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Words & Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition
Following the success of Jenny Uglow's 'Hogarth' and her life of Thomas Bewick, this beautifully illustrated little book uncovers some intriguing connections between British writers and artists.
As children, learning to read, we look first at the illustrations - but how do these tell their stories differently to the words? 'Words & Pictures' explores this question through three encounters. It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, 'Paradise Lost' and 'Pilgrim's Progress'; at Hogarth and Fielding, great innovators, sharing common aims; and at Wordsworth and Bewick, a poet and an engraver, both working separately, but both imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.
Sometimes amusing, sometimes moving, this is a book to pore over and enjoy. 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.
As children, learning to read, we look first at the illustrations - but how do these tell their stories differently to the words? 'Words & Pictures' explores this question through three encounters. It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, 'Paradise Lost' and 'Pilgrim's Progress'; at Hogarth and Fielding, great innovators, sharing common aims; and at Wordsworth and Bewick, a poet and an engraver, both working separately, but both imbued with the spirit of their age. A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.
Sometimes amusing, sometimes moving, this is a book to pore over and enjoy. 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.
176 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2009
3 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Jenny Uglow
43 books138 followersJennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther, born 1947) is a British biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 11, 2019
Jenny Uglow examines the relationship between author and artist and how the illustrated work impacts on the reader in this most readable study of how words and pictures gel.
She takes Milton and Bunyan together with the artists who subsequently illustrated their main body of work, Hogarth and Fielding and Wordsworth and Bewick as her main themes with sub-themes being Dickens and Phiz and Carroll and Tenniel.
Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress were originally published 10 years apart and both gained more popularity with the illustrations that were incorporated in them. As Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre later stated, 'Each picture told a story' and there was no doubt that the various artists who illustrated these two books enhanced the book itself and made it more popular to the reading public.
Paradise Lost for instance gained much more popularity once the third edition of 1688 was published as the illustrated folio contained 12 designs, one for each book, by the Belgian artist John Baptist de Medina.
The Pilgrim's Progress meanwhile began life modestly, illustration-wise, but in 1728, the centenary of Bunyan's birth the centennial edition contained 22 superb copperplates by John Sturt. And when, towards the end of his life, William Blake turned his attentions to Bunyan, the book's continued success was assured; Charles Lamb even felt that the woodcut pictures in one edition were the book itself. And George Cruikshank, Gustave Dore, Wiliam Strang and many others maintained that author/artist relationship over the years.
Hogarth and Fielding both spent their entire working lives in the area around Soho, Drury Lane, the Strand and Covent Garden and as such they built up a strong friendship. Hogarth was, of course, much more than a book illustrator, although he was the first known artist to paint a Shakespearean scene (Falstaff examining his recruits in the late 1720s), but once he liaised with Henry Fielding his art illuminated the author's work admirably.
Bewick was a specialist in wood engravings, particularly of animals and birds, but Wordsworth called him 'The Poet of the Tyne'. And the links between them revolved around the fact that author and artist both returned obsessively to childhood scenes and they also had similar views on art, politics and man's relation to nature.
As for Dickens and Phiz, they complemented each other for 20 years until the latter could no longer accept the control that the former wanted over illustrations; the same thing happened to Criuikshank, who gave up working with Dickens after just one novel, Oliver Twist. Interestingly Vincent Van Gogh, a Dickens' admirer, felt he probably did not need an artist for he said, 'There is no writer, in my opinion, who is so much a painter and black-and-white artist as Dickens.'
John Tenniel was not as tolerant as Phiz and he very soon gave up on Lewis Carroll and 'Alice' and initially even refused to illustrate the sequel, only giving in when Carroll could find nobody else to do the job. Tenniel then made that his last book illustrating job, even telling a later prospective Carroll illustrator, Irishman Harry Furniss, 'Lewis Carroll is impossible'!
Jenny Uglow's book is a superb study of how the careers of writer and artist, while one deals in words and symbols and the other in lines, shading and colour, are intertwined. As she states, 'The image created by the words inhabits the picture but the picture is both less and far more than a graphic equivalent of the words.' However, both are gateways to imagining, allowing the reader to enter and see invented worlds ... and that can't be bad at all.
She takes Milton and Bunyan together with the artists who subsequently illustrated their main body of work, Hogarth and Fielding and Wordsworth and Bewick as her main themes with sub-themes being Dickens and Phiz and Carroll and Tenniel.
Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress were originally published 10 years apart and both gained more popularity with the illustrations that were incorporated in them. As Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre later stated, 'Each picture told a story' and there was no doubt that the various artists who illustrated these two books enhanced the book itself and made it more popular to the reading public.
Paradise Lost for instance gained much more popularity once the third edition of 1688 was published as the illustrated folio contained 12 designs, one for each book, by the Belgian artist John Baptist de Medina.
The Pilgrim's Progress meanwhile began life modestly, illustration-wise, but in 1728, the centenary of Bunyan's birth the centennial edition contained 22 superb copperplates by John Sturt. And when, towards the end of his life, William Blake turned his attentions to Bunyan, the book's continued success was assured; Charles Lamb even felt that the woodcut pictures in one edition were the book itself. And George Cruikshank, Gustave Dore, Wiliam Strang and many others maintained that author/artist relationship over the years.
Hogarth and Fielding both spent their entire working lives in the area around Soho, Drury Lane, the Strand and Covent Garden and as such they built up a strong friendship. Hogarth was, of course, much more than a book illustrator, although he was the first known artist to paint a Shakespearean scene (Falstaff examining his recruits in the late 1720s), but once he liaised with Henry Fielding his art illuminated the author's work admirably.
Bewick was a specialist in wood engravings, particularly of animals and birds, but Wordsworth called him 'The Poet of the Tyne'. And the links between them revolved around the fact that author and artist both returned obsessively to childhood scenes and they also had similar views on art, politics and man's relation to nature.
As for Dickens and Phiz, they complemented each other for 20 years until the latter could no longer accept the control that the former wanted over illustrations; the same thing happened to Criuikshank, who gave up working with Dickens after just one novel, Oliver Twist. Interestingly Vincent Van Gogh, a Dickens' admirer, felt he probably did not need an artist for he said, 'There is no writer, in my opinion, who is so much a painter and black-and-white artist as Dickens.'
John Tenniel was not as tolerant as Phiz and he very soon gave up on Lewis Carroll and 'Alice' and initially even refused to illustrate the sequel, only giving in when Carroll could find nobody else to do the job. Tenniel then made that his last book illustrating job, even telling a later prospective Carroll illustrator, Irishman Harry Furniss, 'Lewis Carroll is impossible'!
Jenny Uglow's book is a superb study of how the careers of writer and artist, while one deals in words and symbols and the other in lines, shading and colour, are intertwined. As she states, 'The image created by the words inhabits the picture but the picture is both less and far more than a graphic equivalent of the words.' However, both are gateways to imagining, allowing the reader to enter and see invented worlds ... and that can't be bad at all.
December 10, 2020
I guess I need to get my criticism of this book out the way first and ironically it is nothing to do with how the book was presented or written. What is even more ironic is it is connected to the subject matter of the book itself - namely the illustrations. You see (or not) they were too small. For a book that has as part of its focus the illustrations that are so famously connected to the works explored they are painfully small to the point where some of the features referred to in the text are almost impossible to spot. Surely a book that takes so much time to explore various aspects of the images would make them a little larger.
So yes I was disappointed but not at the author Jenny Uglow who clearly not only has put a lot of time and effort researching the book but clearly loves the work she did in preparing it as well.
And I must admit it posed an interesting question - about the relationship between authors and artists and the way we perceive them - after all if we mentioned the book Alice in Wonderland who would think of the classic illustrations which were commissioned to go in it. Exactly there are some connections that are so strong yet so sublime we do not realise we are making them. As I say a fascinating book with some interesting ideas - just a shame it was so small
So yes I was disappointed but not at the author Jenny Uglow who clearly not only has put a lot of time and effort researching the book but clearly loves the work she did in preparing it as well.
And I must admit it posed an interesting question - about the relationship between authors and artists and the way we perceive them - after all if we mentioned the book Alice in Wonderland who would think of the classic illustrations which were commissioned to go in it. Exactly there are some connections that are so strong yet so sublime we do not realise we are making them. As I say a fascinating book with some interesting ideas - just a shame it was so small
July 28, 2016
"What is the use of a book without pictures and conversations?" Alice asks in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I have to agree. Illustration is not just parallel storytelling: it is a point of departure for an entirely different work of art, which means that picture books cannot be dismissed as the dopey younger sister of adult publishing - in fact, picture books are complex universes, and the best of them can stand beside a great novel and hold its own. Uglow's book is a lovely volume, small in the hand and yet packed with pictures and conversation - a winner, in short.
February 11, 2019
I have mixed feelings about this book. It has chapters that really appealed to me. It also had chapters that seemed to say that all art is of the same value. Coarseness is as valuable as that which is beautiful? I happen to have a peeve about that. Maybe that's why I even saw it in the pages of this book. My loss. Or, my gain.
All the same, Jenny Uglow's incredible attention to detail and exhaustive research stands in the usual place I have come to expect of her. If you were to read all her books on a certain time period, you would give yourself a great course in focused and intense history.
All the same, Jenny Uglow's incredible attention to detail and exhaustive research stands in the usual place I have come to expect of her. If you were to read all her books on a certain time period, you would give yourself a great course in focused and intense history.
May 8, 2023
As you'd expect form a short book this is quite a brief overview of the subject. Having said that its both accessible and erudite so it's well worth spending an afternoon or two with. As other reviewers have said the illustrations are quite small, but they illustrate the author's points well.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews