John Ruskin: The Early Years 1819-1859 by Tim Hilton  (2)
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Editorial Reviews
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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.
See all Editorial Reviews
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.
See all Editorial Reviews
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- The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew by Susan K. Harris on 4 pages
- Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature (Anthem Nineteenth Century Studies) by John Rosenberg on page 86, and Back Matter
- Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature (Anthem Nineteenth Century Studies) by John Rosenberg on page 86, and Back Matter
- Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art, and Individual Lives by Nicols Fox on page 98, and Back Matter
- Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin on page 137, and Back Matter
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