“[Thomas] Bewick’s fame rested on three publications. His A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), an illustrated history of four-footed beats, went through eight editions in Bewick’s lifetime. His equally successful two-volume History of British Birds, a more complex and scientific study, appeared in 1797 and 1804; it was reprinted six times before his death in 1828. Lastly, the Fables of Aesop, a project conceived during a nearly fatal illness in 1812 and finally published in 1818, combined Bewick’s love of nature with his penchant for trenchant moralizing. As Bewick himself recognized, these three lavish books transformed his life.”

—John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1997.