In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the English Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the center of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toymaker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor, and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles). Later came Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and fighting radical. With a small band of allies they formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham (so called because it met at each full moon) and kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Blending science, art, and commerce, the Lunar Men built canals; launched balloons; named plants, gases, and minerals; changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms; and plotted to revolutionize its soul. Uglow's vivid, exhilarati
A beautifully observed history of the British home front during the Napoleonic Wars by a celebrated historianWe know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic Wars—but what of t
At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain, and much of the Western world, fell in love with nature. Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds marked the moment, the first "field guide" for ordinar
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
William Hogarth was an artist with overflowing imagination and his prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. This book showcases the portrait of a proud, stubborn, comic, vulnerable
In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life
Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate, an architect and an intellectual who dumbfounded critics with her genius and originality. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune,
Led by Erasmus Darwin, the Lunar Society of Birmingham was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s.
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. This title is a
If we follow him across land and sea - to Italy, Greece and Albania, to The Levant and Egypt and India - and to the borderlands of spirit and self, art and desire, can we see, in the end, if the no
Elizabeth Gaskell wrote some of the most enduring novels of the Victorian age. This biography traces Elizabeth's youth in rural Knutsford, her married years in the tension-ridden city of Manchester an
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper PrizeAs 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 ever
Where do these human-like animals and birds and these odd adventures - some gentle, some violent, some musical, some wild - come from? In this book the author's many drawings that accompany his verse
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 seri
A thrilling portrait of Sara Losh, a forgotten architectural genius of the nineteenth centuryIn the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England.
