John Jackson

Ovingham, 1801 - 1848, London

BiographyJackson, John (1801–1848), wood-engraver, was born at Ovingham, Northumberland, on 19 April 1801, the son of ‘a poor cottager’, John Jackson, and his wife, Mary Mason. Nothing else is known of his early circumstances except that his attempts at drawing were sufficiently promising to raise hopes that he could follow the career of Thomas Bewick, who had been born in the same parish. His parents were without the means to pay an apprentice's premium, but William Laws, steward of nearby Prudhoe Castle, had approached Bewick on his behalf in 1818 or 1819, and a letter from Bewick to Laws of 22 February 1819 reveals that Jackson had already spent some time on trial in the workshop, and that he was eager to learn, earnest in his ambition, and ‘a clever boy and in every sense promising’ [see also Bewick, Thomas, apprentices]. Bewick pointed out that, when no apprentice's fee was forthcoming, boys were kept by their parents or friends for the first three years, after which they received 5s. per week. If a fee of £60 were to be found, then the weekly rate would run from 5s. in the first year to 8s. in the seventh and final year. He emphasized that, as the parents were poor and that a subscription was to be raised, he would do everything possible to help. A few impressions from his work on wood were enclosed as an example of his promise.

The terms were refused by Jackson's sponsors, who by June of 1819 had sent a sample of Jackson's work on copper to Edward Walker of Newcastle upon Tyne, asking him to show it to likely employers who might visit his printing office. Bewick had been provoked by the sponsors' reaction and drafted a letter which, while not sent, declared that he blamed himself for letting the youth see ‘for months past’ everything of his trade that had taken him many years to perfect and more than he had ever seen when an apprentice himself. He continued by saying that he had been ‘unsuspicious of any thing happening to prevent his becoming our Apprentice’, and finished his note bitterly: ‘having obtained all the information in the time he wished for—he leaves me in the Lurch’ (letter, 15 April 1819).

Eventually Jackson was apprenticed to the Newcastle firm of Armstrong and Walker. (George Armstrong had himself been apprenticed to Bewick between 1802 and 1804.) The firm failed in 1823, and Jackson's sponsors were once more approaching Bewick to take him on for his final three and a half years. The 5s. a week first offered was considered insufficient, but a compromise was reached: Jackson was first on the workshop wages in the week ending 26 April 1823, and indentures were paid for on 19 June 1823. But by 12 June 1824 the work books record ‘J. Jackson gone to London’, and it was here that he finished his time, under William Harvey. No love was lost, and Bewick failed to notice Jackson in his Memoir. Jackson was eighteen when he began his time, four years later than was customary, and it is possible that his skills had developed more swiftly than usual, to the point where London could offer much more than the Newcastle trade. Despite having executed a few original drawings and watercolours, he was to become not a designer but an immensely successful reproductive engraver, working for the most part from the designs of others.

Jackson's London reputation was established on the extensive work he did for Charles Knight's Penny Magazine and its publisher, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Here his hand appears workmanlike and vigorous but very mechanical, without much subtlety of tone, and suggesting the occasional use of the ruling machine. Among his other work for Knight, examples appear in the Shakspeare, Pictorial Bible and Prayer-Book. Two other notable contributions were made, after Harvey's designs, to Northcote's Fables of 1828 and 1833, and to Lane's Arabian Nights of 1840. The highly finished drawings on the wood were interpreted with extraordinary precision, in a manner very far from Bewick. W. J. Linton, while remarking on Jackson's want of artistry, admired the ‘excellent cleanness’ of his cutting (Linton, 192). Without his signature, which usually appears in minute capitals, it is difficult to attribute any idiosyncrasy of manner to his hand.

Jackson contributed articles to the New Sporting Magazine and to Hone's Every-Day Book, and he had an abiding interest in the history of wood-engraving. Provoked by the ignorance of the processes of engraving shown by earlier writers, he proposed, funded, and supplied engraved illustrations and much of the material for A Treatise on Wood Engraving (1839), which was put together and edited by his fellow Northumbrian W. A. Chatto. A valuable source of information on contemporary engravers and their technique, the work is generous in its praise of Bewick, and has often been referred to in relation to the discussion of the apprentice contributions to Bewick's major works. Chatto's preparatory notes for the book, now in the London Library, reveal that the source for this material was Edward Willis (apprenticed between 1798 and 1804) and his not altogether accurate recollection of events which had taken place thirty years earlier.

Jackson died in London of acute bronchitis on 27 March 1848, after several years of illness, and was buried in Highgate cemetery. He was the elder brother of Mason Jackson (1819–1903), who also moved to London and was widely employed as a wood-engraver.

Iain Bain

(“Jackson, John (1801–1848),” Iain Bain in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, 2004, accessed September 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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