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Posts Tagged ‘Hugh Thomson’

Hugh Thomson Drawings of England

Posted in art, jane austen, tagged , , , on July 23, 2009| 4 Comments »

roman road, 1909 H. Thomson
Highways and Byways of Surrey, 1909, an e-book on Project Gutenburg, features drawings by Hugh Thomson. Mr. Thomson is best known to Jane Austen fans for his drawings for Jane Austen’s novels. These idealized images of England, drawn almost 100 years after the Regency period, could still represent village and country life as Jane and her characters knew it.
A Street in Oxted 1909
More about Hugh Thomson on this blog:

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Illustrated Jane Austen

Posted in jane austen, Jane Austen illustrators, Jane Austen Novels, tagged , on March 6, 2008| 5 Comments »

Google books is simply an amazing online library resource. Since Google began to scan and digitize the books that sit in the world’s great libraries (at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Virginia, for example), authors, book sellers, and book publishers have been up in arms. Until the legalities are resolved, we can take advantage of the convenience of finding books that are often not in the public domain from the comfort of our homes. Unless they are entirely free of copyright infringement, most of the books that you can access through Google book search are partially complete. One can still glean an enormous amount of information in those partial books, however. Obscure authors of out-of-print books seem to be less incensed by this practice than their publishing houses, since their words are once again seeing the light of day and being READ. (Click on the links below to read more details about the controversy.)

One of my favorite finds is the Illustrated Jane Austen, a compilation of Jane’s six great books and two additional minor works. I have been reading Emma and Sense and Sensibility in anticipation of the last two airings of The Complete Jane Austen on PBS. You can imagine how delighted I was to view the illustrations by Hugh Thomson in this digitized book.

  • Click here to read Google’s rationalization for scanning the world’s books
  • And here is an assessment of the situation from Law.com
  • Click here to read my other post about Hugh Thomson

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Hugh Thomson, Jane Austen Illustrator

Posted in jane austen, Jane Austen illustrators, Jane Austen Novels, tagged on December 5, 2007| 18 Comments »

Project Gutenberg has scanned a Sense and Sensibility novel illustrated by Hugh Thompson. “You can view all of Hugh Thomson’s illustrations in this complete edition. Only the illustration on p. 290 (“I was formally dismissed”) is missing, and the introduction by Austin Dobson seems incomplete and ends abruptly.” (From PG foreword)

Mr. Dashwood Introduced Him, Fronticepiece

Hugh Thomson was one of the most popular and successful book illustrators of the Victorian era. He was born in Ireland in 1860, where his skills as an illustrator were recognized when he was still a teenager. Hugh was trained by John Vinycomb, the head designer at Marcus Ward & Co, a prominent Belfast publishing house. He moved to England, where he worked for MacMillan & Co. from 1883 and on, illustrating all six of Jane Austen’s novels and other literary classics. By 1900 he had become one of the most popular illustrators of his time. He died in 1920.

His son’s son is a child four years old

Learn more about the artist at these sites:

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