Sparkle and Status: An Interview with Jenny Uglow

“Biography is a wonderful way into the past, because it’s life as experienced, day to day, subtly influenced by what is happening in politics or the movement of ideas.”

Jenny Uglow, credit: Chris Payne

In the Review’s February 12 issue Jenny Uglow enters the “glamorous,” “luminescent,” “spectacular,” “dashing,” “superrich,” “witty and odd,” “high-society pirate’s chest” world of precious gemstones. Starting at a lavish exhibition of some of the treasures of Maison Cartier’s nearly 180-year history of jewelry design, Uglow takes readers from the “many-layered necklace and headpiece of emeralds and diamonds for the maharaja of Patiala” and “a jeweled sarpech…whose feathers of baguette-cut diamonds float up from a great golden-hued ‘tobacco’ stone known as the Tiger’s Eye diamond” to a “scholarly study of gems in the history of European science” by the historian Michael Bycroft, littering the path along the way with emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and pearls.

Since 2010 Uglow has written numerous essays for the Review, often on the history of science—on subjects ranging from “the stout, wheezing, pioneering doctor Thomas Beddoes, founder of the Pneumatic Institution” to weather forecasting to volcanoes—but also on Waterloo, Lucian Freud, Quentin Blake, the invention of manners, Kew gardens, and Hilary Mantel. She is the author of a similarly catholic array of books, including biographies of George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, and Thomas Bewick, as well as The Lunar Men, about the eighteenth-century scientists and entrepreneurs of the Lunar Society, and histories of British gardening and life during Napoleon’s wars. Her most recent book, A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer, will be published in the United States this September.

I wrote to Uglow last week to ask her about what makes a stone precious, affection for the past, and the eighteenth-century English artist Mary Delany.

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Daniel Drake: I wear a small piece of red sea glass around my neck that is probably essentially worthless, but it’s quite beautiful (and apparently somewhat remarkable, because red glass is relatively rare) and it comes from my mother’s sea glass collection, so also has sentimental value. Do you have any treasured pieces of jewelry, and can you tell me what’s beautiful or meaningful about them? Had “precious stones” and gems and baubles been an interest of yours before you went to the Cartier exhibit?

Jenny Uglow: I’ve always been fascinated by jewelry, though very ignorant about it—a childish interest, born from the “treasure box” of my grandmother’s necklaces and brooches. None were precious, but I particularly loved an old gold chain with a heavy cluster of charms—an anchor, a boat, a tiny elephant and others—that had been patiently collected over years. I wore this all the time as a student and, amazingly, still have it. Like your sea-glass, it’s not valuable but it’s precious in the way it makes me feel connected to people I have loved.

Could you explain to me, a complete novice in the world of gemology, your understanding of the aesthetics of gems? Other than purity and carats and markers of monetary value, what are diamond or emerald aficionados looking for?

This is not a technical answer, and experts would put it differently, but basically, I think the attraction is sparkle and status. There’s a breathtaking quality in the way a cut of diamond catches the light, or the intensity of blue in a sapphire. Added value comes from the history of special stones and pieces and from the flair of individual designers.

For me, the most stunning aspect is the astounding skill of the gem cutters and setters. Great jewels are thrilling, but I confess they pose dilemmas. Tiaras, for example, are real works of art but they’re also ridiculous, summing up the stuffiness and snobbery of court life. More widely, the bravura display of wealth in a single necklace or brooch is jolting when you think of the conditions in the diamond mines, and of poverty across the globe. Grand jewels remind us that the top 1 percent own half of the world’s net wealth—marked out less, perhaps, by the length of a necklace than the length of their yacht.

As you write, Bycroft contends that “strictly speaking, gems do not exist.” You elucidate, and correct me if I’m misunderstanding, he means that by modern scientific understanding, a diamond has as much in common with a piece of granite as it does with a ruby. (He’s probably also being a little tongue in cheek.) But that did leave me with a lingering question: What, really, is a gem? Could you hazard an answer?

Yes, that’s a lovely sentence for Bycroft to begin his book. He’s writing about the history of science—before 1800 “gems” were a distinct scientific category, but as experiments by physicists, chemists, and crystallographers examined their structure and composition this simple definition vanished. As Bycroft puts it, “substances as diverse as onyx, flint and amethyst all have the same nature.” Curiously, though, the answer to “what is a gem?” remains the same—they are “precious stones.” One fascinating part of the history is the way that jewelers, gem cutters, and collectors worked so urgently to reconcile the science with the traditional nomenclature—whatever the complexity of their make-up today we still recognize “a garnet,” “a ruby,” “an opal”—and of course a diamond.

Your bibliography skips wonderfully across subjects. My sense is that they are united, if they are at all, by a certain affection you have for the past. I suppose I’m literally saying that you are a historian, but in your writing for us, too, I detect a kind of fondness underlying the dedication to history. How do you find that you end up arriving at your subjects? When you embark on a new project, what is the impetus?

I don’t have a “fondness” for the past—I would have hated to live without antibiotics, for example. But I do have huge admiration, and often affection, for the people I write about, warts and all. Biography is a wonderful way into the past, because it’s life as experienced, day to day, subtly influenced by what is happening in politics or the movement of ideas.

I’m drawn to people first of all by their work, that amazement of “how did they do this?”—groundbreaking writers, scientists, and artists. Most of my subjects have been in some ways radical, regarded as eccentric, or even dangerous—Gaskell for defending the Manchester chartists, William Hogarth for exposing the ills of society, scientists like Joseph Priestly or Erasmus Darwin who were identified with dangerous French philosophes. They’re also very human and flawed and often funny—I don’t think I could write about anyone who didn’t make me laugh. Some may seem quiet, like the naturalist Gilbert White, but his insistence on the way that all nature is linked and on the importance of the most unregarded creatures, like worms, make us see him today as the father of ecology—a different kind of radical.

What do you think your next book project might be?

I’ve become increasingly curious about the history of botany, so I think I will go back to the late eighteenth century and write about Mary Delany, who made extraordinary collages of flowers in her old age, both beautiful and botanically accurate, and her friend the Duchess of Portland, one of the great plant collectors. I’m fascinated by the way that art and science overlap in surprising ways, and I’m also very interested in friendship, and the story of Delany will let me explore all this—and be fun to write too.

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