I started reading Jane Eyre again. In the first chapter, Jane says:
“I possessed myself of a volume, taking care that it should be one stored with pictures.” “I returned to my book – Bewick’s ‘History of British Birds’: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking: and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as blank. They were those which treat of the haunts of seafowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only inhabited.”
I had not bothered to look these up in prior times I read the book, but today I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find them. It turns out that Thomas Bewick wrote a two-volume History of British Birds. The first covers land birds, the second sea birds. You can find them on the Internet Archive here:
V2
https://archive.org/details/history-of-british-bird-vol-2-1804-2015351-images/page/124/mode/2up
Here is a screenshot from the book itself, where you can see the poem from which four lines are quoted in the book.
Reading about the bleak shores mentioned in the passage, the book says: “Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to…” And then there are seven different pictures listed. I perused through the two books and found what I believe are the pictures she refers to. I may be incorrect, but here are the pictures I’m assigning to the text:
1) “A rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray” found in v2 on pg 206
2) “The broken boat stranded on a desolate coast” v2 p 400
3) “The cold and ghastly moon glancing through the bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking” v2 p 125
I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if this is the correct picture, because I don’t really see a wreck just sinking, but it’s the only picture I see of a “cold and ghastly moon glancing through the bars of cloud”, and it’s possible that on the right of the image is smoke going up from a sinking ship.
4) “The 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” v2 p 166
The inscription on the stone reads “Good Times & Bad Times & all Times get over”.
5) “The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea I believed to be marine phantoms” v2 p 235
6) “The fiend pinning down the thief’s pack behind him” v2 p 196
7) “The black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant crowd surrounding a gallows” v1 p 129
This is the only picture I found that was in Vol 1, so Jane would not have been looking at it, but would have remembered it from a previous perusal.
