John Massey Stewart’s long-awaited biography of the Atkinsons is now due to be published in late June. Called Thomas, Lucy & Alatau: The Atkinsons’ Adventures in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, it is being published by Unicorn Press at £25. According to the advance publicity, it is “the first full biography of an unjustly forgotten man: Thomas Witlam Atkinson (1799-1861), architect, artist, traveller extraordinaire, author – and bigamist“.

We very much look forward to this book’s publication, not least because it contains copies of Atkinson’s paintings that have not been made public previously. Biographically, it will be interesting to see how much it adds to my book, South to the Great Steppe: the travels of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson in Eastern Kazakhstan 1847-1852 (FIRST, 2015), to Susanna Hoe’s superb chapter on the Atkinsons in Travels in Tandem (Holo Books, 2012), Sally Hayles chapter on Thomas in The Hidden Artists of Barnsley (Barnsley Art on Your Doorstep, 2015), Marianne Simpson’s pamphlet on Alatau, To a Higher Destiny, and to the more than 100 postings that have appeared on this blog.