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Jenny Uglow grew up in Cumbria, and then Dorset. After leaving Oxford, she worked in publishing and is now an Editorial Director of Chatto and Windus, part of Random House. She reviews for radio and for the Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Times and the Guardian, and acts as historical consultant on several BBC 'classic serials', including Wives and Daughters, The Way We Live Now, Daniel Deronda, and the forthcoming Trollope adaptation He Knew He Was Right. Jenny is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was on the Advisory Group for the Humanities of the British Library, and is Vice-President of the Gaskell Society and an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Warwick.
Her own books include The Macmillan Dictionary of Women, now preparing its fourth edition; studies of George Eliot and Henry Fielding and the biographies Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (1992) and Hogarth: A Life and a World (1997), both shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, and Cultural Babbage: Time, Technology and Invention, co-edited with Francis Spufford. Her book The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future (2002), told the story of the colourful Lunar Society of Birmingham, including Matthew Boulton and James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin - grandfather of Charles. Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick was published in October 2006.
Jenny is married to Steve Uglow, Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Kent: they have four children and live in Canterbury, Kent.
Coloured by Jenny Uglow's own love for plants, and brought to life in the many vivid illustrations, this book 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.
This book is Short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize. As the Napoleonic wars raged, what was life really like for those left at home? Award-winning social historian Jenny Uglow reveals the colourful and turbulent everyday life of Georgian Britain through the diaries, letters and records of farmers, bankers, aristocrats and mill-workers. Here, lost voices of ordinary people are combined with those of figures we know, from Austen and Byron to Turner and Constable. In These Times movingly tells the story of how people really lived in one of the most momentous and exciting periods in history.
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 or 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 prize-winning 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, Rowlandson and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and combining the familiar voices of Jane 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 ahead.
Winner of the Portico Prize Shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography of the Year High-spirited, witty and passionate, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age, including Mary Barton, North and South and Wives and Daughters. This biography traces Elizabeth's youth in rural Knutsford, her married years in the tension-ridden city of Manchester and her wide network of friends in London, Europe and America. Standing as a figure caught up in the religious and political radicalism of nineteenth century Britain, the book looks at how Elizabeth observed, from her Manchester home, the brutal but transforming impact of industry, enjoying a social and family life, but distracted by her need to write down the truth of what she saw. In this widely acclaimed biography, Elizabeth Gaskell emerges as an artist of unrecognized complexity, shrewdly observing the political, religious and feminist arguments of nineteenth century Britain, with enjoyment, passion and wit. Jenny Uglow is the bestselling author of Nature's Engraver, which won the National Arts Writers Award, and A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize. Her most recent books include Nature's Engraver, the story of Thomas Bewick, and In These Times, a history of the home front during the Napoleonic Wars.
William Hogarth is a house-hold name across the country, his prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous', as Hazlitt said. Jenny Uglow, acclaimed author of Elizabeth Gaskell, Nature's Engraver and In These Times, uncovers the man, but also the world he sprang from and the lives he pictured. He moved in the worlds of theatre, literature, journalism and politics, and found subjects for his work over the whole gamut of eighteenth century London, from street scenes to drawing rooms, and from churches to gambling halls and prisons. After striving years as an engraver and painter, Hogarth leapt into lasting fame with A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress, but remained highly critical of the growing gulf between the luxurious lives of the ruling elite and the wretched poverty of the massess. William Hogarth was an artist of flamboyant, overflowing imagination, he was a satirist with an unerring eye; a painter of vibrant colour and tenderness; an ambitious professional who broke all the art-world taboos. Never content, he wanted to excel at everything - from engraving to history painting - and a note of risk runs through his life. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, Hogarth: A Life and a World brings art history to life in the voices of Hogarth's own age. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a great artist and a proud, stubborn, comic, vulnerable man.
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