Since her excellent book on William Hogarth and his London, “Hogarth: A Life and A World” (2001), Jenny Uglow has been moving progressively northward, away from the hurly-burly of Britain’s capital and out into the provinces, chronicling the artistic and intellectual ferment of regional Britain during the Industrial Revolution. In “The Lunar Men” (2002), she explored the lives of an energetic and fiendishly eclectic group of inventors, craftsmen, and tinkerers — James Watt and Josiah Wedgewood, among others — who lived in and around the Birmingham of the mid-18th century. With “Nature’s Engraver” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pages, $30) she ventures on to blustery Northumberland and the life of naturalist, illustrator, and printmaker extraordinaire, Thomas Bewick.