Words & Pictures

Words & Pictures explores three fascinating examples of relationships between artists and writers: the illustrations of Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; Hogarth and Fielding, a writer and artist dealing with common material; Wordsworth and Thomas Bewick, a poet and engraver working separately, but imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth kind of relationship, the writers and artists who collaborate from the start, beginning with Dickens and Phiz. Illustrated throughout with a wide variety of examples, this is a book to pore over and enjoy. At turns moving and comic, this book illuminates a brilliant poet, an engraver, a writer and an artist, 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 is the award-winning author of Elizabeth Gaskell (winner of the Portico Prize), Nature's Engraver, which won the National Arts Writers Award, and A Gambling Man, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize and most recently In These Times. 'Perhaps future biographies (of requisite quality) celebrating a certain kind of unshowy Georgian figure could be called 'Uglow's Lives' after the woman who has made the genre her own.' Sunday Telegraph

Jenny Uglow grew up in Cumbria and now lives in Canterbury. Her books include prize-winning biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and William Hogarth. The Lunar Men, published in 2002, was described by Richard Holmes as 'an extraordinarily gripping account', while Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, won the National Arts Writers Award for 2007 and A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize. The Pinecone, published in 2012, tells the story of Romantic visionary Sarah Losh and was described as 'a quiet masterpiece'. Jenny's most recent book, In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 was longlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. Jenny is Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.