Jenny Uglow

Chronicles the friendships of Matthew Boulton, James, Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, and Joseph Priestly, whose ideas and experiments launched the Industrial Revolution. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World

The Lunar Men

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

A haunting, beautifully controlled novella, Cousin Phyllis is considered to be among Elizabeth Gaskell's finest short works. Lodging with a minister on the outskirts of London, Paul Manning is initially dismayed to discover that the uncle he must visit in the country is also a churchman. Yet far from the oppressively religious household he envisages, Manning is delighted to meet his genial relations—not least, his cousin Phyllis. But when Phyllis falls for the charms of his more sophisticated colleague, Manning's family ties render him powerless to prevent the inevitable heartbreak that ensues. Collaborator and friend of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865) is a leading figure in Victorian literature.

Cousin Phillis

A Life of Thomas Bewick

Nature's Engraver

This January, get out in the garden and discover the history hidden in the hedges. Did the Romans have rakes? Did the monks get muddy? Did potatoes seem really, really weird when they arrived on our shores? Drawn from Jenny Uglow's own love for plants, this lively 'potted' history of gardening in Britain takes us on a garden tour from the thorn hedges around prehistoric settlements to the rage for ornamental grasses and 'outdoor rooms' today. Tracking down the ordinary folk who worked the earth - from weeding women to florists - as well as aristocrats and grand designers and famous plant-hunters, A Little History of British Gardening is brought to life by gorgeously vivid illustrations and Uglow's insightful wisdom. Not only dealing with flowery meads, grottoes and vistas, landscapes and ha-has, parks and allotments, Uglow explains, for example, how the Tudors made their curious knots; how housewives used herbs to stop freckles; how the suburbs dug for victory in World War II. With a brief guide to particular historic or evocative gardens open to the public, this is a book to put in your pocket when planning a crisp, winter's day out - but also to read in your armchair with a well-earned glass of red, after a hard day's graft in your own garden. 'Enchanting, stirringly evocative and fascinating' Daily Mail 'This book will be a joy for any gardener' Independent

A Little History of British Gardening

A Life and a World

Hogarth

The Story of Sarah Losh, Romantic Heroine, Architect and Visionary

Pinecone

In These Times

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 colour, summing up the hectic interwar years. Yet at the same time they looked back, to medieval myths and early music, to country ways disappearing from sight. Cyril & Sybil 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, shops and sport and dance, shining against the threat of depression and looming shadows of war.

Sybil and Cyril:Cutting Through Time

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.

A Life of Art and Nonsense

Mr. Lear

Did the Romans have rakes? Did the monks get muddy? Did the potato seem really, really weird when it arrived on our shores? This lively 'potted' history of gardening in Britain takes us on a garden 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 and grand designers and famous plant-hunters. Coloured by Jenny Uglow's own love for plants, and brought to life in the many vivid illustrations, it deals not only with flowery meads, grottoes and vistas, landscapes and ha-has, parks and allotments, but tells you, for example, how the Tudors made their curious knots; how housewives used herbs to stop freckles; how the suburbs dug for victory in World War II. With a brief guide to particular historic or evocative gardens open to the public, this is a book to put in your pocket when planning a summer day out - but also to read in your deckchair with a glass of cold wine, when dead-heading is simply too much.

An exploration of the life and work of Walter Crane, the pioneering British socialist artist who transformed the illustration of children’s books. This volume in Thames & Hudson’s The Illustrators series showcases the work of Walter Crane, one of the most influential children’s book creators of his generation. Crane transformed the illustration of children’s books with his bold outlines, jeweled colors, and vivid characters. While many knew Crane for fantastical children’s tales, he was also a leading voice in the aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements and a powerful socialist. Along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, Crane pioneered the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize nursery rhymes and children’s stories for decades. Craftsman and visionary at once, he created powerful images for the new socialism in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Distinguished biographer Jenny Uglow expertly narrates a fascinating study of how Crane’s art and politics developed from his childhood love of Pre-Raphaelite painting and the influence of the ideas of William Morris and other progressive thinkers of the time. This book is a brilliant record of an artist who blended styles and influences like no one before him.

Walter Crane

"Originally published in 2017 by Faber and Faber Limited, Great Britain"--Copyright page.

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.

The Quentin Blake Book

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.

Living in Britain Through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815

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

The Pinecone

Charles II was thirty when he crossed the Channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after long years of Cromwell's rule. But there was no going back, no way he could 'restore' the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled with his father's beheading. 'Honour' 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. Exactly ten years later Charles II would stand again on the shore at Dover, laying the greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV.The Restoration decade was one of experiment: from the science of the Royal Society to the startling role of credit and risk, from the shocking licence of the court to the failed attempts at toleration of different beliefs. Negotiating all these, Charles II, the 'slippery sovereign', played odds and took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theatres were restored, but the king was the supreme actor. Yet while his grandeur, his court and his colourful sex life were on display, his true intentions lay hidden.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, racked with plague, fire and war, in which the risks the king took forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.

Charles II and the Restoration

A Gambling Man

Thomas Bewick wrote A History of British Birds at the end of the eighteenth century, just as Britain fell in love with nature. This was one of the wildlife books that marked the moment, the first 'field-guide' for ordinary people, illustrated by woodcuts of astonishing accuracy and beauty. But it was far more than that, for in the vivid vignettes scattered through the book Bewick drew the life of the country people of the North East - a world already vanishing under the threat of enclosures. In this superbly illustrated biography, Jenny Uglow tells the story of the farmer's son from Tyneside who revolutionised wood-engraving and 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. Nature's Engraver won the National Arts Writers Award in 2007. Jenny Uglow is the author of, among others, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize, Lunar Men and In These Times. 'The most perfect historian imaginable' Peter Ackroyd

In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. This vivid, original book tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Sarah 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, her signature in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life and death and rebirth. Sarah'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 struggle of the weavers, the coming of the railways, the findings of geology and the fate of a young northern soldier in the Afghan war. Above all, though, it is about the joy of making and the skill of local, unsung craftsmen.

Jenny Uglow

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