James Thomson’s pastoral poem The Seasons was hugely influential throughout the eighteenth century. Published in parts, Winter (1726), Spring (1727), Summer (1728), the first complete edition of the poem, including the first printing of Autumn, was published in 1730. Based on Miltonian blank verse, the poem gave an idealised description of the British year and the passing of the seasons.
It was one of the favourite poems of the Newcastle artist and publisher Thomas Bewick. However, Bewick later came to see Thomson's descriptions of the landscape wanting in the face of the immense changes of the late eighteenth century and the lived experience of those in the countryside, who had been faced with the enclosure of common land and the eviction of tenants from homes they had lived in for generations.
This 1805 edition contains wood engravings by Bewick after designs by John Thurston. The success of Bewick’s wood engravings as seen in his A History of Quadrupeds (1790) and A History of British Birds (1797 and 1804) saw him in much demand. Bewick often gave commissions to his apprentices and although he would have preferred to create designs himself for outside projects, the immense workload often meant that he was restricted to carving the designs of others. Thurston and Bewick worked together on several projects before the former's death in 1822, but progress was often slow, with designs and finished blocks being sent between Newcastle and London by sea.