John Ruskin: A Life [Hardcover]

John Batchelor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2000

On the centenary of Ruskin's death, a biography that explores the genius of the romantic visionary and the anguish of the private man. A man of prodigious genius, the eminently Victorian John Ruskin ranged over the entire landscape of human knowledge, from botany and geology to art criticism and social theory. He championed the painter J. M. W. Turner, the poetry of Wordsworth, and Gothic architecture. He inspired Proust and Gandhi. Works like his incomparable Stones of Venice fathered a new generation of aesthetes, while his indictment of English industrialism in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century fathered the ethical socialists who would strive to establish a new political order for the working man. Not only does this probing new biography celebrate the literary career that made Ruskin one of the most influential cultural figures of his day, it also illuminates the darker side of an emotionally unstable man whose obsessive desires thwarted his marriage to Effie Gray and later - after the death of Rose La Touche, the young girl he loved consumingly - drove him to extended bouts with madness. No passion, though, could dim the blazing creative energy of the intelligence that reimagined England's social destiny, as this estimable, crisply detailed volume shows. "Attractively written and well-argued.... A shrewd summary of Ruskin's career and a balanced assessment of his major works." - Sunday Telegraph "The perfect condensed account of Ruskin's life." - Daily Telegraph; "An excellent short study, keenly alert to the social and political environments in which Ruskin found himself." - Guardian.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Early in Batchelor's splendid one-volume life, he notes that young Ruskin (1819-1900) suffered as "an overloved child [who] has been emotionally mutilated by its parents"Dand that this suffering was to affect him for the rest of his life. For example, when Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother took lodgings nearby to oversee him. When he went on holiday to Italy to study its art and architecture, his parents accompanied him. When Ruskin wed the beautiful Effie Gray, his mother and father accompanied the bride and groom on their honeymoon, where he proved unable to consummate the marriage. Claiming for much of his life to be a semi-invalid whose first priority was himself, Ruskin, financed by his father's wealth as a wine merchant, was an indefatigable climber and walker, and a hugely productive writer and lecturer. He proposed linked social, economic and aesthetic cures for all the ills of 19th-century life, but no cure emerged for his manic-depressive swings emanating from sexual obsessions that, Batchelor writes, "filled him with grief, guilt and conflict." While such a calamitous life might produce in others only suffering and self-absorption, Batchelor (The Life of Joseph Conrad; etc.) shows how Ruskin's self-destructive discontent was turned into passionate, crusading prose about the dignity of work and the worth of art. Well received in England, where it has already been published, and hardly more than half the bulk of Tim Hilton's recent and swollen John Ruskin: The Later Years, Batchelor's complete life takes by far the more accessible approach. As this is the centennial of Ruskin's death, this bio should draw some attention here, especially if linked by New York booksellers to the current "Ruskin's Italy, Ruskin's England" show at that city's Morgan Library, but interest won't approach that in Ruskin's native England, where the book previously appeared to critical acclaim. 8 pages b&w, 8 pages color illus. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

More admired than understood, Ruskin still towers above his age as a genius both titanic and enigmatic. Batchelor shrinks from neither his subject's imposing stature nor his hidden secrets in this exceptionally perceptive and satisfying biography. Rejecting the common view that the volume and inconsistency of Ruskin's writings make impossible anything but a selective reading, Batchelor pieces together a meaningful pattern of intellectual development integrating all of Ruskin's works, from early volumes in art criticism to late works in botany and geology. Throughout the oeuvre, we see a passionate moral imagination, devoted to the beauty of painting and architecture but also committed to the dignity of the worker and defiantly opposed to the degrading effects of modern industrialism on both art and labor. Yet to understand fully the public literary triumphs, such as The Stones of Venice and Fors Clavigera, we must also understand the private failures: the annulled marriage, the obsession with a prepubescent girl, the lapses into baby talk and insanity. In probing the darker episodes of Ruskin's life, Batchelor confronts not a betrayal of the inspiring works of literature but rather the deepest reason for their existence, their taut urgency reflecting Ruskin's heroic struggle to wring meaning out of an often-ugly world and a frequently tormented heart. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers; 1ST edition (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078670814X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786708147
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,235,604 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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