Dealing in Deceit: Edwin Pearson of the ‘Bewick Repository Bookshop’, 1838-1901. By Nigel Tattersfield

Anyone caring to look at the rear of the dust-jacket to Sydney Roscoe's bibliography of the Newbery family (1967) will find a couple of ghosts residing there. They feature in a proposal to publish a series of facsimiles of rare children's books in the Roscoe Collection, a project that foundered on the incompatibility of ambition and financial resources.

This was just as well, since one of the two books chosen to begin the series was A New Year's Gift for Little Masters and Misses (Newcastle: Printed by T. Saint for W. Charnley, 1777), a group of wood engravings by Thomas Bewick presented in decorative form without any text. Its publication would have seriously misled any customers who might have bought it. Most of the cuts were indeed by Bewick, but subsequent examination has shown that the make-up was highly atypical of T. Saint's publishing style while—as James Mosley was to point out—a group of fleurons and a typeface could be dated not earlier than the 1840s. In his commentary on the book in the ‘Spurious Pretences’ section in Volume 11 of Bewick's Complete Illustrative Work, Nigel Tattersfield lists the errors and suggests that the perpetrator of the fake was almost certainly Edwin Pearson.

That is by no means the only reference to Pearson in Tattersfield's tremendous bibliography, for other scams of one sort of another are attributable to him and in Dealing in Deceit he has brought the indictments together within a systematic biography. It is not a pretty story but one whose brief telling manages to illuminate not just the Bewick craze among nineteenth-century book collectors but the almost self-willed destruction of a Victorian rogue

There was a hopeful potential at the beginning of Pearson's career coming about through his father before decline and fall could take place. Emanuel Pearson had been trained as a printer, and although when Edwin was born in 1838 he had become a Methodist minister, by the time the boy was in his late teens the father had returned to the world of print and become a London bookseller with a largely theological stock in Blackfriars Road. As a kind of apprentice Edwin was thus early inducted into a typically precarious life in the book trade, but what would become a constant quest for success and financial reward was undermined ab initio by unstable behaviour, not least in his marriage at the age of nineteen and fatherhood a year later.

Tattersfield charts the downward passage of events as dating from 1862 when Pearson perceived the work of the Bewick brothers as a potential source of profit. It was the year of publication of Thomas Bewick's Memoir and also the occasion when he bought a large collection of Bewick blocks from the dealer and publisher Henry Bohn. These he first exploited with a ‘genuine’ reprint of Bewick's Pretty Book of Pictures (itself a piracy of Newbery's 1752 volume) and its success persuaded him to use the Bohn blocks for several further cobbled-up inventions. The New Year's Gift was the most notorious of these and it was joined in the final years of the sixties by ‘newly discovered’ sample displays of blocks such as the Specimens of Wood Engravings by Thomas and John Bewick, supposedly from the stock of M. Angus, Newcastle, 1798, and catalogued as such by Pearson to sell for three guineas in 1868 (the year when he printed it). Tattersfield zealously pursues these invented issues and their spurious local imprints even unto such provincial bit-players as Christopher of Stockton and Ferraby of Hull. Unfortunately, it can never be made entirely clear how profitable the exercise may have been since (as with that later forger, Thomas Wise) print numbers and the location of present-day copies are hard to assess—Pearson's assertions of their rarity making them a rarity in themselves.

For twenty years or so he gained something of a reputation as an ‘expert’ in what he liked to call Bewickiana, moving among collectors, especially Thomas Hugo, auctioneers, and even buttering up Bewick's two formidable surviving daughters. But his dependence on his huge stock of blocks and a seeming indifference to the potential and the wider possibilities of work as an antiquarian bookseller closed off other areas of fortune. In 1871 however he did publish through Bickers (a specialist in remainders, etc.) a complete edition of Bewick's Select Fables of 1784 with all its 142 wood engravings and sundry introductory cuts and decorative tailpieces. Tattersfield's animus against his villainous subject leads him to be disparaging about the book although one would like to have had a fuller analysis of its presentation through its four differing editions, one apparently coming from Longman. It was, after all, Bewick's most extensive exercise in narrative illustration, showing through the history of its cuts three stages in his mastery of his craft, and its reissue opened a direct way for the general reader of the time to gain an otherwise impossible insight into his wonderfully diverse scene-painting.

The same can hardly be said of the gallimaufry of blocks by all and sundry with which Pearson later made up his Banbury Chapbooks and Nursery Toy Book Literature, which Tattersfield rightly stigmatizes as ‘a rag-bag of woodcuts

accompanied by a text stuffed with shoddy scholarship’. It was published in 1890 where all that can be said of it is to note its place as a marker of the growing interest in antiquarian popular literature from such enthusiasts as Charles Hindley and Field & Tuer.

Measured on the scale of human perfidy however, Pearson's lies and shifts are not much more than peccadilloes (no Ashley Librarian he), and a Leitmotif of Tatters- field's study is the weakness and heartlessness of the man's personal conduct. That early marriage is shown from its commencement to have been ‘a miserable tale of abuse, assault and neglect’ which eventually gained his wife a divorce. Within a couple of years of that he married again but imported a mistress into the house in a menage a trois. There was a growing addiction to liquor, and his perpetual financial crises were exacerbated by a disastrous two-day sale of his Bewick material at Sotheby's and by the death of his father, who had supported his extravagances with paternal forbearance but cut him off with a watch and a copy of Cassell's Illustrated Bible. His pitiful end, away from his second family in Brighton, occurred in Luton where he had sought unsuccessfully to continue trading and in 1902 he died in the workhouse there, being buried in a pauper's grave.

Tattersfield's richly detailed account and condemnation of his depressing subject relents at the end to the extent of supplying him with a toppling tombstone from Bewick's Water Birds.