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