Jenny Uglow, whose biography of Hogarth is a great favorite, has written one on another engraver, Thomas Bewick

"In his memoir, Bewick also displayed a rhapsodic response to a unifying force "beyond the reach of thought and human knowledge". As a naturalist, the more facts he learned, the more he was intrigued by the promise beyond the horizon. Yet his engravings of "humble life" were stubbornly down-to-earth. He showed his country folk as cruel, foolish and crude, as well as hard-working and long-suffering. The country might be beautiful, but it also stank: men relieve themselves in hedges and ruins, a woman holds her nose as she walks between the cowpats, and a farmyard privy shows that men are as filthy as the pigs they despise. In the respectable atmosphere that settled like a cloud during the Napoleonic wars, such scenes disconcerted his readers: an article appeared suggesting "that the fair sex, pass overleef on seeing them"."