Thomas Bewick’s (1753–1828) History of British Birds was the first field guide for ordinary people, illustrated with woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. In Nature’s Engraver, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer’s son from Tyneside who became one of Britain’s greatest and most popular engravers. 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 refined and engaging biography, as beautifully wrought, in its way, as Bewick’s woodcuts.”—New York Times
“Uglow’s clear prose sparkles like Bewick’s River Tyne.”—Los Angeles Times
“This is a lovely book, not just in the quality and sympathy of the writing but in the care of its design and illustration. [Uglow] has turned a rich but undramatic life into a vignette as full of interest and details as one of Bewick’s own woodcuts.”—Sunday Telegraph
“A splendid biography. But it becomes an endearing one by the scattered presence of so many of Bewick’s woodcuts.”—Washington Post
“Another triumph for England’s most innovative biographer, and a marvelous treat for fans of Bewick’s beguiling work.”—Kirkus Reviews

Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick

UGLOW, Jenny

Humor & Entertainment

University of Chicago Press

A beautifully illustrated biography of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), the man whose art helped shape the way we view the natural world
At 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.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A sparkling biography of the poet and artist Edward Lear by the award-winning biographer Jenny Uglow
Edward Lear, the renowned English artist, musician, author, and poet, lived a vivid, fascinating life, but confessed, “I hardly enjoy any one thing on earth while it is present.” He was a man in a hurry, “running about on railroads” from London to country estates and boarding steamships to Italy, Corfu, India, and Palestine. He is still loved for his “nonsenses,” from startling, joyous limericks to great love poems like “The Owl and the Pussy Cat” and “The Dong with a Luminous Nose,” and he is famous, too, for his brilliant natural history paintings, landscapes, and travel writing. But although Lear belongs solidly to the age of Darwin and Dickens―he gave Queen Victoria drawing lessons, and his many friends included Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelite painters―his genius for the absurd and his dazzling wordplay make him a very modern spirit. He speaks to us today.
Lear was a man of great simplicity and charm―children adored him―yet his humor masked epilepsy, depression, and loneliness. Jenny Uglow’s beautifully illustrated biography, full of the color of the age, brings us his swooping moods, passionate friendships, and restless travels. Above all, Mr. Lear shows how this uniquely gifted man lived all his life on the boundaries of rules and structures, disciplines and desires―an exile of the heart.

Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense

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

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World

From the celebrated author of Hogarth--An animated, swarming group portrait of the friends who launched the Industrial Revolution In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the English Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the center of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toymaker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; 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. Uglow's vivid, 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.

Historical

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.

The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine--Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary

Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time

About the Author\nJenny Uglow is the author of many prizewinning biographies and cultural histories, including The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future and In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815. Her interest in text and image is explored in biographies of William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Walter Crane, and in Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, winner of the 2018 Hawthornden Prize. She was the chair of the Royal Society of Literature from 2014 to 2016. She lives in Canterbury and Cumbria.\nFrom Jenny Uglow, one of our most admired writers, a beautifully illustrated story of a love affair and a dynamic artistic partnership between the wars.\nIn 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.\nJenny 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.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

A beautifully observed history of the British home front during the Napoleonic Wars by a celebrated historian We 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.

In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815

History

Europe

The Restoration was a decade of experimentation: from the founding of the Royal Society for investigating the sciences to the startling role of credit and risk; from the shocking licentiousness of the court to failed attempts at religious tolerance. Negotiating all these, Charles II, the “slippery sovereign,” laid odds and took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theaters may have been restored, but the king himself was the supreme actor. Yet while his grandeur, his court, and his colorful sex life were on display, his true intentions lay hidden.
Charles II was thirty when he crossed the English Channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, as spring after the long years of Cromwell’s rule. But there was no way to turn back, no way he could “restore” the old dispensation. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship had ended with his father’s beheading. “Honor” was now a word tossed around in duels. “Providence” could no longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire, and war, people searched for new ideas by which to live. And exactly ten years after he arrived, Charles would again stand on the shore at Dover, this time placing the greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV of France.
Jenny Uglow’s previous biographies have won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and International PEN’s Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History. A Gambling Man is Uglow at her best: both a vivid portrait of Charles II that explores his elusive nature and a spirited evocation of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world on the brink of modernity.

A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game

Community & Culture

Hogarth: A Life and a World

A landmark account of the great English artist's tumultuous life and times William 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).

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by UGLOW, Jenny. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by UGLOW, Jenny

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by UGLOW, Jenny. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick

Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick

Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories

The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World

The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine--Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary

Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time

In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815

A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game

Hogarth: A Life and a World