J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours

The sketchbook’s construction is unique among those in the Turner Bequest, as ninety-five recto pages comprise the engraved text of Nathaniel Coltman’s The British Itinerary or Travellers [sic] Pocket Companion throughout Great Britain. The British Library, London, holds two copies, one dated ‘1^st. July. 1799’ on the title page, the other, like Turner’s, with ‘Price 3^s Sewed.’ in place of the date (see the entry for folio 10 recto; D08380), but assigned in the library’s catalogue to about 1810. The 1799 edition has running subsection headers set within the upper page borders, but these are not present in the undated copy, and were probably systematically burnished out from the individual page plates to give slightly more clarity to the crowded tabulations. Another noticeable difference is the inclusion of a brief section of routes ‘From Edinburgh’, numbered ‘371’, in the 1799 edition, which is omitted from the second British Library copy and from Turner’s, which finish at section 370 (see folio 187 recto; D08707; CXXIII 184). The unpaginated subsections and indices are also collated in different ways, but the engraved texts of almost all the individual pages are effectively identical across all three copies. Turner’s has most in common with the undated example in the British Library, and is likely to be from the same edition, published a year or two before his 1811 tour.

The British Itinerary is essentially a list of distances from London to places around the country and the distances between them in turn. In their ‘Address to the Public’ on folio 13 recto (D08385) its ‘proprietors trust that the very heavy expence [sic] they have incurred, by engraving it on copper, in preference to the less elegant but cheaper mode of letter-press, will be considered as a proof that nothing will be omitted to give it every degree of accuracy, and utility which it is capable of receiving.’ They also note that ‘blank pages are left to contain the traveller’s observations’. Unlike Turner’s copy, neither of the British Library’s is interleaved – indeed the 1799 edition is a paperback in a custom-made, printed slipcase which would not allow for expansion – so this comment may simply refer to the blank versos of the printed pages. The later edition was perhaps offered in both standard and interleaved formats, as it would seem overly elaborate for Turner to have ordered a specially interleaved copy in which to draw, given that he was in the habit of travelling with sufficient conventional sketchbooks.

Turner generally reserved the versos of the engraved text, on smoother, less absorbent printing paper, for his extensive draft in ink of poetry related to the places he visited on the tour, as discussed above, using the writing paper in between for pencil sketches. He actually inscribed a few lines of verse in the vertical gaps between the columns of data of folio 152 recto; otherwise, the tables of routes and distances are not annotated, except for a few figures in ink in section 158 (‘to Havant’) on folio 108 recto, and a pencil note concerning ‘Bagshot’ opposite folio 90 recto (see the concordance below). Both the papers making up the main body of the book are very thin; the printed text shows through to the versos, where Turner’s occasional pencil drawings and inscriptions are difficult to make out.

The overall condition of the covers is reasonable, with slight bumping to the corners, rubbing and fraying of the leather along the edges and wear to the gilt decoration. There is some cracking to the surface of the leather along the spine, caused by normal handling and opening of this tightly bound book. The pages are in generally good condition, with occasional signs of staining from water or damp. The laid endpapers show chain lines varying from 25 to 27 mm apart with approximately 9 laid lines per centimetre; the paper was made on a single-faced mould and shadows (thicker areas formed during the manufacturing process)30 are evident, with variant ‘1798’ and ‘17 8’ watermark, the latter due to damage to the mould.31 Peter Bower has noted ‘W Dickie’ as ‘an early example of a stationer’s or merchant’s watermark’ on paper made to order by an unidentified mill, and observes incidentally that most of Turner’s sketchbooks before 1807 ‘appear to have been bound up by Dickie’.32 Although Bower notes the name watermarked on the interleaved sheets as an unidentified ‘Smith’,33 the central letter is actually ‘Y’, coinciding with the gutters of the tightly bound sheets but with the serifs and extremities of the arms occasionally visible, making the name ‘Smyth’.

John Ruskin initially missed three leaves in the course of numbering the leaves in ink, rectifying this by introducing ‘b’ and ‘c’ suffixes at folios 52, 57 and 59. Since Finberg followed Ruskin’s sequence, the Turner Bequest numbering deviates progressively from the actual foliation, which subsequently runs three ahead of the stamped numbers. Two leaves have been torn out and lost, leaving narrow, irregular stubs. The first is between folios 143 verso and 144 recto (D08633, D08634; CXXIII 140a, 141); an ink blot offset from Turner’s inscription on the former to the latter appears to indicate that the missing leaf was removed at an early stage, before the inscription was made. The second is between folios 240 verso and 241 recto (D08786, D08787; CXXIII 237a, 238). Finberg’s Inventory only mentions the second missing leaf,34 and for the purposes of foliation the stubs have been ignored here.

The ninety-five pages of Coltman’s British Itinerary are unpaginated, as its indices refer to numbered sections within the two main sections of ‘Direct Roads from London’ (folios 23 recto–187 recto; D08404–D08707; CXXIII 23–184) and ‘Principle Cross Roads’, i.e. routes not passing through London (folios 189 recto–243 recto; D08710–D08790; CXXIII 186–240). The engraved sheets are printed on both sides, but folded and trimmed such that the text appears only on the rectos. Gatherings of six leaves (blank–leaf with printed recto–blank–blank–leaf with printed recto–blank) alternate with gatherings of four (leaf with printed recto–blank–blank–leaf with printed recto), so that each printed leaf is separated from the next by either one or two blanks.

As indicated in the concordance, two consecutive gatherings in this copy were misbound, so that the four pages comprising sections 210 to 235 of the ‘Direct Roads’ (folios 110 recto to 118 recto; D08571–D08587; CXXIII 107–115) are out of sequence, falling between sections 158 and 159, with a corresponding jump later straight from section 209 to section 236.