John Ruskin: The Later Years [Hardcover]

Tim Hilton (Author)

Book Description

Series: John Ruskin : the Later Years | Publication Date: March 2000

John Ruskin, one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century, was also one of the most prolific. Not only did he publish some 250 works, but he also wrote lectures, diaries, and thousands of letters that have not been published. This book the second and final volume of Tim Hilton's acclaimed biography of Ruskin, which is published on the centenary of Ruskin's death draws on the original source material to give a moving account of the life of this brilliant and creative man. The book begins in 1859. Ruskin had a disastrous marriage behind him, was living with his parents, travelling, and earning his keep by writing and tutoring. This brought him into contact with Rose La Touche, a girl of ten, with whom he slowly fell in love. Hilton recounts how this relationship developed into one of the saddest love affairs of literary hsitory, ending in tragedy in 1875. Thereafter, says Hilton, Ruskin's life was punctuated by bouts of insanity and despair that culminated in total breakdown for the last ten years of his life. During these years, however, his intellect and imagination reached new heights, as he produced Praeterita and most of Fors Clavigera, the series of monthly letters to British workers. Hilton's magisterial narrative follows Ruskin through this period and shows that he was the most eloquent and radical of all the great Victorian writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Beginning in 1859, the second volume of Tim Hilton's sterling biography of John Ruskin chronicles much suffering and sadness, as well as spiritual and artistic growth. The deaths of his beloved parents, in 1864 and 1871, snapped Ruskin out of self-indulgence and a tendency to complain. His love for Rose La Touche, only 9 years old when he met her in 1858 and appalled when he declared his feelings in 1866, would last throughout this morbidly pious girl's lingering illness and beyond her death in 1875. He had bouts of mental illness that finally incapacitated him in the decade before his death in 1900. Yet these were also the years in which Ruskin wrote his fascinating autobiography, Praeterita, and the innovative Fors Clavigera. Hilton believes this series of 96 pamphlets addressed to British workers to be Ruskin's masterpiece, a revelation of "the continuing life of the mind" as their author ranged from Dante to the English Poor Laws to the iconography of the penny. Hilton discusses these and the underlying themes of Ruskin's life with remarkable clarity and an impressive range of knowledge. He enables modern readers to decipher the idiosyncratic thoughts and feelings of a great Victorian who was "a glory of the nation's literature, and an important part of its social conscience." --Wendy Smith

From Library Journal

This new work by Hilton, a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, picks up in 1859 where his highly praised John Ruskin: The Early Years left off. At that time, Ruskin was finishing his five-volume Modern Painters, still recovering from a failed marriage, and starting to teach ten-year-old Rose La Touche. By his early 40s, Ruskin had earned a reputation as a writer and most notably a famed and feared art critic. But soon he became a strident activist for social reform whose essays, though stinging, petulant, and sarcastic, brought forth the ideas of national education, organized labor, old-age pensions, homes for the working classes, and organized street cleaners. When La Touche refused to marry him for religious reasons and soon died, there began a series of bouts with "brain fever" that eventually led to periods of seclusion and madness. Still, Ruskin was the first to head up a professorship of fine arts at Oxford. Hilton's research, years of reading Ruskin, and attention to detail make this biography very personal and readableDand probably the definitive account on Ruskin. A necessary companion to Susan P. Casteras and others' John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye (LJ 4/1/93), Hilton's two-volume set is recommended for English literature and art collections at academic and larger public libraries.DJoseph Hewgley, Nashville P.L.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (March 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300083114
• ISBN-13: 978-0300083118
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,685,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great, if often dry, rendition of R.'s life, January 3, 2002

By 

W Beaufort-Brantley (Oxfordshire, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Ruskin: The Later Years (Hardcover)

An affectionately and well-written account of Ruskin's life (I'm referring here to parts 1 and 2 of this biography, taken as a whole). As another reviewer has pointed it, the book does move along nicely, leaving the reader feeling as though he has been given a solid picture of a period in Ruskin's life (the book is organized chronologically), though not that he has exhausted all possible accounts of it, accounts which could easily become boring to all but the most devoted of Ruskin's admirers. The only thing for which I would fault the book is its sometimes cumbersome, dry over-emphasis on facts -- lots of facts. We are too often told about where, what and when instead of why. Perhaps it was the author's intention to give an "objective" account of Ruskin's life, one in the shadow of which we'd paint our own picture of Ruskin the man. But that would seem to be contradicted by the obvious affection with which Hilton writes. Nevertheless, it was an informative read and the two volumes evidence Hilton's enormous work of scholarship. Ruskin was one of the most prolific writers we know of, but here Mr. Hilton shows that he familiarized himself thoroughly with Ruskin's works and letters. If for nothing else, we should be grateful for that. With a little humor and more analysis, this would be a near perfect biography. As it is, it's the most authoritative contemporary account of its subject and a fulfilling read.

3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Definitive Work, July 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: John Ruskin: The Later Years (Hardcover)

To begin with the headlines: Ruskin was a racist, sexist, anti-democratic pedophile. Despite all of this (grounds for civil, if not criminal, liability today), Hilton has managed to craft a magnificent biography. He does not condemn these parts of Ruskin's character -- raising the question of whether it is place of biography to condemn -- he simply states the facts. Hilton certainly does, however, praise Ruskin where praise is due, perhaps posing this problem of biography in reverse. In this book, a fifteen year later sequel to "The Early Years," available here in paperback, but in hardbound only through the out-of-print service, Hilton accomplishes everything for which one could wish in a literary biography. Hilton makes you feel Ruskin's inspirations and how they colored, often drove, his numerous works. He ties Ruskin into his time and how he stood in relation to his contemporaries. I'm not sure that Ruskin was worth the dedication of so much of Mr. Hilton's life and labor. Surely that is for him to decide. Nevertheless, this is, and will remain, the definitive work on Ruskin.