Awards

• Short-listed for Whitbread Book Awards: Biography Category 1997
• Shortlisted for Whitbread Book Awards: Biography Category 1997.

Overview

'Jenny Uglow is one of the most talented of contemporary biographers. Hogarth is her masterpiece. I expected it to be well-researched and fluently written, and it is; but it also crackles with vitality and sparkles with insights. She recreates Hogarth's mercurial genius most dramatically, as well as the turbulent and sophisticated eighteenth-century world he inhabited. You can feel his presence in this book. It is a wonderful achievement.' Michael Holroyd'The author's Hogarthian vitality and enthusiasm are infectious. It's a marvellous book.' Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review

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9780571193769

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Reviews

The British artist William Hogarth (1697-1764) lived, as they say, in 'interesting times'. A period of extraordinary change, it was the time of the British Empire, with colonies built on slavery and convict labour; a time of great turbulence, with war abroad, and riots and Jacobite rebellion at home; and an exciting time for intellectual and scientific exploration. Hogarth moved widely in the worlds of theatre, literature, journalism and politics, and his fascinating life is re-created here in the first major recent biography of a popular and quintessentially British artist. Hogarth's work remains among the most recognizable in British art: reproductions of his prints abound and his art is the first choice to illustrate histories of the period - from his progresses of the Harlot and the Rake, the fashionable 'Marriage-a-la-Mode' and the horrifying 'Gin Lane,' to his many conversation pieces and portraits. Uglow's extremely well-illustrated William Hogarth: A Life and a World is as splendidly discursive and lively as this subject deserves. As much a vivid picture of Hogarth's London as of Hogarth himself, bringing to life the teeming streets, pleasure gardens, theatres, squares and fairs of 18th-century London as it does the great artist: touchy, impatient, proud and vulnerable, patriotic yet irreverent, whose genius made the Shrimp Girl as appealing as the Rake pitiable, the Harlot pathetic and his Southwark Fair a scene of such bustling excitement. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

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 Wor

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