Jenny Uglow

In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the centre of things, but they were young and their optimism was together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toy-maker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgewood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles). Later came Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and fighting radical. With a small band of allies they formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham (so called because it met at each full moon) and kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Blending science, art and commerce, the "Lunar Men" built canals, launched balloons, named plants, gases and minerals, changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms and plotted to revolutionize its soul. This exhilarating account uncovers the friendships, political passions, love affairs, and love of knowledge (and power) that drove these extraordinary men. It echoes to the thud of pistons and the wheeze and snort of engines, and brings to life the tradesmen, artisans and tycoons who shaped and fired the modern age.

A Gambling Man is a portrait of Charles II, exploring his elusive nature through the lens of these ten vital years - and a portrait of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world, in which the risks the king took forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.

Traces the life of the English novelist, uses excerpts from her letters to depict nineteenth-century British society, and looks at her major works and their themes

A beautifully observed history of the British home front during the Napoleonic Wars by a celebrated historianWe know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic Wars―but what of those left behind? The people on a Norfolk farm, in a Yorkshire mill, a Welsh iron foundry, an Irish village, a London bank, a Scottish mountain? The aristocrats and paupers, old and young, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers―how did the war touch their lives?Jenny Uglow, the prizewinning author of The Lunar Men and Nature's Engraver , follows the gripping back-and-forth of the first global war but turns the news upside down, seeing how it reached the people. Illustrated by the satires of Gillray and Rowlandson and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and combining the familiar voices of Austen, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron with others lost in the crowd, In These Times delves into the archives to tell the moving story of how people lived and loved and sang and wrote, struggling through hard times and opening new horizons that would change their country for a century.

A beautifully illustrated biography of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), the man whose art helped shape the way we view the natural worldAt the end of the eighteenth century, Britain, and much of the Western world, fell in love with nature. Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds marked the moment, the first "field guide" for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. But his work was far more than a mere guide, for in the vivid vignettes scattered through the book, Bewick captured the vanishing world of rural English life.In this superb biography, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who influenced book illustration for a century to come. It is a story of violent change, radical politics, lost ways of life, and the beauty of the wild -- a journey to the beginning of our lasting obsession with the natural world.

A sparkling biography of the poet and artist Edward Lear by the award-winning biographer Jenny UglowWe know Edward Lear as a genius of nonsense, full of shocks and surprises, and as a poet of strange loves--"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat," "The Dong with a Luminous Nose." We may know him, too, for his paintings of parrots and owls, or for his luminous landscapes. But do we know that he taught Queen Victoria to draw, traveled alone across the wild Albanian mountains, and waded through muddy fields with Tennyson?Lear lived all his life on the borders of rules and structures, of disciplines and desires. Children adored him and adults loved him, yet somehow he was always alone. In this beautiful volume, a fresh and joyful appreciation by the award-winning and compulsively readable Jenny Uglow, we follow Lear from his troubled childhood to his striving as an artist, tracking his swooping moods, passionate friendships, and restless travels. And, as we travel with him, his "nonsenses" are elegantly unpicked--without losing any of their fun.

In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical Victorian church in England. This vivid, original book tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed, passionate, and unusual in every way.Sarah Losh is a lost Romantic genius―an antiquarian, an architect, and a visionary. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Losh combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower―there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs, and poppies; an arrow pierces the wall as if shot from a bow; a tortoise-gargoyle launches itself into the air. And everywhere there are pinecones in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life, death, and rebirth.Losh's story is also that of her radical family, friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge; of the love between sisters and the life of a village; of the struggles of the weavers, the coming of the railways, the findings of geology, and the fate of a young northern soldier in the First Afghan War. Above all, it is about the joy of making and the skill of unsung local craftsmen. Intimate, engrossing, and moving, The Pinecone , by Jenny Uglow, the Prize-winning author of The Lunar Men , brings to life an extraordinary woman, a region, and an age.

Best known for her masterpieces Middlemarch and Silas Marner, George Eliot (1819–1880) was both one of the most brilliant writers of her day, and one of the most talked about. Intellectual and independent, she had the strength to defy polite society with her highly unorthodox private life which included various romances and regular encounters with the primarily male intelligentsia. This insightful and provocative biography investigates Eliot’s life, from her rural and religious upbringing through her tumultuous relationship with the philosopher George Henry Lewes to her quiet death from kidney failure. As each of her major works are also investigated, Jenny Uglow attempts to explain why her characters were never able to escape the bounds of social expectation as readily as Eliot did herself.

Did the Romans have rakes? Did the monks get muddy? This lively history of gardening in Britain takes us on a tour from the thorn hedges around prehistoric settlements to the rage for decking and ornamental grasses today. It tracks down the ordinary folk who worked the earth-the apprentice boys and weeding women, the florists and nursery gardeners-as well as aristocrats, grand designers, and famous plant hunters. Colored by Jenny Uglow's own love for plants and brought to life by many vivid illustrations, it not only deals with flowery-meads, grottoes and vistas, landscapes and ha-has, parks and allotments, but also tells you, for example, how the Tudors made their curious knots, how housewives used herbs to stop freckles, and how the suburbs dug for victory in World War II. This is a book to put in your pocket when planning your ideal green space-and to read in your deck chair with a glass of cold wine, when deadheading is simply too much.

A landmark account of the great English artist's tumultuous life and timesWilliam Hogarth (1697-1764) was perhaps London's greatest and best-known chronicler. The exuberant expansion and upheavals of city life furnished him with the subjects of the elaborate prints that made him famous, and that remain our finest and most fantastic visual record of eighteenth-century England.Evoking Hogarth's fierce nationalism, his philanthropic vision, and his antagonistic dance with London's artists and patrons, Jenny Uglow's acclaimed biography "crackles with vitality and sparkles with insights" (Michael Holroyd). In the company of his friends and peers--Swift, Gay, Pope, and the rest--Hogarth burned to expose hypocrisy and yearned to be recognized as a painter in the grand old tradition. In decoding his work's details and damning references--to craven leaders and corrupt institutions, and the beloved, tragicomic tribulations of rakes, harlots, and common citizens--Uglow breathes life into his accomplishment and his thwarted ambition, showing herself at every turn "in sympathetic rapport with Hogarth the man" (P.N. Furbank, The New York Review of Books ).

A fascinating, fully illustrated overview of the life and work of one of the world’s best-loved illustrators, Quentin Blake, celebrating more than seventy years of work that has redefined illustration. Familiar to both young and old, Quentin Blake’s entertaining and lively artworks are full of characters that have amused and inspired generations of readers. He is best-known for his collaborations on children’s books, including those written by Michael Rosen, John Yeoman, Russell Hoban, and, most famously, Roald Dahl. An artist for seven decades, Blake’s first drawings were published in Punch when he was just sixteen. He has also illustrated literary classics such as A Christmas Carol , Candide , and Don Quixote , and in the last twenty years, Blake has extended his practice to large-scale works for hospitals, libraries, and public spaces. He has received numerous prizes and awards for his illustration work, including the Whitbread Award, the Kate Greenaway Medal, and the international Bologna Ragazzi Award. In 1999, he was appointed the United Kingdom’s first-ever Children’s Laureate; he has won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration, the highest international recognition given to creators of children’s books; and he has been awarded a knighthood for “services to illustration.” A unique celebration of the illustrator’s art to date, this beautiful collection guides the reader through Blake’s extraordinary body of work. Seventy years of the artist’s drawings and illustrations of enormous diversity are represented―including recent unpublished work―alongside text by distinguished writer and illustration specialist Jenny Uglow, with commentary by Blake himself. An insightful overview, profusely illustrated with images specially selected in consultation with the artist, The Quentin Blake Book commemorates his life’s work and showcases the wide- ranging and personal nature of his art. 300 color illustrations

From Jenny Uglow, one of our most admired writers, a beautifully illustrated story of a love affair and a dynamic artistic partnership between the wars. In 1922, Cyril Power, a fifty-year-old architect, left his family to work with the twenty-four-year-old Sybil Andrews. They would be together for twenty years. Both became famous for their dynamic, modernist linocuts--streamlined, full of movement and brilliant color, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time, they looked back to medieval myths and early music, to country ways that were disappearing from sight.Jenny Uglow's Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time traces their struggles and triumphs, conflicts and dreams, following them from Suffolk to London, from the New Forest to Vancouver Island. This is a world of futurists, surrealists, and pioneering abstraction, but also of the buzz of the new, of machines and speed, of shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.

Following the success of Jenny Uglow's 'Hogarth' and her life of Thomas Bewick, this beautifully illustrated little book uncovers some intriguing connections between British writers and artists.As children, learning to read, we look first at the illustrations - but how do these tell their stories differently to the words? 'Words & Pictures' explores this question through three encounters. It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, 'Paradise Lost' and 'Pilgrim's Progress'; at Hogarth and Fielding, great innovators, sharing common aims; and at Wordsworth and Bewick, a poet and an engraver, both working separately, but both imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.Sometimes amusing, sometimes moving, this is a book to pore over and enjoy. It touches on a peculiarly British tradition of community and defiance of authority, unmasking pretension and celebrating energy and warmth. The visions it considers link daily life to the universal, the passionate and the sublime.

Jenny Uglow narrates the story of Walter Crane, an intriguing and most prolific figure not only in illustration, but in political culture more broadly. Uglow expertly weaves a fascinating study of how Crane’s art and politics developed from his childhood love of Pre-Raphaelite painting to the influences of Morris and William Blake on the journals, books, banners, pamphlets and postcards he went on to create as he forged a new style for the international socialist movement. Comprising a staggering range of visual material, Crane’s images became a symbolic code that leapt over linguistic boundaries. This book is a brilliant record of an artist who blended styles and influences like no one before him.

'Uglow makes us feel the life beyond the facts.' GUARDIAN'Few can match Uglow's skill at conjuring up a scene, or illuminating a character.' SUNDAY TIMES'Charming . . . Like Radio 4's shipping forecast for naturalists.' Andrea Wulf, FINANCIAL TIMES'A glorious celebration of curiosity and nature.'OBSERVERIn 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate, living in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. Fascinated by the fauna, flora and people around him, he kept journals for many years, and, at that time, was halfway to completing his path-breaking The Natural History of Selborne. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and his spellbinding book has remained in print ever since, treasured by generations of readers. Jenny Uglow illuminates this quirky, warm-hearted man, 'the father of ecology', by following a single year in his Naturalist's Journal. As his diary jumps from topic to topic, she accompanies Gilbert from frost to summer drought, from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails and the coming of harvest.Fresh, alive and original - and packed with rich colour illustrations - A Year with Gilbert White invites us to see the natural world anew, with astonishment and wonder.'A feast of a book, it is beautifully illustrated and compulsively readable.'LITERARY REVIEW'The author brings her subject endearingly alive . . . [an] enriching book.' NATURE

A man of powerful intellect and bullish stubbornness, Johnson forged his way in 18th Century London society with his friends, who included such greats as Boswell, David Garick and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Together, they formed the exclusive Johnson's Club.

This thoroughly revised and updated edition of The Northeastern Dictionary of Women's Biography profiles the lives and achievements of more than 2,100 outstanding women. International in scope and stretching from ancient times to the present day, the women represented here have played important roles in history and society. Their accomplishments are as diverse as their backgrounds. They include artists, teachers, politicians, athletes, scientists, pioneers, businesswomen, and activists, as well as those who were simply willing to challenge the status quo.Among those making their first appearance in the Dictionary Madeline Albright, Aung San Suu Kyi, Roseanne Barr, Tina Brown, Jane Campion, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Phoolan Devi, Susan Faludi, Catherine Mackinnon, Sally Mugabe, Lata Mangeshkar, Wangari Maathai, Camille Paglia, Anne Rice, Stella Rimington, Mary Robinson, Anita Roddick, Claire Short, Albertina Sisulu, Emma Thompson, Vivienne Westwood, and Naomi Wolf. The Northeastern Dictionary of Women's Biography features a user-friendly subject index and a comprehensive bibliography of additional reference sources.A celebration of the lives of remarkable women, this unique book is an indispensable reference for students and general readers alike.

This study offers a fresh introduction to the achievement of Henry Fielding (1707-1754) as dramatist, journalist and novelist. Fielding emerges as a writer of startling originality, constantly adapting traditional forms to new ends, whose fiercely ironic analysis of gender, power and language is combined with a comedy at once critical and humane.