. ‘The Devil’s Pipe! . . . Here the distance, crowd, and gibbeted figure wonderful. The little puff from the pipe . . . and its outlines with knob below bowl - quite marvellous.’ cf. also Tennyson, Maud, 11, xix, ‘The Devil may pipe to his own.’ Ruskin sees the devil as flying: Jane sees it as ‘seated aloof on a rock’. Ruskin discusses also the vignette of the ‘fiend’, interpreting it as ‘the devil and the burglar’. It should be noted that a gallows with a hanging body is to be seen in the back-

ground behind Bewick’s figure of the Mountain Sparrow, which Charlotte copied, as has been said, in 1830. In her drawing, however, she omitted the gallows. See also vignette Number 8. 24 See Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the 1840’s, 1956, p 306. 25 John Wesley, Henry, Earl of Moreland, 1781. The quotation is from Shirley, chapter xxii. 26 The Golden Eagle is the first bird figure in Land Birds.

Land Water Land Water Land Water Land Water Memorial Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Edition 1885 1797,8 1804 1805 1805 1821 1821 1826 1826 Land Water Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Birds Birds (2nd ed)(isted) (Royal) (Royal) Plates A-J Land Water Land Water Land Water Land Water Memorial Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Birds Edition 1885 1797,8 1804 1805 1805 1821 1821 1826 1826 Land Water Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Roscoe Birds Birds (2nd ed)(isted) (Royal) (Royal) 15 17 18B 19B 24-25 26-27 31 'b 32 17 18B 19B 24-25 26-27 31 32 ..••• H ••••f >H 1 f!lV» *>» • f‘ A Rock Alone _ f'fU ■ supp. . _ - - - pio nzo’it xhi rjjoiq 5'i . supp. pio C*2C0l f J 11. 128 128 _ 156 A B Broken Boat — 400 — 400 — 360 400 — ■ i a — 421 360 — — 407 421 B — 407 B C Ship in Ice 3! ;i v . n: tidiiib bf tA- — 188 — 188 — 156 188 — — , 156 .196 — — 196 185 — C 185 C D Moon, Wreck — 125 — 125 — 122 125 109 — 122 26 — D 109 — 26 D u. r> / r.. • > ,1 :-j Ib-Jtn J2”U- . 11 yr>nl bnA E Churchyard — 166 — ; 166 — 237 — 166 256 — — 237 353 — E 256 — 353 E F Ships becalmed — 194 - - - j 190 J ? — — 190 — 125 — 370 F toqil V.’C f f a j? 125 — 370 F G Fiend, Thief — 196 SU PP. : r. — I96 22 196 supp. 22 — 183 — 232 — G j ..... 183 !.• ... — 232 — ■ G H Devil on Rock 129 — 133 — 318 — — 99 OJ 103 w — 00 H — 99 — 103 — H I Lone Traveller lAuxiij'd lie r 11.; rrt£\ dd Ilxi olid w — 251 - 251 - 228 — 251 245 — — 228 - 231 — I 245 — 231 I J Poacher and Shadow Fables, 1818, page 74, Vol IV p 74 r P 74 . . tnr IV) V/Ofl no a ifu moit _ jf iLihi s Qm^finvl Numbers (not illustrated) • tb nor!7/ ,rtO i Boat Rudder — 138 — 138 — 169 •yr 138 173 — — 169 158 — 1 173 — 158 1 2 Kayak on Ice — 230 — 230 ; — 211 230 171 — 395 2 220) — 211 — 171 — 395 2 lad 3V/' 3 Rock, Two Ships — 206 — 206 — 173 206 — — 173 128 — — 128 401 — 3 401 3 4 Casta way, Wreck — [j 182 TJ « _ . — 186 — 177 ■ _ 180 — 388 4 5 Old man, — 182 — 186 — 177 — 180 — 388 4 c ifaioi Eirioq oicv borhiloq c ntof t Off?. Tombstone 202 — 209 °J j'i— V£V/ 5— Of Tii6 r gi — 238 — ici_ 116 158 238 — — 5 158 — 5 6 Church by Sea ti ■ '1 hi i i i Hot tfa idW — 245 — 245 — 220 245 234 — — 220 222 — 6 234 — 222 6 7 Rock and Hat — 248 — ; 248 — 230 248 — — 236 — 230 224 — 7 236 — 224 7 •}?imn ■ .>?!!!;;? J. ■: . ■: Tif ; oiarb ia 8 Man on Gallows — — — h-P-I Jcrh— — 78 — — — 71 78 — — 8 7i — 8 9 Poacher, Spooks 57 — . ■ ! ■ axfj 59 s.i 'A'/f: cl nr> foil — 70 w 175 107 — — 70 9 — 107 — 9 io Naiad 330 — r. f 34i. raovi-vdl ijjy <1 0 — _rb. . — 194 — 175 213 — 10 194 — 213 10

LOCATION TABLE