Thomas, Lucy and Alatau

This is the first full biography of an unjustly forgotten man: Thomas Witlam Atkinson (1799 - 1861), architect, artist, traveller extraordinaire, author – and bigamist.Famous in his lifetime as 'the Siberian traveller', he spent seven years travelling nearly 40,000 miles through the Urals, Kazakhstan and Siberia with special authorisation from the Tsar, producing 560 watercolour sketches – many published here for the first time - of the often dramatic scenery and exotic peoples. He kept a detail